Making Place with Displacement: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Romona and California Promotional Literature

Kaitlin Walker
English
UC Davis

The Huntington Library’s L.E. Behymer Archive on California promotional literature connects Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona to the development of Los Angeles as a metropolitan center. Comparing the novel with this archive centers how desired forms of domesticity shift when remembering or forgetting settler colonial violence in California. As part of a larger project, “Displace: Reimagining Domesticity, Development, and the Production of Space in California, 1848-2007,” this archival examination represents a key moment when domesticity was imagined through an idealized version of California’s missionary past. Ramona both remembers and forgets the racialized violence. The analysis of the archive helps to better understand what enables that forgetting. Examining ephemera from this moment demands a responsibility to the violent displacements of racialized groups in California, as well as reimagining what it means to be at home in California in the present.