ABSTRACT
Ever since Johnston McCulley published the first story, The Curse of Capistrano, inAll Story Weekly in 1919, El Zorro, the Fox, is one of the most popular heroes of the American West. Nevertheless, twentieth-century American popular culture has appropriated and imaginatively transfigured the actual figures who inspired the legend. Drawing on the literary, historical, and ideological sources of inspiration for the man behind the mask, this chapter will therefore survey the way in which this material became Americanized through Johnston McCulley in The Curse of Capistrano, a novel that appropriates Hispanic traditions, concealing their political and anticolonial context, and transforming them by projecting American values onto them. This chapter proceeds to examine Isabel Allende’s contemporary radical revision of the legend in her novel El Zorro: Comienza la Leyenda (2005), a revision that reclaims the legend’s historical and ideological Hispanic origins, attempting, in the narrator’s own words, to protect El Zorro from those who seek to defame him. In this way, the author shows that it is still possible to recover the political import of the legend after a series of palimpsestic rewritings, which have sought to efface the historical background, giving voice to the subaltern.
