Этнокультурные трансформации на аннексированных (1848) территориях Северной Мексики и гипотетическая реальность будущего в представлениях калифорнийских писателей XIX и XX вв. (Мария Ампаро Руис де Бёртон, Хелен Хант Джексон, Алехандро Моралес)

Abstract

The article focuses on defining the ways the 19th and 20th centuries authors presented ethnocultural transformations driven by ethnopolitical processes in the Mexican territories of Alta California annexed by the United States in 1848. The research includes the novels of the 19th-century American authors: The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Ramona (1884) by Helen Maria Hunt Jackson; and The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) by the author of late 20th century Alejandro Morales. The object of the research is the historical reality as presented in the literature of California in the 19th and 20th centuries. The subject of the research is the representation of ethnocultural transformations in the territories of the former Alta California in the views of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Helen Maria Hunt Jackson, and Alejandro Morales. The purpose of the research is to identify the specifics of depicting ethnocultural transformations in the fiction works by Californian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. The methodological basis of the research includes the works that analyze a literary text as a product of social life in specific cultural and historical conditions. The article uses a comprehensive approach to the analysis of the social and ethnocultural phenomena specific to the population of Mexican territories that became part of the United States. The approach combines methods of the sociology of literature, historical and cultural, problem-focused and chronological, and comparative research methods. The analysis of the novels helps to identify similarities and differences in the representation of the views of the 19th and 20th centuries authors on the ethnocultural transformations both in the ‘current’ historical reality (in literature depicting the ‘local color’) and the hypothetical reality of the future (in the dystopian novel).