Blending literary analysis and memoir, Something More Splendid Than Two is at once an excavation of intergenerational wounds, a dance number, a poem, and a fraught love letter from son to father that disrupts the dominant narratives surrounding the life and myth of Joaquin Murrieta. In the Mexican American imaginary, the legend of Joaquin Murrieta has been recast to explain the wounding of Mexican American men after the 1848 border formation. In these versions, Joaquin is a vigilante hero and the patriarchal father of the Chicanx movement.
Revisiting the most circulated version of the Joaquin myth, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta written by Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge, the first published Native American author in the US, Something More Splendid Than Two offers an alternative to these versions. Stitching together multiple tangled histories of Indigenous and Mexican woundings living in the margins of Ridge's 19th-century novel, alfaro opens a queer timeline where Chicanx and Indigenous solidarities can be imagined. By attuning to the choreographies of power and patriarchy that produced readers and writers like Ridge and the author of this book, jose rivers alfaro imagines that in that endless encounter between reader and writer, both time travel and collective healing are possible.
jose rivers alfaro is an artist who teaches writing and literature. Raised in Sacramento, California, he attended Cosumnes River College, the community college where he currently works as a professor. He earned his B.A. in English Literature at San Francisco State University and his Ph.D. in English at UC Riverside, focusing on Nineteenth Century American Literature and Queer Latinx Studies. Before returning to Sacramento, he learned how to dance salsa and bachata. Since then, he continues to spend a lot of time thinking about how he can make the magic of the dance floor happen on the page.
