The image of Ramona, as imagined by artists, directors, publishers, and promoters, has endured within California's visual language.
For 140 years, Ramona has reigned as one of California's most ubiquitous celebrities. Her name graces street signs, schools, towns, and highways throughout the SoCal region. Her dark-haired beauty has been depicted in movies and on stage. Since she first sprung from the pages of Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 best-selling, myth-making novel, Ramona has come to symbolize the promise and potential of the California dream. She is the romance of the Mexican Ranchos. The fragrance of orange blossoms across a citrus grove.
Of the many Ramonas featured on numerous book covers, my favorite interpretation comes from the artist N.C. Wyeth (1882 -1945). Publisher Little, Brown and Co. commissioned this work (left), entitled Ramona and Alessandro on The Narrow Trail, from the artist to illustrate its 1939 novel edition. Read more about Wyeth at the National Museum of American Illustration web site.
Wyeth at the time created four cover renditions for the publisher, including the illustration (left) Ramona with her Guardian. (The original illustration was discovered in 2017 in a New Hampshire thriftstore and purchased for four dollars. Read more here.)
Alas, Ramona, an orphan of Scottish and Native American roots, is also a dark reminder of California's brutal past regarding the mistreatment of Native Americans, first by Franciscans in the Spanish Missions (1769 - 1833), then as forced laborers within the Mexican Rancho system. Things worsened when settlers arrived in the west with U.S. Government land grants declaring them rightful owners of the Indian's ancestral homelands.
But that part of Jackson's story, the most important part to her was mostly overlooked by publishers, film directors, and theatrical productions that, over the decades, have presented to audiences their own version of the literary heroine. Typically winsome and goodly, Ramona's ill-fated love affair with the Indian Alessandro was simply more captivating than the tragic plight of the native people and the loss of their land.
Below are several depictions of Ramona for the stage, film, and television:
