Anyone who has lived in Southern California has seen the name "Ramona" on a street sign: Ramona Street, Ramona Place, Ramona Avenue, Ramona Boulevard, Ramona Way, &c. My grandmother's house lies just off of a Ramona Boulevard.
Q. So just who is this Ramona?
A. She is the protagonist in H.H. Jackson's famous novel Ramona: A Story.
This novel was perhaps one of the most influential American novels of the second half of the 19th Century. The story is set just after the American take over of Alta California and chronicles the life of a young Spanish girl who later finds out that she is not Spanish at all, but half Anglo and half Indian. She lives on the rancho of her late foster mother's sister where she falls in love with an Indian man by the name of Alessandro. Ramona and Alessandro elope and go to live with Alessandro's people. From then on the novel reads like a Shakespearean tragedy. I won't give away the plot, but suffice it to say that the novel depicts the mistreatment of the California Indians at the hands of the Americans. As well it tells of the decline and disappearance of the idyllic, rural, Spanish Catholic way of life in old California.
The novel was intentionally writted as a political statement. Mrs. Jackson had become aware of the plight of the American Indians while living in Boston. She wrote her first work A Century of Dishonor, which she sent to every Congressman. This first work gained little notice. While on holiday in Southern California, Mrs. Jackson became acquainted with the plight of the Mission Indians through a Spanish man by the name of Antonio Coronel. Don Antonio, a former mayor of Los Ángeles, was very knowledgable about the Californios (i.e. the Spanish Californians whose ancestors had come to California in the late 18th century) and the Mission Indians.
From Wikipedia:
"Many of the original Mexican land grants had clauses protecting the Indians on the lands they occupied. But when Americans assumed control of the southwest after the Mexican-American War, they ignored Indian claims to these lands, which led to mass dispossessions. In 1852, there were an estimated fifteen thousand Mission Indians in Southern California. But, because of the adverse impact of dispossessions by Americans, by the time of Jackson's visit they numbered less than four thousand.
The stories told by Don Antonio spurred Jackson into action. Her efforts soon came to the attention of the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hiram Price, who recommended she be appointed an Interior Department agent. Jackson's assignment was to visit the Mission Indians and ascertain the location and condition of various bands, and determine what lands, if any, should be purchased for their use. With the help of Indian agent Abbot Kinney, Jackson criss-crossed Southern California and documented the appalling conditions she saw. At one point, she hired a law firm to protect the rights of a family of Saboba Indians facing dispossession of their land at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains.
During this time, Jackson read an account in a Los Ángeles newspaper about a Cahuilla Indian who had been shot and killed. His wife, it turned out, was named Ramona. On one excursion, Jackson was escorted by wagon to Santa Bárbara and stopped off at Rancho Camulos in the Santa Clara River Valley, where she visited the adobe of the Del Valle family. But the Señora del Valle was not home the day Jackson was there. And at the Mission Santa Bárbara, Jackson made the acquaintance of Father Sánchez, a source of great inspiration.
In 1883, she completed her fifty-six page report, which called for a massive government relief effort ranging from the purchase of new lands for reservations to the establishment of more Indian schools. A bill embodying her recommendations passed the U.S. Senate but died in the House of Representatives.
Jackson, however, was not discouraged by this Congressional rejection. She decided to write a novel that would depict the Indian experience "in a way to move people's hearts." An inspiration for the undertaking, Jackson admitted, was Uncle Tom's Cabin written years earlier by her friend, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
"If I can do one-hundredth part for the Indian that Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful," she told a friend. Jackson was particularly drawn to the fate of her Indian friends in the Temecula area of Riverside County and decided to use the story of what happened to them in her novel. She began writing the outline for her novel while staying at the Grapevine Inn in San Gabriel, but it wasn't till December 1883 that she actually started to write the novel in her New York hotel room, with an original title of In The Name of the Law, and completed the manuscript in slightly over three months. The result was her classic novel Ramona about a part-Indian orphan raised in Spanish Californio society, and her Indian husband, Alessandro, which was published in November 1884 and achieved almost instant success.
Encouraged by the popularity of her book, Jackson planned to write a children's story on the Indian issue. But less than a year after the publication of Ramona, while she was examining the condition of the California Indians as a special government commissioner, she died of cancer in San Francisco, California."
The novel Ramona was later made into a pageant play beginning in 1925 and is staged in The Ramona Bowl Amphitheater, in the town of Hemet, California. The pageant was originally staged one weekend every year, however it now runs three consecutive weekends. This year marks the pageant's 85th Anniversary. It has run every year since 1925 with the exception of three years during the Second World War. Ramona is the the official "State Play" of California. It is interesting to note that there have been a few famous actresses who have played Ramona in the pageant, the most famous being Raquel Welch in 1959. There are five Ramona movies as well: a 1910 silent version starring Mary Pickford; a 1916 silent version starring Adda Gleason; a 1928 version starring Dolores del Río; 1936 version starring Loretta Young; and a 1946 Spanish version starring Esther Fernández.
This year I took my ahijada (god-daughter) & comadre (the mother of my god-daughter, literally "co-mother") to see Ramona. The play was rather melodramatic at times, and the plot felt a bit rushed, but over all I would highly recommend it to anyone visiting Southern California in late April. The Spanish and Indian dances alone were worth the price of admission. One thing to note is that the play is predominantly in English, but there is a still bit of Spanish spoken in the play. I would recommend brushing up on your Spanish seeing as there were many "inside" jokes. As well, there is also a bit of Latin! The blessings given by "Father Salvierderra" are sung in Latin and there are a few Latin hymns sung throughout. What's not to like about this play!
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