Our Ramona: The Multicultural Dreams and Legacies of the California State Outdoor Play
Julia Sizek is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at UC Berkeley and an Associate Scholar of the Native American Land Conservancy. Her doctoral research focuses on contemporary land use problems in California’s Mojave Desert.
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Though largely forgotten by contemporary Californians, Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 Ramona was the most important novel about California of the nineteenth century.1 Ramona follows its heroine, a mestiza, as she leaves the rancho of her adopted Californio family for the love of Alessandro, an Indian, to live in the San Jacinto foothills. Though the historical novel follows Victorian stylistic conventions, Jackson intended it to be a social commentary on the early days of California statehood. She hoped that Ramona would inspire social critique, making American settlers question their treatment of Native Americans and Mexican-Americans in Southern California, when California’s inclusion into US statehood caused the dispossession of both Native Americans and Californios.
At the time of its publication, Ramona’s immense popularity and social message earned it comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the only novel more popular than Ramona in the nineteenth century.2 Like Stowe’s novel, Ramona was controversial upon its publication: white settlers accused Jackson of defaming them in their new home. Conversely, the book inspired a proliferation of tourism in Southern California that glorified Spanish history, as white settlers glorified dispossessed Californios and Native Americans in a performance of imperialist nostalgia. Ramona outgrew its origin as a novel intended to protest the treatment of Native Americans and Mexican-Americans in California, becoming the Romanticized and fictional basis for interpreting California as a place for Euroamerican settlers, Mexican- Americans, and Native Americans.
In its many adaptations, translations, and transformations, Ramona is the story told about belonging and dispossession, and a story of three Californias belonging to the Native Americans, Californios, and Americanos. In its many versions, the story tends to follow the contours of the novel: it begins with Ramona’s life as a teenager at the rancho with her adopted family. Her adopted mother, Señora Moreno, a Californio, is the widow of a Spanish-Mexican man who had fought against the Americans. Today, she is bitter at the Americans, who have killed her husband and shrunk her rancho after taking control under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Only her sickly son, Felipe, remains to help the Señora at the rancho. During the sheep-shearing season, Ramona falls in love with a hired Native American hand, Alessandro. In a fight with Señora
1 DeLyser, Dydia. Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California. ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Powell, Lawrence Clark, California Classics: The Creative Literature of the Golden State (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1971). 2 Allmendinger, Blake. A History of California Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 46. Moreno, the Señora reveals Ramona’s true heritage as both Scottish and Native American. After that, Ramona decides to leave the rancho to elope with Alessandro, the son of the chief of the Temecula village of the Luiseño tribe. The couple travels across Southern California, seeking both work and places to live, made difficult by an influx of American homesteaders settling on Native lands. They have a daughter, Eyes of the Sky, who dies of fever because they could not convince a doctor to come to their homestead. Their second child, named after her mother, is also born during this time. Unable to withstand the loss of Native lands and constant humiliation at the hands of the Americanos, Alessandro becomes unstable, and is killed by a local vigilante after a misunderstanding. After Alessandro’s death, Ramona returns to the rancho (which is now missing Señora Moreno, who died in the interim), eventually marrying her adopted brother Felipe and moving to Mexico City, the Romantic dream of California proven to be no more than tragedy.
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Helen Hunt Jackson had intended Ramona to be a protest novel against the mistreatment of Native Americans in the United States.3 She wrote the historical novel in a feverish three months , drawing from her travels through Indian country in Southern California as well as her research for A Century of Dishonor, her nonfiction account of the abuse and neglect of Native Americans at the hands of the federal government.
The novel failed as a reform effort because her white readers didn’t see the story as a tragic telling of the fallout of California statehood.4 Instead, readers saw it as a Romance, an emplotment in which the main character overcomes oppression to become saved or emancipated. Ramona’s commercial success came from readers understanding it as a love story and regional novel of Southern California. After being published serially, it was still a best-seller, selling 21, 000 copies in 1885. It has never gone out of print. Though Ramona failed to create political
3 Mathes, Valerie Sherer. “Friends of the California Mission Indians: Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Legacy.” (PhD Dissertation. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1988): iv. 4 Although the political message of Ramona was missed in the United States, Cuban writer José Martí, felt compelled to translate the novel as soon as he recognized the critique of American expansion into Mexico inherent in the tragic work. This is a pan-American, not North American, story, he argues in his introduction to his 1888 translation of the novel, despite being written by a gringa. See Kerekes, Ana-Maria. Poder y belleza de la Palabra: Análysis de la traducción martiana de la novela Ramona de Helen Hunt Jackson. (Master’s Thesis. Montreal: Concordia University, 2009): 21-22, and Martí, José. José Martí: Obras Completas, Vol. 24. (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1991), 204. This new myth of California followed on the Romantic tradition rather than a tragic one, celebrating California multiculturalism in a way that today we would understand through anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s concept of “imperialist nostalgia,” a problematic longing and valorization of the Native Americans and Californios who Americans had pushed out just years earlier.5 Ramona brought new tourists to California, aided by the “See America First” patriotic tourism campaign and the low railroad fares. Due to demand, proprietors had shifted their already-existing tourist sites to accommodate Ramona-themed tourism by the mid-1920s.
What began as tourist sightseeing became a veritable Ramona industry, as guidebooks to the region appeared (the most enduring by George Wharton James in 1908). Towns and businesses adopted Ramona themes: you could also visit locations like the Ramona Highway or Ramona Pharmacy. The book was translated into many languages, adapted into five films and a tevenovela in US and Mexico, and made into no less than eight plays, the most famous of which is the annual Ramona Pageant in Hemet, which began in 1923.6
Tourists searched for the ‘real’ Ramona promised to them in tourist literature, though they were often met with many seeking to make a quick buck on the myth.7 Perhaps the most ‘real’ of the Ramonas was a Cahuilla woman by the name Ramona Lubo, who Jackson had read about while writing her novel.8 Like the fictional Alessandro, Lubo’s husband Juan Diego had mistaken the horse of a white man for his, and a vigilante band subsequently shot him in front of his wife and children. Lubo never received justice for her husband’s death—as a woman and Indian, she had no legal standing as a citizen at the trial, and was not invited to testify.
Lubo tried to benefit from the popularity of Ramona, charging small fees for tourists to take pictures of her with their new Kodak cameras or entrepreneurs to take pictures of her for reproduction in postcards (though she certainly did not receive royalties for the latter). Newspapers denounced her opportunism, a charge they didn’t level at white and Latino Ramona entrepreneurs.
5 Rosaldo, Renato, ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’, Representations, 26 (1989), 107–22
— The best site to understand contemporary Ramona tourism is the Ramona Pageant, held yearly in Hemet. Inspired in part by the pageant Tahquitz in Palm Springs, the Hemet-San Jacinto Chamber of Commerce hired Garnet Holme (who later became pageant master for the National Park Service) to write a dramatization of Ramona that was first performed in 1923.9 Like other pageants of the era, the Ramona Pageant was played almost entirely by amateurs who recounted scenes of local history with spectacular crowd scenes, music, and choreography. Theater historians disagree as to whether the Ramona Pageant is more of a pageant, a melodrama, or a hybrid of the two,, both sides agree that Ramona can’t simply be viewed as an “ideologically innocent expression of tradition.”10
Pageants were one of the most important art forms of the early twentieth century: they created historical stories that then were sedimented in the public imagination, and drew in heritage tourism. A prominent example was The Mission Play, which ran from 1912 through the mid- 1930s in San Gabriel. The Mission Play articulated tropes of Southern California into a clear and self-evident story: the Spanish period was one of European civilization and the following Mexican period was one of decadence and degeneration.11 Degeneration theory justified American expansion into California as a civilizing force against Californios and Native Americans. Like the Native American village in Yosemite, these tourist attractions both romanticized Native Americans and legitimized their dispossession under the new American government.12 These myths—forms of imperialist nostalgia—gave a way for tourists and settlers to understand their history through the narrative conventions of drama.
9 Brigandi, Phil, Garnet Holme: California’s Pageant Master (Hemet: Ramona Pageant Association , 1991). 10 Stokes, Shilarna. “Playing the Crowd: Mass Pageantry in Europe and the United States, 1905- 1935.” (PhD Dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 2013). See also Matson, Barb. “Performing Identity, Staging Injustice: California’s Ramona festival as Ritual.” (PhD Dissertation. Boulder: University of Colorado, 2006 ). 11 Vaughn, Chelsea K. “The Joining of Historical Pageantry and the Spanish Fantasy Past: The Meeting of Señora Josefa Yorba and Lucretia del Valle.” Journal of San Diego History 57, no. 4 (2011): 213-235. 12 Spence, Mark David, Dispossessing the Wilderness : Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York : Oxford University Press, 1999). Even thought the Pageant was originally marketed to motor tourists in the 1920s and 1930s, the play has always served a large role in community life as a ‘rite of spring.’ Many of the Pageant volunteers return yearly for the event, defining the seasons of their lives by Pageant-time. Barb Matson, an ethnographer of the Pageant in the 1990s, argues that the Pageant is a ritual in which both participants and audience-goers emerge as transformed converts to the Ramona story and its multicultural values.13 In Hemet, where today 40% of the population is Latino, the play attempts to reflect the diversity of the community through its Pageantry: many trained ballet folklórico dancers perform, as do Native American tribal members. Former Ramona Pageant Historian Phil Brigandi notes that the pageant participants include all socioeconomic classes in the San Jacinto Valley, telling me that “some of the most prominent and wealthy families in the region perform alongside people on welfare.”
A longstanding goal of the Pageant has been multiculturalism and intercultural understanding, if not social critique of the actions of Americanos in California after 1848. One of the first big changes to the play was the introduction of untranslated Spanish language into the script, but arguably the largest transformation has been the increased representation of Native American tribes. While prominent Native families had always participated, students from Sherman Indian School (the local boarding school) were invited to participate by performing the dances of their tribes in the Pageant in the 1930s.14 In the 1980s, a Native American Advisory Council was formed to improve the Elder Blessing Scene, which had been allotted four and a half minutes in earlier iterations of the play.15 Today, this portion of the play has expanded to equal the length of the fiesta scene at the rancho, including Bird Singing (a southern California Native American singing tradition) and a Native soloist, Hoop Dancers, and the Red Tail Spirit Dancers, together representing California and Southwestern Native American traditions.
Native participation in the play is made visible through the performers themselves, but it’s also clear from the program, as the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, and the Soboba Foundation (of the Soboba Band of Luiseno Indians) provided financial support for the 2018 season of the Pageant. When I spoke to a friend who had participated in the Ramona pageant in years past, he said “the Pageant may have gone belly up” without the help of tribes today.
Today’s Native American sponsorship of the Ramona pageant inverts the historical relationship between tribes in the Pageant. In 1927, Condino Hopkins, the son of Ramona Lubo, wrote a letter to the San Jacinto-Hemet Chamber of Commerce accusing them of profiting from retelling the tragedy of Native dispossession: “Although the pageant is supposed to be in honor of the Indian woman who was immortalized in Mrs. Jackson’s famous story, it is well-known that it is
13 Matson, “Performing Identity,” 431. 14 Although this was a good faith effort on the part of Pageant organizers, Sherman (like most Indian Boarding Schools) has a much darker history as places where students were prohibited from speaking in their Native languages and forcibly removed from their family for assimilation. See Trafzer, Clifford E., Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc. Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences. (Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 2006) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/11793. 15 Matson, “Performing Identity,” 466. primarily a publicity scheme on the part of the real estate interests in your locality…. In view of the fact that her name is thus commercialized, with the proceeds of this exhibition netting thousands of dollars each season, it would seem to me that it would be no more than right and proper for her heirs to share in such receipts.” 16 Though Hopkins’ point that the play was meant to honor an individual is incorrect, his critique of the Pageant reveals that the benefits of the Pageant largely went to the European settlers in the form of community growth and development ,17 not to the tribes who lost so much from Euroamerican settlement. Though the Pageant is one of the few representations of Native history that could be used to ask hard questions of settlers, has it been used to both reveal how California Native Americans were treated by European settlers and critique it? A Native American former Pageanteer told me that he still hasn’t decided whether the Pageant can bring awareness to Native issues or be a viable social critique, even after a lifetime of attending the event and seven years participating as a Bird Singer.
— Though the Pageant is an exercise in community-building in practice, former Pageant historian places the value of the Pageant in the story: “the message is the story and the story is the message.” Garnet Holme’s dramatization of the play hewed closely to the book in order to have theatergoers identify with Californios and Native American tribes, an identification made possible by the understanding that both groups are tragically doomed. This identification manifests itself in one of the longstanding traditions of the play, when the crowd boos the Americano cowboys as they ride away after threatening Ramona.18 Jackson had hoped that the strong identification with Native American and Californios would make contemporary Americanos question their role as settlers in a land that was not theirs.
The novel highlights this with the final tragedy that befalls Ramona and Alessandro. After Alessandro’s wrongful death at the hands of a greedy Americano, Ramona moves back to the rancho. Life in California becomes more and more difficult, and Ramona and Felipe choose to move to Mexico—a homeland yet unseen—rather than endure the Americans. On the boat, Felipe asks Ramona to marry him, and she agrees, deciding that it would be selfish to refuse. He accepts her reluctant hand, realizing that he will never have all of Ramona, as part of her will always be with Alessandro. They have a prosperous life together in Mexico City, having many children. Of the children, the most beautiful and loved is “Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian,” the words with which the novel ends.
16 Hopkins quoted in DeLyser, Ramona Memories, 135. 17 A 1972 study tried to tracked some of the economic impacts of the Ramona pageant, and found that around 7.5% of San Jacinto Valley residents had moved to the area after being introduced through the play. This points to the impact of the play as being both an economic change to the community and a social shift to growth in the region based on Ramona tourism. See McLaughlin, Robert M. “A Descriptive Study of the Interrelationships Between the City of Hemet and the Ramona Pageant.” (Unpublished Master's Thesis, Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 1972.). 18 Matson, “Performing Identity,” 50. Scholars of Ramona disagree as to the meaning of this ending. Some have argued that Ramona is not miserable enough at the conclusion to make the novel a searing social critique, but other readings suggest that the ending is tragic, since Ramona can never live in Alta California because of the discrimination against Native Americans, nor will she ever love Felipe as she had Alessandro.19 Through the allegorical deaths of Señora Moreno and Padre Salvierdierra, the Spanish aristocracy and Mission system of California are dead too, making California alien to Ramona and Felipe. Alessandro’s death, too, dooms California Indians, creating tragedy for remaining Californios and Native Americans.
Garnet Holme’s original script for the Ramona Pageant maintains the sense of injustice by ending with a speech by the ranch manager Juan Canito, in which he begs God to send the Indians justice and return to them the land that was theirs before the Americanos came. The emphatic plea for justice only furthers the sense of tragedy.
In 2015, the Ramona Pageant Board of Directors commissioned an Idyllwild local, Steven Savage, to write a new version of the play. Unlike the Garnet Holme version and Jackson’s book, this version keeps Ramona—and Felipe—in California, at the rancho that they both love. Rather than recognize the changing times and the tragedy that has befallen them both, Ramona seems to overcome tragedy, making the play into a narrative Romance. She ends the play with the following words—“My home, California, where everyone can receive justice.”
The newer version papers over the injustices Ramona has suffered with a quick song and speech, rendering anew the question of what Ramona has become today, and the kind of parable it does —and should--offer to its audience. In his compelling reading of CLR James’ The Black Jacobins, anthropologist David Scott demonstrates how historical metanarratives structure possibilities for future thought; that is, how understanding history as tragedy or Romance has implications for our understandings of present politics.20 As a novel and story that has been told of California and its history, Ramona has been read as both a Romance—in which a hero can overcome present conditions to emerge victorious—and a tragedy—in which a “sets before us the image of a man or woman obliged to act in a world in which values are unstable and ambiguous.”21 In a moment in which it is so obvious that a multicultural democracy is not a “done deal,” perhaps Ramona should not be a Romance, but a tragic tale. This tale is one in which Americanos are the bad guys and Ramona is trapped in an unstable and unforgiving world that can’t be resolved by a song.
19 Matson, “Performing Identity.” Nevins, Allan. “Helen Hunt Jackson: Sentimentalist v. Realist.” American Scholar 10 (1941): 280. Phillips, Kate. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003: 259). Whitaker, Rosemary. “Helen Hunt Jackson.” Boise State University Western Writers Series 78 (Boise: Boise State University, 1987), 37. 20 Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 21 Ibid. .