I just got back from Hemet, California. I went there, with my family, to see the 78th annual production of "The Ramona Pageant." I had never been to Hemet before and had no idea what this was all about
It all started a few months ago, at a classroom meeting for my daughter's fifth grade. The teachers mentioned that they were getting a group together to go see the pageant and asked who would like to go along. They said it was the "official" play of the state of California and that it was larger than life. We bought our tickets and pretty much forgot about it.
It was over a three hour drive to get there and we barely made it in time. The performers were just making their entrance as we found our seats (front row!) and then it began.
Now, before we go any farther, let me do something for you that I should have done for myself, in preparation and that is to define a "pageant." I guess I've always heard "pageant" after the word "beauty" so when I was told this was a play and had something to do with history and tragedy, I wasn't really sure what to expect. Just to set us both on the right track, Oxford's dictionary defines a pageant as a noun meaning "spectacular performance, usually illustrative of historical events." The folks in Helmet were correct in using that as a part of their title.
And it might also help you to understand the events if you knew that Hemet is a small agricultural city, located on the Eastern edge of Los Angeles. The valley is fertile and the surrounding mountains are rocky and still tipped with snow despite the 80 degree temperature in the natural outdoor amphitheater. The grandstands are concrete bleachers set opposite of two steep hills with a hacienda set to out right and a faux Indian village locate several hundred feet up the left-hand mountain. The time is unspecified but somewhere in California's past.
The first act had to do with a native American laborer on a Spanish-owned farm in California (then part of Mexico). It was a preachy bit with everybody invoking god at least once in every other sentence. The landowning Mexicans looked down on the "Indians" with thinly veiled racism. Our heroes are Ramona and Alexandro. Ramona is the ranch-owner's niece but initially we don't know anything about her mother. Alexandro (pronounced "Allah hand row"), an Indian who is employed to tend sheep and entertain the landowners. The Indians were kept to work the ranch, but were not allowed to attend the Mexican's fiesta and certainly not good enough to marry even their foundling daughter. But our heroes fall in love and the lovers couldn't be denied. They run off to be married. The narrator tells us that a year has passed before they return with their newborn daughter.
In the third act, the Mexicans reap what they have sown and are turned off their lands and treated as inferior by the incoming American settlers. The Indians get brutalized yet again although one or two of the settlers express mild discomfort with the theft of land and brutality visited upon the Indians.
The scenery is really what steals the show. The two steep hills begin perhaps a hundred paces from our seats and climb nearly straight up hundreds of feet more. The right-hand hill is so big it can only be used as a backdrop. The other is so steep that you can hardly believe when they ride horses even part-way up it. But at one point, when Alexandro blows a note on his whistle, a hundred children (dressed as Indians) spring up from their hiding places and the hillside is dotted with them.
I guess that was part of what impressed me about the pageant, the size of it. The mountains, the performance area and the size of the cast. After it was over, the emcee told us there were one thousand volunteers involved. And a great many of those were costumed and performing!
In the end I was left melancholy. On the one hand, I was glad that they didn't try to sugarcoat the tragedy that was the American invasion of the West. When I was in school, we were taught about Manifest Destiny and how god wanted "us" to settle the continent and eject the people who were already here. In fact, there was usually very little said about the previous inhabitants. They were just the savages or lazy Mexicans who were holding up god's will.
It's probably how a Japanese would feel attending a play about the Chinese in world war II. You weren't personally responsible for ANY wrongdoing, but there you are, a member of the evil race.
So, is the Ramona Pageant worth the $25/ticket price? Yeah, I guess so. It's not lighthearted or fun-filled. It's got some violence (murder, attempted rape) but the "stage" is amazing. The costumes are pretty good too (except for one of the fiesta women who rides in on her horse with designer sunglasses and a bizarre tan-line across her largely-visible bosom. I think it's good for children to learn that there has been more than one holocaust and it's good for some of the older people too (my generation and my parents' too, were never told how despicable our "heritage" really is.)
Go. Take your family. It's uncomfortable, both physically (damn concrete benches) and emotionally. You'll have to explain some things to your kids on the ride back, but it's worth telling them yourself.