Me and Joaquin

Beyond the Yellow Journalism' of the frontier:, A forensic search for the truth behind the "Robin Hood of El Dorado."

Growing up in Pasadena, the silhouette of the San Gabriel Mountains wasn't just a landscape; it was a boundary line for a legend.

Beyond those peaks ranged the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta-the "fearsome outlaw" of settler lore and the "Zorro" of my childhood television. 

But as an Emmy®-winning filmmaker and practicing anthropologist, I came to realize that the stories written by the pens of 19th-century gold-seekers were often fabricated constructions designed to sell newspapers and hide the facts of a brutal, difficult birth of California statehood.

Me and Joaquin is the story of a lifelong homecoming. It documents my journey from the cultural pastiche of Anglo-American Pasadena to the heart of the Mojave, where I met the living descendants of the Murrieta bloodline.  

This is not a mere recalibration of lore; it is a forensic look at the miasma of "yellow journalism" and the racism that continues to trigger and manipulate our world today.