Our caped crusader—dressed in all black, weapon by his side—stands on the roof of a tower. Before him is the Gotham skyline. Below is his unsuspecting mark, a corrupt cad who must be vanquished.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Our masked avenger then looks directly at the camera. There’s a slight smile on his face as his dreamy eyes gaze at us, the audience. He’s assuring viewers that justice will be served. Evil must die.
Our hero stands still as the camera does a dramatic, CGI-assisted 360-degree swoop around him while the soundtrack swells with the audaciously rising sound of horns. Will he leap off the ledge and get the bad hombre? Of course not: there are other battles to fight first, more drama to find. Our champion will return—and we’ll be here for it.
It’s the stock scene in basically every Batman movie since Michael Keaton first donned the Batsuit and kicked off this country’s modern-day fascination with the Dark Knight. But what I just described is the final shot in the season 1 finale of Zorro, the Amazon Prime Video series that debuted in January and stars Miguel Bernardeau. The show is based on the swashbuckling hero of California’s rancho days from Johnston McCulley’s short stories and novels.
But Zorro in New York City? Yes. Zorro is everywhere nowadays.
For instance, Paramount+ is set to release a comedic take on Zorro starring Oscar winner Jean Dujardin this fall. Wilmer Valderrama is planning to star as Zorro and his public persona, Diego de la Vega, for a Disney+ series still in development, which he’s also executive producing. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures has four Zorro films in development, ranging from a cartoon to an animation–live action hybrid to a project based on Django/Zorro, the graphic novel cowritten by Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner. Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez is also getting in on the fun, working on a modern-day take with a woman as the lead. Away from the screens, Opera Santa Barbara sold out its two performances of a Zorro opera this past spring; a Kickstarter campaign seeking to turn Zorro into a board game reached its goal in five hours this May.
There has been at least one Zorro film or television series released every decade—in English, Spanish, Italian, French, even Hindi—since Douglas Fairbanks starred in the 1920 silent smash The Mark of Zorro. McCulley had introduced the romantic avenger to the world the previous year in the serialized novel The Curse of Capistrano. But let’s face it: previous Zorro incarnations have, to be kind, come up short. There’s the inherent corniness of the plots. The actors who play him—invariably, not Latinos—usually speak with bad Spanish accents. The entire conceit romanticizes a Spanish fantasy heritage. Yet, Zorro persists.
John Gertz, founder of Zorro Productions, which licenses the character, says there have never been as many film and television projects about the character in development as right now. Gertz attributes Zorro’s popularity to his normality. “[Zorro is] not a superhero; he’s an ordinary person,” Gertz says. “He’s flesh and blood. No radioactive spider bit him. [His story can] be flexible to the times and speak to the times.”
Zorro endures because he interrogates the very idea of California, in all its good and bad. This is the eternal land of possibility, but one where danger is always just over the hills. And if ever California needed a hero to save it, the latest series bravely argues, it’s today.
MAN IN BLACK
Haven’t heard of this contemporary Zorro from Amazon? Neither had I, until I was asked to write this commentary, but I was immediately excited to watch it. See, Zorro is a part of my family.
My mother remembers seeing reruns of the Disney serial starring Guy Williams when she was a child taking a break from picking crops in Hollister in the 1960s. I remember the Zorro show of the early 1990s that originally appeared on the Family Channel and later aired on Southern California television stations in syndication.
In 1998, my friends and I went to our local AMC movie theater to watch The Mask of Zorro, a Hollywood blockbuster starring Anthony Hopkins as Zorro, Antonio Banderas as his protégé, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the former’s daughter and the latter’s love interest. My mami bought my family a copy of it when it came out on VHS; we played it so much, the tape broke.
“Growing up, Zorro was the one character that made me, as a Latino, feel like I could be a hero,” Valderrama said in a 2021 statement announcing his project for Disney+. Similarly, that possibility was part of Zorro’s appeal for my family and me, even though Hopkins and Zeta-Jones are Welsh. But what really drew us in was that Zorro was…fun. Zorro always was on the side of good, always helped those in need, was as ready with a quip as he was with his whip, and lived to defy authority.
The outlaw hero he represents is a mainstay of working-class communities worldwide, and none of the Zorros I’ve seen have ever pretended to be anything deeper than a good time. At first blush, this is what makes Amazon’s Zorro so compelling. But the more I watched, the more I realized the show offers a deep meditation on politics, loyalty, and belonging, whether its makers explicitly set out to argue those points or not.
The setting: 19th-century California. The plot (this time): Diego de la Vega (Bernardeau) returns to Los Angeles from Spain to settle the estate of his murdered father and find his assassins. He tries to rekindle a romance with his old flame, Lolita Marquez (Renata Notni), only to learn that the sharpshooting daughter of wealthy rancheros is betrothed to Captain Monasterio (Emiliano Zurita), who’s starting to have doubts about the sadistic Mexican governor he serves.
De la Vega soon discovers that the local Indigenous tribe has determined he is to be the next Zorro. That angers Nah-Lin (Dalia Xiuhcoatl), sister of the previous Zorro, who was killed trying to save de la Vega’s father. Nah-Lin becomes her own renegade Zorro, and off to the desmadre we go! Throw in the invention of the Colt six-shooter, a secret hooded society called the Clan of the Bear, karate moves, and the rumor of gold, and this Zorro is irresistible.
I binged the 10-episode season in two days.
Initially, I tried to check my email while watching, but quickly realized I had to pay close attention. This was a PG-13 John Wick reimagined as a Latino Beau Brummell—you want to see Zorro vanquish all the baddies and look handsome while he does it. And those baddies… At one point, as Zorro extended his blade toward the reprobate Gobernador Pedro Victoria (Rodolfo Sancho), I yelled, “Give him the Z!” and cheered as he slashed three quick strokes across Victoria’s shirt. El gobernador didn’t flinch and continued to drink his wine—peak Zorro!
FIGHTING FOR CALIFORNIA
The most immediate difference between this Zorro and previous versions, whether on-screen, in comics, or in any of the short stories that continue to be published under license from Zorro Productions, is its wildly multicultural world. This Zorro is not a simple tale of Spaniards, Indians, and Mexicans, as in the past. Russian, Chinese, French, and Black people all play key roles. Indigenous people are proud, not pitiful. Characters are complex instead of black-and-white. Americans? Those Yankees are far, far away—but they’re coming.
The characters in this rendition are all fighting for California for the same reason generations of people from across the world have come here since 1849: this is a dreamland. But the dream, the series argues, is ever ready to succumb to darkness.
A cruel, racist tyrant protects the rich and abuses the poor. A reformer comes into power, only to have to survive an insurrection organized by the ancien régime. Mention is made of Los Angeles becoming a “dangerous city” and of how the “legitimate children of California” must take back what’s theirs. Are we talking 1830s California, or the fever dreams of the Trump-loving parts of the state?
But liberals don’t get off easy either. When Lolita’s mom told Zorro, né de la Vega, “California is neither Mexico nor Spain. California is California. If you were born here, you’d understand,” I had flashes of Governor Gavin Newsom bragging about us as a “nation-state” even as our cities face a huge housing crisis and our state budget is headed off a cliff.
California is worth fighting for, the series argues—but at what cost, and for whom? Season 1 ends with that tantalizing question, among many. The finale leaves a lot of plot points unanswered and creates a bunch of new storylines begging to be told, as if daring Amazon to not renew the show.
Afterward, I called Stephen Andes to ask what he thinks of the series. He’s a history professor at Bushnell University and the author of the 2020 book Zorro’s Shadow: How a Mexican Legend Became America’s First Superhero, which traces the character’s development and historical roots. Andes told me that this new Zorro is the best studio take on the hero since The Mask of Zorro but doesn’t top Isabel Allende’s 2005 novel, Zorro. The book combines characters in the Zorro canon with real-life historical figures to create a thrilling, literary investigation of our love affair with the masked hero.
“Could they get more beautiful people?” Andes joked, before getting serious and pointing out what he liked. “It’s not a bunch of people walking around with faux Spanish accents—they’re actually speaking Spanish,” he said. “I loved the idea that Zorro comes from the Indigenous people of the region. At first, I was like, ‘Why is an Indigenous person dressing like a Spaniard?’ But it’s cool, because they’re dressing like a Spaniard to wreak vengeance on the Spaniards.”
As for the bad: “What the heck was Lolita wearing half the time?” he asked, referring to the sleeveless shirt and top hat that made the character look like a steampunk señorita. “I don’t want to root against a female Indigenous Zorro, but the story is such that for this Zorro to win, that’s what has to happen—that hit me kind of weird. And the casting call for Zorro—can we get the whitest Hispanic in the room, please?”
We both laughed at some of the inevitable historical inaccuracies: How Zorro asks for tequila at a time when it was still a regional spirit in the Mexican state of Jalisco. How the pueblo of Los Angeles has a bustling harbor, even though the real-life Port of Los Angeles wouldn’t start in earnest until later in the 19th century. How the series names one of its antagonists Francisco Ramírez, the same name as that of a real-life Angeleno Zorro: a pioneering newspaper publisher in 1850s L.A. who crusaded against the mistreatment of Mexican Americans in his newspaper, El Clamor Público. Or was this intentional?
But Andes and I agreed: we can’t wait for the next 10 episodes. Yes, Amazon green-lit season 2.
“He becomes a little bit of a Rorschach test for our values about the interplay of law and justice,” Andes said, explaining Zorro’s ongoing appeal. “There’s always been this real allure in the American mind of what would it be like if you can bring justice into your own hands. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s why a huge group of Americans don’t see the raid on the Capitol as an insurrection. They see it as righting a wrong. And that’s a real attraction to people.”
While no one dressed as Zorro during the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, the Russian army, when invading Ukraine, marked its tanks and other vehicles with a Z. This did not escape the notice of Zorro Productions, which posted a statement on its website: “Zorro and his ‘Z’ have represented the pursuit of justice and defense of the persecuted throughout his 100-year history. Zorro stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, and all those seeking justice.”
Evil can be found everywhere, just like in the days of Old California. Now, more than ever, Zorro must ride.•
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
