Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California

Learn how a work of historical fiction came to define how we understand southern California’s past.

Dydia DeLyser is Associate Professor of Geography at California State University, Fullerton. A native Californian, she began researching the “Ramona Myth” as an undergraduate at UCLA. Her book, “Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California” (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) is the only scholarly, book-length treatment of this important element of southern California’s past. Her research, based on obscure archival sources as well as a growing personal collection of Ramona-related tourist souvenirs, revealed that it was not the promoters and boosters who first fabulated Ramona-related attractions, but the tourists themselves who demanded that Ramona locales become visitable tourist sites, thus reshaping not only the region’s landscape, but also how generations have thought about its past.

An in-person presentation by Dydia DeLyser, author and Associate Professor of Geography at California State University, Fullerton,