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Though the novel is no longer required reading in local schools and the two surviving film versions are now mainly of academic interest, Ramona’s mythic traces remain a fixture of the Los Angeles palimpsest: in Spanish Fantasy Past manifestations such as Olvera Street; in the Ramona Pageant held each spring in nearby Hemet; and, most indelibly, in the area’s part theme park, part reliquary, part still religiously functioning colonial-era missions. Befitting Ramona’s “birthplace,” Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, situated in the city of San Gabriel, nine miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, lies at the intersection of Mission Drive and Ramona Street. Across from the mission is a small, storefront Ramona Museum. On the sidewalks to either side of Ramona Street, and leading up to the mission entrance, is a “Walk of Fame” with embedded colored tiles designed by school children on a mission theme. A variation on the long-standing California elementary-school assignment to construct scale models of the missions, the tiles also literalize D. J. Waldie’s notion that, in parts of Los Angeles, “the pedestrian and the sacred are still there.”1 Affirming the mission’s tourist function as a stop on the California Historic Mission Trail, the visitor entrance proceeds through a gift shop. In the mission courtyard, by a gate leading to the chapel, a large sign erected in 1961 parrots the Spanish Fantasy Past: “SALUDOS AMIGOS: We witness here the beginning of a new civilization wherein Christianity was introduced to a pagan sphere some 190 years ago. For nearly two centuries this garden of peace has been a haven for the weary travelers, adventurous pioneers and builders of the magical desert. . . . Here trod the daring redskin, the blithe-spirited Mexican, the valiant Spanish soldier, and the venturesome American.” The mission museum fares better at balancing public relations with historical accuracy. It also directly references the Ramona myth. One display case is devoted entirely to Helen Hunt Jackson, her famed novel, and the tourist craze it ignited, including photos of Ramona-inspired visitors to the mission from the late 1880s and early 1890s. The mythic theme is extended via a purple-prose tribute to 43 c h a p t e r 2  Ramona Revisited 4 4 Original Si(g)n Ramona-phile extraordinaire John McGroarty: “Congressman, historian, California poet laureate, and California’s beloved son, who has chronicled her history, who has written her poetry, and who has woven the colorful beginning into the world’s greatest pageant, The Mission Play.” Two nearby displays chronicle the mission’s celebrity guests, which included President Gerald Ford and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy (two days before his assassination), and a raft of famous actors including silent-era superstar (and Ramona-portrayer) Mary Pickford, pictured together with the 1910 Ramona movie’s director, D. W. Griffith. Pickford’s and Griffith’s 1910 mission visit was not on account of Ramona, however, but for another film they made together earlier the same year, The Thread of Destiny—touted here as “the first picture that was begun and completed out west.” Besides two framed photographs of mission Indians flanking a large wooden crucifix, the museum devotes only one of its several rooms to the mission’s main inhabitants. The “Indian Room” does at least begin to address the mission era’s more problematic legacy. It features a photo (see fig. 7) of the rebel leader Toypurina, for example, though its caption gives only half the story: “Toypurina: the leader of an aborted Indian rebellion of 1785, pardoned and baptized by Father Miguel Sanchez in 1787.” Another display, documenting events held at the mission in 2008, is more forthright. A clip from the local Tidings newspaper reports a “rededication” ceremony in which members of the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe of San Gabriel, one of several organized Tongva groups, planted native plants and built an Indian thatched dwelling, or kiiy, on the mission grounds (fig. 9). The article also mentions a large crucifix flanked by two Indian figures in the mission cemetery, erected in 1935 “to commemorate the 6,000 Tongva buried within the mission walls” and part of an “ongoing effort to raise the visibility of Native Americans and to acknowledge their contributions.” Most redemptively, presiding Claretian Father Ralph Berg is reported to have publicly admitted to the mission’s “complex history,” which “included forced labor, compulsory Christianity, and deaths due to European-borne illnesses. . . . We can’t undo the painful history, but we...

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