MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This paper examines the Zorro phenomenon; the impact that this duel-identity romantic Latin action hero has maintained in the imagination of an adoring public for more than eight decades.

Since Zorro’s début in 1919 in Johnston McCulley’s short story, The Curse of Capistrano, published in the pulp fiction magazine, All Story Weekly, this swashbuckling character has remained one of the most intriguing and highly regarded action hero icons in popular American culture both in and outside the United States.

In addition to detailing Zorro’s success in fiction, film and television, my paper emphasizes two characteristics that set McCulley’s creation apart from other popular American action figures. The first is Zorro’s identity as a hero of Spanish heritage, a fact that has generally been overlooked in the United States by Zorro followers. In the gallery of admired and adored twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon American action heroes, such as Superman, the Lone Ranger, Spiderman, and Batman, Zorro stands out as not only the first, but still to date, the only Spanish hero to achieve such celebrity status. The phenomenal success of Zorro, in fact, inspired other writers to create their own dual-identity heroes. Most notably, Bob Kane credits Zorro as the inspiration behind the creation of his own caped and masked Batman character. The second characteristic attests to McCulley’s exceptional nineteenth-century historical setting for his action hero. Unlike the aforementioned heroes, Zorro remains inexorably linked to California’s triple identity as Spanish, Mexican and American over the course of a few decades.