Sinister Ranchos and Hopeful Hybrid Dwellings

Erin Sweeney
English
UC Irvine

Lavish descriptions of a breezy, bountiful Southern Californian rancho in Helen Hunt Jackson’s immensely popular sentimental social protest novel, Ramona (1886), incited a vogue for Mission Revival architecture still visible in today’s red-tiled strip malls and faux bell towers. This dissertation chapter on Ramona challenges glamorized perceptions of Southern California’s Mission-style architecture by tracing, within Jackson’s famously romantic depictions of hacienda life, overlooked legacies of the land theft and policed Indian labor under the feudal Mission and encomienda landholding systems that made such splendid residences possible. Half-Indian Ramona flees from the hyper-visibility and -audibility of the airy Moreno rancho, creating unusual dwellings that blend Spanish, Indian, and Anglo building styles and ways of life. Her hopeful architectural conglomerations imagine the construction of a multicultural California even as they register the inability for Californios or Indians to repel an incursion of Anglo squatters who, like Jackson’s readers, desired “Edenic” Southern California.