Translating Hemispheric Legacies in Helen Hunt Jackson, Don Antonio Coronel, and José Martí
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Gillman, Susan
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
UC Santa Cruz
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2013
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Body granting the degree
UC Santa Cruz
Text preceding or following the note
2013
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
This thesis uses translation theory and practice as a new critical framework to revise dominant readings of Helen Hunt Jackson and her novel Ramona (1884). Rather than assuming both author and novel as origin-points of Southern California's "Spanish Revival" tradition, I investigate a less recognized, pre-Anglo, Spanish-language thread of revivalism, the practice of constructing Spanish-influenced identity within the Californio population. Through close analysis of unpublished Spanish-language texts and early Californio testimonios, I read this alternative revivalism as a paradigm of temporal cultural translation: Californio history-and identity-making, traceable within and across time through linguistic terms that carry cultural meaning, both synchronically and diachronically. Reading Jackson's novel through a translational framework, I reconceive her role in these revivalisms not as originator, but as translator-ethnographer, who deploys language and time in Ramona to inscribe an invented Spanish Southern California subject into the region's historical memory.