...(among other Latin American immigrants) in the newly American California. Lynchings were a recurring subject in the newspaper, as Ramirez worked to place the extralegal execution of Latinos in the context of struggles over land rights, limited economic resources, and the United States's expansionist policies. (1)

In the following essay, I suggest that El Clamor Publico is an invaluable, underutilized resource in the study of lynching in the United States. While lynching has frequently been configured within a black and white paradigm, El Clamor Publico offers early archival evidence that Mexicans, Californios, Latin Americans, and Native Americans were not only the frequent targets of lynching violence, but that key public figures, such as Francisco Ramirez, understood lynching violence as specifically designed to distinguish between "Americans" (understood as white of Anglo) and racial Others. This evidence counters the assertion frequently made in contemporary lynching scholarship that lynching in the West should be distinguished from the kind of racialized spectacle the term "lynching" conjures today. Further, I argue that both the embodied act of lynching and Ramirez's use of lynching as a rhetorical strategy in his newspaper must be understood as public performances staged to transmit particular cultural messages to a variety of audiences. The spectacular act of lynching served then, as it does now, as a complicated site from which to perform identity, place, and citizenship.

At its core, to perform means to do, to carry out. Diana Taylor, professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, notes "performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity." (2) To call lynching a performance is to acknowledge it as a public act, framed for an audience, and to ask how the fact of public violence against individual bodies is mobilized as part of larger political and social agendas. Lynchings were meant to be seen. They relied upon an audience, both live and mediated through newspapers, gossip, and letters, to impart important messages about justice, agency, and citizenship. As such, they often followed semi-formal and pre-established structures. Kirk Fuoss, associate professor of performance and communication arts at St. Lawrence University, uses the term "performance complex" to describe the entire web of performance woven in and around lynchings. (3) From advance planning and preparation to careful selection of the execution site to communal participation in the act of lynching, many lynchings served as framed events that invited community members to perform as both willing and unwilling participants.

In California, many lynching events followed relatively similar patterns. An individual of group accused another individual or group of a crime, spreading the word about the alleged injustice and gathering support for a lynching posse. The suspect, or someone resembling the suspect, would be apprehended (even if already in formal custody) and taken to a public area that afforded ample public view of the event--perhaps a town square or a bridge--where spectators would gather to observe and participate in the proceedings. Often, those conducting the lynching would arrange a trial, asking those assembled to offer evidence for or against the suspect. (4) Usually, the suspect was granted the opportunity to make a statement about their guilt or lack thereof. Confessing the crime seldom averted execution, but occasionally appeased the mob enough to ensure a slightly less prolonged form of death. The suspect would then be killed, usually by rope or bullet, and left on display as a warning to others who might chose to transgress social order. Eventually, the body would be released to friends, family, or a community member who had agreed to be responsible for its burial.

Some California lynchings were mass public events, such as the well-documented lynching of Josefa Segovia (sometimes called Juanita) in Downieville. (5) Accused of murdering a well-liked miner, Josefa was hanged from a bridge in front of three thousand men. Other lynchings were smaller events, staged to send messages to a particular family or community. In either case, the "well choreographed spectacle" of lynching served to affirm "the people's" right to establish their own rules of law and order at a time when California was in a period of legal and national transition. (6) At the same time, lynchings also sent clear messages about who was to be included in "the people" and who had the right to establish law. (7) The embodied act of lynching must be understood as a performance, as an efficacious cultural event with devastating corporeal consequences.

The very act of calling something a "lynching" is itself performative, calling upon a range of wider cultural and political associations. The definition of lynching is hotly contested and varies depending on who is using it and why--Ramirez for example uses the terms "hanging," "execution," and "lynching" to describe relatively similar events. At times, these terms work to distinguish between public events and private murders or between those events Ramirez deems legitimate or illegitimate. A well-attended or publicized extralegal death might be called a lynching or an execution while an anonymous body left for dead was likely to be called a hanging particularly if the body was deemed an "Indian." (8) More often, however, Ramirez deploys terminology to make a political argument, using the term "lynching" to perform a particular critique of American democratic claims. Historian Christopher Waldrep argues that, in general, the use of the term lynching is best understood as rhetoric, implying a "consciousness of argument, an attempt to influence a public." (9) He notes the "word 'lynching' cannot be defined. That is its most important characteristic: it is a rhetorical dagger ready to be picked up and deployed by a host of actors in a variety of circumstances." (10)

LYNCHING AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

For Ramirez and his contemporaries, to call something a lynching was to enter into a longstanding political and cultural debate about community agency and democratic practice. Although the term "lynching" did not enter into widespread usage until the 1830s, Waldrep traces its origins to the American Revolution. He points to the Bedford, Virginia, magistrate and militia leader Charles Lynch, who regularly "ran down and hanged miscreants outside the law." (11) Governor Thomas Jefferson praised the militia for taking measures to "expose [suspected traitors] to the pains of law," but cautioned them to "avoid any irregularity which might give them legal means of withdrawing themselves from punishment." Nevertheless, he agreed that the "method of seizing them at once," regardless of proof of guilt, "was best," as long as they were "regularly tried afterwards." These exhortations for "regular trials" did not preclude immediate hangings and whippings, as in the case of Zacharias Gross, who was accused of horse-thievery and executed on the spot, "with the joint consent of near three hundred men." Lynch was perceived by some as having an ethnic bias, given one wife's worry that her husband would not be granted a fair trial because of "a misunderstanding between Colo Lynch and the Welsh in General." The diarist Andrew Ellicott offers a slightly different origin of the term "lynch," complaining that his neighbor William Lynch had responded to Tory insurrection by organizing "Lynch-men associated for the purpose of punishing crime crimes in a summary way without the tedious and technical forms of our courts of justice." (12) These early roots of the term "lynching" reveal an important tension in the meaning of lynching. One the one hand, advocates articulated lynching as a necessary mode of exacting justice, particularly during unstable or contentious political environments. On the other hand, some participants recognized the potential for lynching to destabilize the premise of American democracy, as lynching eschewed the court system and the Fifth Amendment in favor of personal bias and group discretion.

This was an active tension in Ramirez's California. Journalist Philip Dray writes that in the early to mid-nineteenth century, lynching "was understood to exist in lieu of established systems of justice, and observers, even those who advocated the practice, believed that as a feature of frontier life it would be phased out by the advent of civilization--the coming of larger municipalities, courts, and a salaried constabulary." (13) In Western territories and states, lynching was a common and tolerated practice that included a full range of corporeal punishment, from public whippings to full-scale...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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