Killing Joaquín begins in 1519 with the arrival in Mexico of Joaquín's ancestor Juan Murrieta, who is part of the Spanish invasion force led by Hernan Cortez.The early part of the book relates the family's background in Mexico and the social reality that motivates the northward migration of the Murrietas during three centuries of avoiding the Spanish boot their own family had once worn.The political structure in Colonial Mexico is as follows: Spaniards born in Spain, Spaniards born in Mexico, Mestizos, and Indians, in order of descending power. The people in Spain think of the Spaniards in Mexico as subordinate intermediaries necessary in the extraction of wealth from the colonized country.Time widens the gap, and the colonists become separate from the people who had originally sent them to Mexico as agents of subjugation and avenues of revenue.Their lowered status compounds the far greater duality that is soon caused by the genetic blending of Spanish and Indian people throughout Mexico, whereby the majority of the population becomes both the oppressor and the oppressed, which is a major component of the Mexican Dilemma.In 1776, there are fewer than one hundred non-Indian people in the entirety of California, and not all of them are Hispanic. The children born here to the largest of these settler groups are the first generation of the Califorñios - people born in California of Spanish-speaking parents.The Califorñios, like the Murrietas, seek a life free from Spanish rule, and they are a group comprised of ethnically Spanish Mexicans and culturally Spanish Mestizos, more of the former than the latter. The earliest arrivals also include some pure Indians whose family members have intermarried with the Spaniards.The Califorñio culture develops separately from Mexican culture and establishes itself during a hundred years of living in grace, being far enough from the seats o