I believe this may be the oldest book I have ever read, meaning physically oldest. This book appears to have been printed in 1884. It is in quite good shape and I hope I kept it in almost as good shape as when I got it. Because of the Coronavirus pandemic, I am not going out so wasn't worried about carrying it with me. I still tore ever so slightly one page. The quality of the paper and binding on these olders books was quite good. It was given to us as a gift from old family friends and I had no idea what it was about. It turns out to be a forgotten classic, a huge hit back in the day that it came out and one that reinforced the idea of California in the eyes of a westward expanding nation. It also created a lot of consciousness about Mexicans and to some degree the suffering of the indigenous peoples of California. Jackson had written a non-fiction report three years earlier titled "A Century of Dishonor" about how the Americans had totally fucked the natives. She wrote Ramona to fictionalize much of what she had put in the report to try and spread the word. On her deathbed, she wrote a letter to the president, pleading with him to redress the ongoing repression of the indigenous population. Some argue that her book was influential in pushing the Dawes act.
The story takes place in a Mexican ranch in central coastal California. It is run by a strong, inflexible woman, La Senora Morena. Though her son, Felipe, is the ostensible boss, she has the great skill of subtle manipulation, controlling everything without saying anything directly and somehow making her son think he is making all the decisions. She has also taken in her dead sister's daughter, Ramona, whom everybody on the farm loves, except La Senora herself. Ramona falls in love with the head of the Indian sheep shearers and La Senora forbids it for all kinds of crazy reasons, but basically racism and a weird, misplaced jealousy of Ramona. I am not doing justice how well and thoroughly written the characters are, turning this simple into a rich and believable dynamic. The character of Senora Morena is really an all-timer, nearly tragic at the Lady Macbeth level. It's the kind of story where you would be screaming why can't you just not be fucking lame everything would be fine, except that their characters are so well-built that the lameness (the rigidity of the mother, the weakness of the son, the jealousy of the friend) makes perfect sense.
It also really pulls no punches when it comes to portraying what happens to the natives. I portrays the Mexican and Catholic relation wit the natives a bit too positively, despite some narrative saying they weren't all as nice as the main ones in the narrative. The Americans are shown to be the monsters they are, using manufacturing laws to drive the natives from their homes, steal their cattle and horses and basically destroy their lives. It is interesting to read this narrative after There, There. It is no surprise that there is so much trauma among the American Indians. What is a surprise is that they even survived at all. It's fucking horrific. Some of this is hard reading.
What is not so hard to read are the beautiful descriptions of California at this time. It really is an incredible part of the world and back in the 19th century as Americans were only starting to destroy it, you get a sense of how bounteous and beautiful it was. While you start to get the sense that things are not going to go well early in the book, the fleeing couple stay in a few really cool locations, ultimately ending up in a hidden valley high in the mountains. This location had me feeling quite a sense of longing seeing as I will probably be here in my nice little urban neighbourhood for many months.
Great book. I am really glad it was given to me.
(Note, why the fuck can I not wrap text around the image in Blogger anymore?)
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