California and Hawai'i Bound by Henry Knight Lozano

Author:Henry Knight Lozano [Knight Lozano, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036140 History / United States / State & Local / West (ak, Ca, Co, Hi, Id, Mt, Nv, Ut, Wy), HIS036040 History / United States / 19th Century, HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century
Publisher: Nebraska

Spanish Fantasy Future

In Southern California this mythology took shape with what Carey McWilliams has termed the “Spanish Fantasy Past” because this fantasy whitewashed historical realities in sanitized stories of Spanish California as a premodern civilization of Latin hospitality, guitar-twanging fiestas, dark-eyed señoritas, and paternalistic friars who guided their “neophyte” Indians.43 A complex range of factors shaped this Anglo-constructed historical narrative, but its emergence owed much to the popularity of Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona, the 1884 publication of which coincided with the arrival of transcontinental railroads in the region and a land boom in Los Angeles County.44 Set after the Mexican-American War, the novel Jackson wrote was intended to raise awareness of and action to relieve the plight of Native Americans in California. She had already written a work of nonfiction, A Century of Dishonor (1881), which chronicled white dispossession of Native American tribal communities in the United States, and she had dispatched copies of the work to members of Congress. The limited impact of the book, however, spurred her to try her hand at fiction instead. Ramona’s legacy proved more significant; the book became a best seller. Yet, in part due to the author’s style, Jackson’s readers were much more taken with the tragic romance between Ramona and Alessandro at the heart of the story, which she filled with lyrical depictions of the music, piety, and generosity of californio society, than they were with the novel’s political message about the desperate conditions of many Native American communities in late nineteenth-century California.45

With new railroads offering competing rates to Los Angeles, invalids and tourists poured into the region, bearing expectations of Southern California shaped by the Ramona narrative. West Coast railroad boosters and travel writers were quick to capitalize. They provided tours and guides to “Ramona Country,” while Ramona themes became a staple of regional advertising for everything from civic fiestas to citrus labels to land developments.46 In 1886 J. DeBarth Shorb, a fruit grower and real estate agent, advertised a new settler colony, Ramona, located seven miles from Los Angeles on the Southern Pacific Railroad. He termed it a “place of health and beauty” that offered semitropical groves and a permanent water right.47 Thus, a novel that sought to expose—and perhaps mitigate the legacies of—native dispossession perversely became vital source material for U.S. settler-tourists migrating to Southern California. Whereas white elites had largely disdained Latin California as a wasteful population of lazy Mexicans and subhuman “Digger Indians,” they now luxuriated in a romantic past full of memorable characters, a wistful backdrop to American modernity. Ramona mythology, the historian Charles Shinn observed in 1890, had sparked “a sudden development of interest in the Spanish days of the southwest and the Pacific coast,” with Anglo tourists seeking a vanishing California “of the Padre, the Indian neophyte, the leather-clad Spanish soldier, and the jovial old Spanish ranchero.”48 These visions translated easily to film, as Hollywood grew into an important part of the cultural economy of Los Angeles. In 1916 W. H. Clune produced a popular movie version of the Ramona story, the so-called California Romance.

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