California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place

California Vieja meticulously chronicles five distinct triggers that set off waves of pseudo-Spanish-Mexicanism in the cultural symbolism of Anglo California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is the publication of the wildly popular novel, Ramona, in 1884. Written by Helen Hunt Jackson and crammed with moonlight and roses romance about an ideal rancho society of the past, it sent winter tourists scrambling for California by train in search of picturesque adobes and souvenir shops purporting to be the place where the fictional Ramona was married. At the ranch that might have been the home of Ramona—had she been real, of course—family members dressed up as characters from the book and enacted tableaux vivants for the camera.

The second is "El Camino Real," the king's highway better known as the route taken by the barefoot friars who built a chain of missions from the Mexican border to San Francisco. Beginning in 1902, the road was revived (or reinvented) with the considerable help of local women's clubs and was soon espoused by local automobilists in a period in which route signs were rarer than gas stations. Harrie Forbes, one of the prime activists, joined her husband to create a thriving business out of manufacturing guideposts for the Camino: picturesque mission bells dangling from otherwise undistinguished route signage. The couple also sold smaller replicas for travelers, of course.

The third story is that of the Panama–California Exposition of 1915. The younger brother of San Francisco's Panama–Pacific fair of the same year, San Diego's was a regional show, spotlighting California products. Its buildings and ambiance, however, were steeped in a kind of neo-Spanish atmosphere, including guards in pointy sombreros, senioritas in shawls, strolling guitarists, periodic fiestas, and a wonderful pseudo-chur-rigueresque architectural fantasy village by Bertram Goodhue. If the Spanish could have afforded to rebuild Spain in Southern California, the San Diego Fair is undoubtedly what they would have built.

The fourth example is the planned suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, where Mary Pickford (star of the 1910 film version of Ramona) and Douglas Fairbanks (star of 1920's Zorro) settled into marital bliss in a home called "Rancho Zorro." The development itself took its name from the railroad, which owned an unprofitable tract outside San Diego. The houses—still settling the style for California homes today—were largely the work of Lillian Rice, who managed to combine all the modern amenities with the shady arcades and tile roofs of some idyllic past.

Finally, Ms. Kropp takes up Olvera Street, a foul alley adjacent to Los Angeles' mission-style Union Station which became a Mexican market and a major tourist magnet in the 1930s, under the guidance of Christine Sterling, would-be actress and historic-preservation activist. (Women get their due throughout!)

The book is a goldmine of new information. Its argument, however, is somewhat elderly: namely, that Anglos took parts of the Spanish-Indian-Mexican past while mistreating and despising actual members of these groups. That they compensated for the perils of modernity by retreating into an imagined region of history. That memory's mystic chords were played out of tune throughout. California Vieja could have benefitted from a less formulaic approach. Is escapism always a bad thing? Was California's particular brand of historicism influenced by the movies? By the existing "fantasy" architecture of the region? How does the California Mission/Rancho fantasy stand up to all the others so vividly described in the fiction of James M. Cain and Nathanael West? Or the proto-theme park proposed by Frank Baum, author of the Oz books, for Catalina Island? Less theory, perhaps—and more imagination!