Ramona and the Ballad of Juan Diego

About two hours east of Los Angeles, thousands gather each spring in Hemet for The Ramona Pageant, the oldest continuously staged outdoor play in the United States.

The production draws from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, a cultural force that helped shape California’s identity and spotlighted injustices against Native Americans. Following the pageant’s centennial, the film tracks Eli Santana, who plays Alessandro, as he investigates the real history behind the fiction, including the 1880s killing of Juan Diego.

In museum archives, the team discovers a rare wax cylinder that preserves the killer’s testimony. They seek out descendants of Juan Diego and his wife, Ramona Lubo, and record a new wax-cylinder statement to restore her missing voice. The journey culminates at the pageant, where descendants and Bird Singers gather, and Eli debuts The Ballad of Juan Diego, reframing a California myth for the next hundred years.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

About two hours east of Los Angeles, the oldest play in the United States is held annually in the small town of Hemet, California, in a natural, 5,000-person amphitheater. Every year, the local community comes together to perform the outdoor play, The Ramona Pageant, a rich, one-of-a-kind tradition that led to its hundred-year anniversary in 2023.

The centenary of the play provided an entry point into the larger Ramona story, which was based on a novel written by author and Native American activist Helen Hunt Jackson in the late 19th century. The novel was one of the most popular books in America for decades and spawned a cultural phenomenon that helped shape California as we know it today. It has never been out of print.

A revolutionary in her time, Helen Hunt Jackson served as a special agent in the Department of the Interior, when women did not yet have the right to vote. We interviewed two former Secretaries of the Interior who discuss her work as a government agent and what she witnessed, which informed her advocacy on behalf of Native American tribes in Southern California and led to her writing Ramona.

Ramona was the first novel ever written about Southern California and is set at the time California became part of the United States. The story reflects real events, most importantly the killing of a Native American, Juan Diego, whose death was emblematic of the injustices against Native Americans at that time.

In 2023, we began filming the cast and crew of The Ramona Pageant as they looked back to discover the history behind the play while approaching their 100th anniversary. Eli Santana, who plays Alessandro — the fictional character based on Juan Diego — is a hardcore punk musician who leads the way. As he explores his Native heritage, he embarks on a personal journey of identity and discovery.Along the way we uncovered remarkable findings.

In the archives of the Autry Museum of the American West, we found a wax cylinder — the earliest form of commercial audio recording — containing the testimony of Sam Temple, the white settler who murdered Juan Diego. Eli listens to that recording alongside the actor who portrays Temple in the play.

In the recording, Temple describes in brutal detail how he killed Juan Diego, claiming he did so because Diego had mistakenly taken his horse. After hearing it, Eli channels his musical background to write The Ballad of Juan Diego, a song that tells the real story behind The Ramona Pageant.

During production, we tracked down the real-life descendants connected to the story, including descendants of Juan Diego’s wife, Ramona Lubo, the sole eyewitness to her husband’s murder. When Temple’s recording was made, a recording of Ramona Lubo was also made, but later lost. As a woman and a Native American, she was not allowed to testify in court. The loss of her recording deepened that injustice by erasing her voice from the historical record.

Enter Ramona Lubo’s great-granddaughter, a chef on a local Indian reservation, who re-records her ancestor’s testimony on a wax cylinder, in the same manner as it was originally captured, to finally give voice to someone who never had one.

We also visited the scene of the crime — where Temple murdered Diego in front of his wife — in a remote mountain area. There, alongside the Tribal Chairman of the Cahuilla Band of Indians and a group of Cahuilla Bird Singers, we paid tribute to Juan Diego. Their Birdsongs, unique to the Cahuilla and sung for thousands of years in that place, provided a powerful backdrop for everyone present.

And finally, the play. A descendant of Ramona Lubo attends the pageant, as do the descendants of Helen Hunt Jackson, who unveil a plaque honoring the first female author to receive a literary landmark in the State of California. At the end of the performance, Eli debuts The Ballad of Juan Diego, exploring the significance of the play and why it should continue for another hundred years — to keep telling this story until, one day, the story of Native American oppression is truly part of the past.

We filmed the journey to the 100th year of The Ramona Pageant, capturing rehearsals, live performances, and cinematic scenes. We followed Eli and the cast for months as they traced the origins of the Ramona story and conducted dozens of sit-down interviews with every descendant connected to it. The film also includes exclusive, never-before-seen archival materials from the pageant.

DIRECTOR BIO

Jason Sklaver is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker known for scripted and nonfiction work across premium documentaries and series. He has directed and executive-produced over 200 hours of television, interviewed world leaders and U.S. Presidents, and premiered at top festivals. Credits include the ESPN’s 30 for 30, “Revolution in the Ring,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, 15 Septembers Later, about NYC’s 9/11 terrorist attack, with Dan Rather, Matthew Broderick, Senator Chuck Schumer, and president George W. Bush, with voiceover from Scarlett Johansson and Phylicia Rashad, Time Fears the Pyramids, narrated by Kevin Costner, and the Emmy-nominated Fear of a Black Quarterback.

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Ramona and the Ballad of Juan Diego

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