By Dydia DeLyser, Professor of Geography, California State University, Fullerton

Helen Hunt Jackson was a famous writer when she published her 1884 novel Ramona. Like a modern-day influencer she here deliberately mustered her fame, skills, and connections to draw attention to a cause: righting the wrongs done by American people and the American government to Native peoples in the United States. She became one of a group of mainly upper-middle-class, middle-aged white women who mobilized their non-threatening social positions to draw attention to challenging political and social issues. Thus, Jackson did not write her book with Native people but on their behalf, and not for Native readers, but for a white audience.  

When Jackson died of cancer just one year later, she was unable to mobilize her book’s tremendous success to help Native people, and the painful and then-controversial Indian issues the novel addressed could be set aside. Ramona, set in Southern California and filled with real details of injustices perpetrated here against Native people, was equally rich with poignant romance and vividly compelling landscape and place descriptions. It became not a protest novel but a cherished story of love and loss and a guidebook for tourists to a beautiful region.  

Factual places rendered fictional could be visited both for their real-world charm and their fictional attachments. Among numerous Ramona-affiliated landmarks, tourists descended upon the former home of the Estudillo family (built in the 1820s), which became known as “Ramona’s Marriage Place,” and was for decades one of San Diego’s largest tourist attractions.  

Ramona’s Marriage Place welcomed generations of tourists and became, along with natural wonders like the Grand Canyon, an important stop on Americans’ cross-country excursions at a time when traveling within the U.S. became a ritual of American identity. Restored and opened to the public in 1910, Ramona-related souvenirs of all kinds were sold in the curio shop—the growing numbers of automobile tourists could recall scenes from the novel in the landscape of fact and then bring a remembrance of their trip home with them.  

Souvenirs even unrelated to the story were branded with the name “Ramona’s Marriage Place," and from that spot they would travel across the country as tourists gifted them and returned to distant homes. Some served no practical purpose other than as a remembrance of a person’s visit, or as a way to show others that they had been there, but others would become parts of people’s daily lives and meaningful activities, rendering their visits to a Ramona location personal in lingering ways.  

Many souvenirs could be used in daily life, like souvenir silver matchbox covers and souvenir salt-and-pepper shakers, and could be put to use in different rooms of people’s homes, reminding them in their own intimate spaces of their visit to Ramona’s Marriage Place.  

During the period of Ramona’s greatest popularity (1885–1965) the novel and its characters along with everything related to them—songs, plays, films, places affiliated, places and roadways named in commemoration, souvenirs, and ordinary products named for Ramona—permeated the United States and our culture, guiding how people understood Southern California.

Reclaiming El Camino