Selling ‘Ramona’

Los Angeles and San Diego are bookends to a sprawling landscape of suburbs and industry, although it wasn’t always so. Southern California, a land of little water and arid scenery, was willed into existence, an invention of boosters, health seekers, aqueduct builders and immigrants seeking work in plantation-style orange and lemon groves. “Ramona,” a 19th century novel that captured the nation’s imagination, is part of the inventive spirit that formed Southern California’s identity.

“Ramona Memories,” by Louisiana State University geography professor Dydia DeLyser, highlights the blending of myth and reality, using as a launching point Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel about the ill-fated love affair between a half-Indian, half-Scottish girl and a mission Indian. It centered on the injustices of Yankee reform in an era of massacres of Native Americans, the systematic destruction of the buffalo and the pursuit and surrender of Chief Joseph and his impoverished Nez Perce tribe to the U.S. Army in 1877.

In later decades, however, Southern California embraced the romance and lore of “Ramona” for commercial reasons, and local boosters vied to identify landmarks and people Jackson may have used as models in writing her novel, including Native Americans who could have been the inspiration for Ramona.

To this end, DeLyser details the hype by entrepreneurs that spawned a cottage industry of historic sites, romantic plays and even visions of a theme park. Many sites can still be visited today, including Rancho Camulos in Ventura County and Rancho Guajome in San Diego County, both of which Jackson visited and used to create the novel’s ranch setting. A flood of tourists, vandalism, theft and the loss of privacy forced Rancho Camulos to close in 1968; it reopened in the late 1990s.

Casa de Estudillo in Old Town San Diego claims to be where Ramona and Alessandro, her fictional Native American husband, were married. DeLyser writes that in the 1920s and 1930s, one booster promoted it as a national stop for automobile tours. In John Steven McGroarty’s “Mission Play,” a cottage near the San Gabriel Mission is touted as the birthplace of the fictional heroine. To this day, the Hemet-San Jacinto Ramona pageant attracts thousands of enthusiasts each spring.

DeLyser makes an important point that despite the hype and the competition to claim the Ramona legacy, the story is part of Southern California’s social memory and reflects the locale’s collective mythology. Perhaps it is also a refusal to embrace the darker side of our history – the poverty and discrimination that marked the Native American experience after the arrival of missionaries and white settlers. Yet Native Americans have endured and some have succeeded, not unlike the heroine, who earns a second chance at love and life.

“Ramona Memories” is a crisply written, useful guide to the state’s Ramona landmarks and a cogent look at the novel’s importance in Southern California history. *