ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the construction of a ‘Spanish’ past in California between 1880 and 1930 – best exemplified by the mission church craze sparked by the popular 1884 novel Ramona – in the context of adaptation to US statehood. It argues that the state’s history was ‘de-Mexicanized’ in part by the internal Anglo migrants who moved there, as well as the elite and increasingly dispossessed Californios, who often highlighted their whiteness as a way to preserve their status, as well as their land. Although romanticized Spanish myths remained popular, this chapter also considers the ‘re-Mexicanization’ of space, this time in Olvera Street in 1920s Los Angeles, coming at a moment of rising immigration from Mexico, resulting in an invented Mexican village in the heart of a historically Mexican neighborhood.
