Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona: The Romance that Became a Tourist Guide and Silenced the Mestiza

Abstract

This study focuses on American writer and activist Helen Hunt Jackson and aims to explain why her romance Ramona (1884), originally intended as a form of literary activism on behalf of California’s Native Americans, failed to effect actual change in the situation of the state’s indigenous population and, instead, ended up as an accomplice in the late 19th-century development of Anglo California. Said development brought along not only the advance of railroad companies, real-estate investors and the tourist industry, but, most poignantly, the displacement and consequent genocide of its Native inhabitants. All in all, the paper will prove that a social and political vision like Jackson’s, weighed down by the systems of imperialism and capitalism, as well as the oppressive discourses of racism and sexism, was bound to entrench economic, sexual and racial inequalities despite its good intentions.