Zorro behind the mask: was he a thief, scoundrel, murderer, or savior of his people? New critical interpretations explore the many identities of one of the New World's most swashbuckling icons.

• Author: Alexander, Marc

By melding elements of his own personal biography with newspaper stories and adding a few campfire tales, John Rollin Ridge helped to foster a Robin Hood-like image for the ill-fated Murieta

Zorro was the Americas' first cross-cultural hero. A charismatic legend on both sides of the border, Zorro is the champion of the underdog, the Robin Hood of the New World, the hero of Latinos and Anglos alike. Riding into the night atop Tornado, his ebony steed, the black-clad masked adventurer rights the wrongs in an unjust, often rapacious world.

Zorro is an icon, an archetype, and defender of the common man. But is Zorro more than a romantic myth, a mere celluloid swashbuckler portrayed by Hollywood stars? Or is there a measure of truth behind the legend? Is it possible that his persona and exploits have some basis in history?

Zorro first appeared in print in 1919, in Johnston McCulley's serialized novel The Curse of Capistrano. It is here that the search for the real Zorro begins. McCulley was a San Francisco-based crime reporter who in his early years may have seen the severed head of a man who helped inspire Zorro, Joaquin Murieta (or Murrieta), before his pickled remains were destroyed in the great 1906 earthquake. Zorro is a composite character, a legend based on an earlier California legend, interwoven with elements borrowed from one of the greatest adventure stories of the French Revolution.

One year after the masked caballero made his first appearance in The Curse of Capistrano, El Zorro (the Fox) leapt from the pages of pulp fiction to the silver screen in Douglas Fairbanks's silent classic The Mark of Zorro to avenge wrongs done to Alta California's ill-treated Mexicanos. Set in the early 1850s, McCulley's masked hero was the alter ego of the seemingly callow Don Diego de la Vega, a well-to-do Spaniard with a secret identity determined to defend the downtrodden against a tyrannical ruling class. McCulley's deceptively foppish Don Diego was a rebel with a very real cause. More importantly, Zorro's real life model and inspiration--Joaquin Murieta, a Mexican from Sonora--was also a rebel, one whom some historians have celebrated as "generous and noble" and whom others have condemned as "low, brutal, and cruel."

What is not in dispute is that Joaquin Murieta was an outlaw. His short life was colorfully depicted in the 1998 Disney film The Mask of Zorro, a life that ended (as it did in the film) with Murieta's head displayed in a glass jar, a trophy of his real-life nemesis, Captain Love. Captain Love was a former Texas Ranger who was paid $5,000 to kill Murieta and his accomplice, Manuel Garcia, better known as Three-Fingered Jack.

But no man is born an outlaw or a hero. Joaquin Murieta came into this world in 1830 and migrated north with his future wife, Rosa, and her three brothers during the Gold Rush frenzy. After working as a vaquero and ranch hand, he turned to mining and endured discrimination and possibly beatings at the hands of bigoted Anglos who lived close to local Mexican settlements. Legend has it that Murieta turned bad after five miners falsely accused his "half-brother" of...