Recovering social memories from the past: the 1884 novel Ramona and tourist practices in turn‐of‐the‐century southern California

Abstract

Scholars studying social memory have identified a priority for future work: using the study of documented social memories to understand constructions of the past and social identities in the present. Recovering such lived, individual engagements with social memory is challenging when those engaging the memory are deceased, yet that is what this article attempts to do: Through fine‐grained study of archival traces, I explore the lived practices of tourists in an attempt to understand how the immensely popular 1884 novel Ramona changed the way people thought about southern California's past, creating a new, Ramona‐inspired social memory for the region. In so doing I suggest that those interested in recovering social memories (like these) from the past use such detailed analysis, paying close attention to even the tiniest of details.

Keywords:

• social memory
• Ramona
• southern California
• landscape
• tourist practices

Notes

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, in their book The Invention of Tradition, point out that invented traditions (like the Ramona Myth discussed here) are indeed most likely to be found in times when ‘rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which “old” traditions had been designed’ (1983: 4).

Jackson's was a work of regional fiction, then a popular genre that exoticized and romanticized what were portrayed as primitive remnant cultures in distant corners of the USA (see Brodhead 1994; DeLyser 2003; Foote 2001; Phillips 2003).

Examples of the letterhead and the citrus label are in the papers of Charles Fletcher Lummis, Braun Research Library, Southwest Museum, and the collection of the author.

See for example, Roads to Romance maps or maps in the brochures of the Ramona Pageant for the late 1930s.

One significant exception is Rancho Camulos, which has recently reopened as a museum, partly to commemorate its connection to Ramona.