| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California. By Dydia DeLyser. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. xxiv, 256 pp. Cloth, $56.95, ISBN 0-8166-4571-X. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8166-4572-8.)
The literature of tourism has become voluminous of late, for tourism offers an outstanding prism for analyzing both economic and cultural change. It speaks to questions of identity, cultural formation, and persistence and offers great insights into the relationship between dominant cultures and other entities in their sphere. The result has been a plethora of studies, large and small, that assess tourism and use it to illustrate a range of social concerns.	1
Ramona Memories appears to fall into this category. The fictional protagonist of Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) inspired an identity for burgeoning southern California that contrasted with its late nineteenth-century present by claiming a faux preindustrial past. From a scholarly point of view, the enthusiasm for Ramona fits neatly into the framework that T. J. Jackson Lears established in No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (1981). People in a rapidly changing world looked to their past to find both solace and the model for the present. In southern California, that model evoked the Spanish-Mexican past, replete with pastoral images and a comprehensive rural culture.	. . .

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