The Lola Casanova That I Have Longed to Know

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• The Lola Casanova That I Have Longed to Know
• Robert McKee Irwin (bio)

A few years ago I was embarking on a project about borderlands culture that grew out of a fascination that I'd developed with Ramona—not Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, nor its various adaptations in film or theater or telenovela in the US or Mexico, nor the "real" Ramona promoted by the southern California tourist industry, but the legendary figure that encompasses all those Ramonas. As I researched how Ramona continued to captivate audiences over time and space, I was astounded to see how this beloved character came to take on distinct cultural meanings for different audiences. Ramona, as the story goes, was born to an Indigenous mother and a white father but raised as part of a white elite Californio family, later fell in love with an Indigenous man, discovered her own mixed-race background, got married, and assumed an Indigenous identity, a remarkable choice, taking into account predominant racial ideologies. Her story, with its many romantic and tragic twists and adventures, is too complicated to summarize here. But I can condense some of what Ramona came to signify: the romantic charm of Mexican/Californio/Spanish California, the possibilities of interracial integration in the US West, Mexican American culture's deep roots in the US Southwest, and a challenge to prevailing racial hierarchies.

I found it particularly interesting that the cultural phenomenon of Ramona, as something of a cultural icon of the Mexican American Southwest, was not contained to the southern California region, where her story (her purported birthplace, the ranch where she grew up, the site of her marriage, etc.) inspired a lively tourist industry, or the United States, where the original novel was a perpetual bestseller for decades and the inspiration for multiple movies and a popular romantic ballad. Instead a Spanish translation by Cuban poet José Martí, a Mexican film, and, much later, a popular Mexican telenovela made Ramona into an [End Page 447] iconic figure in Mexico, as well. Ramona, the legend, the character, the icon, was a cross-border phenomenon that provoked passionate adoration among both English- and Spanish-speaking audiences.

Curious as to whether any similar phenomenon could be found in Mexican culture, I soon came across a Mexican borderlands legend that at first seemed to share some fundamental characteristics of the Ramona story. Dolores Casanova, like Ramona, grew up a member of the local white elite, and caused a scandal by giving up her privileged position in Mexican society by going to live with an Indigenous man, bearing his children, and assimilating to his culture. Like Ramona, Lola Casanova, as she was known in popular representations, became a protagonist of both literature and cinema, inspiring a popular fascination that would endure for over a century. However, I soon came to see that beyond the superficial idea of the presumably white girl running off with a brown guy, the two stories had little in common. Casanova was, after all, a real person, who did not have a mixed-race background; nor did she elope with her Indigenous partner, but was rather taken captive by him.

At the time I conjectured that the Mexican beguilement with Casanova was of important national symbolic importance. A series of representations of the Casanova story arose during the couple of decades immediately following the Mexican Revolution, a period of intense nationalism that sought to create national symbols from regional artifacts, and to integrate groups that had previously been denigrated, marginalized, or excluded into a shared national culture. This was a complicated endeavor as Indigenous groups like the Comcaac (popularly known to outsiders as the Seris) had never been definitively conquered, and could not easily be woven into existing national mythologies of the Aztec or Mayan empires. In any case, I argued that Casanova's union with Coyote Iguana, her captor, could be viewed as a national romance celebrating racial harmony and mestizaje, a key component of Mexican national identity. However, the common trope of racial mixing was of a white man seducing (or violating) an Indigenous woman, whose role as an agent of mestizaje made her a traitor to her own conquered people. The...