The character of Señor Zorro was created by author Johnston McCulley, and appeared for the first time in 1919 in a novel serialised in an American pulp magazine. But who was the real Zorro? A masked saviour, or some brave rebel? Johnston McCulley drew his inspiration from three great men: the Scarlet Pimpernel, an English baronet during the French Revolution, Joaquin Murietta, a semi-legendary figure from the Gold Rush era, who fought against the rapacious abuses visited upon Latin youth by Anglo-Americans, and lastly William Lamport, the most significant influence on Zorro. But who exactly was Lamport?
William Lamport was born in Ireland in 1615, at a time of English colonisation. Conditions under the occupation were harsh, and the Irish lived in fear and submission. Their Catholic religion was oppressed and forbidden by the Protestant occupiers. The English held no esteem for the people of Ireland, whom they deemed savage and filthy, and who were abandoned to poverty and illness. Lamport’s family lands were confiscated by English landlords. Farmland was used to grow crops for export, with wheat and corn being shipped off to feed English mouths while the Irish toiled in pain and hunger. And so, the seed of rebellion was planted in the heart of young William Lamport. He wished to see a free and independent Ireland, but the English crown was simply too powerful. It was time to leave the land of injustice, and to set out in search of his destiny. After spending time in Spain, William Lamport fled to Mexico. Mexico was then a Spanish colony, and Lamport saw there the same injustice toward the indigenous people that he had known in his home country. It made his blood boil. Colonisation was an abomination wherever it occurred, and regardless of who it enslaved. William Lamport decided to take up the fight, all the way on the other side of the Atlantic. The sight of Mexican suffering recalled to him the misery of his parents and the famines of his youth; they were foreigners, but their lot was so similar to his own. Before long he had become their ally, and was given a Latin nickname: Lombardo. He was now one of them, and decided to fight by their side against the Spanish colonisers. But Lombardo was not a masked saviour who fought his enemies in fencing duels – he was a leader. He founded a tobacco trafficking network known as Los hermanos de la Hoja, whose profits were used to support the Mexican people’s plight for independence. During their attacks against aristocrats, Lombardo’s guerrillas marked their victims with the letter “Z”, symbolising the word “Ziza”, which came from the Hebrew word meaning ‘splendour’. Rather than the calling card of a single man, or the initial of a legendary name, it was the collective symbol of rebellion.
William Lamport’s story would end on a pyre: he was burned alive, having been tried for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition. But our hero would be cloaked in posthumous glory: in 1910, to celebrate the centenary of Mexican Independence, President Porfirio Diaz commissioned a statue of Lamport to commemorate his role in winning the country’s freedom. The statue is now located within a mausoleum at the base of the Angel of Independence monument in Mexico City.
But Johnson McCulley’s story opts for a happier ending, and audiences never tired of seeing Zorro on his faithful black stallion, Tornado, rearing up against the sunset as the hero rides away victorious.
Alan Alfredo Geday
Comments