Instruction

American literature classes long left out the writers who were already in the West when the United States arrived. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton is one of them. Born in Loreto, Baja California, in 1832, she married a U.S. Army officer, Henry S. Burton, after the Mexican-American War, lived in Monterey and San Diego and on the East Coast, and spent the last decades of her life fighting in court to keep her family’s rancho at Jamul, east of San Diego. She is often described as the first Mexican American writer to publish a novel in English. The Squatter and the Don appeared in San Francisco in 1885 under the name “C. Loyal”, usually read as a play on ciudadano leal, “loyal citizen.” The pen name is an argument: the Californios were loyal citizens, and the United States had not been loyal to them.

The history the novel assumes. The war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), by which Mexico ceded California and much of the Southwest. The treaty promised that Mexicans’ property would be “inviolably respected.” In 1851 Congress passed a Land Act requiring every holder of a Spanish or Mexican land grant to prove title before a federal Board of Land Commissioners. Cases were appealed through the courts for years; many owners sold land to pay lawyers, and settlers moved onto land whose title was still being decided. Those settlers are the novel’s “squatters.”

Two plots (RL.11-12.3). Ruiz de Burton builds her novel on two plots and makes them depend on each other. The land plot follows Don Mariano Alamar, whose San Diego County rancho is occupied by squatters, including William Darrell, who files a claim on Alamar land. The romance plot follows Mercedes Alamar and Clarence Darrell, the squatter’s son, who has paid for his land. The romance makes a political point: an Anglo American and a Californio can build a family on justice, but only if the injustice of the land plot is faced. As you read, notice how often a scene in one plot changes the stakes of the other.

The railroad. In the second half, a third force enters: the railroad. San Diego’s hopes rest on a transcontinental line; the novel blames the Central Pacific’s owners — it names them — for blocking it to protect their monopoly. The Alamars’ ruin is completed not by a gun but by lawyers, legislators and corporations. This is the novel’s boldest argument, and its narrator states it directly.

A theme of its period (RL.11-12.9). Ruiz de Burton was writing in the same decade as other American writers who attacked monopoly and political corruption, including Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, whose The Gilded Age (1873) gave the period its name. Read her as part of that argument about law and wealth in the post-Civil War United States, from a position no one else in it occupied.

Reading strategy. The novel is long and its sentences are formal. Keep a two-column log: land plot on the left, romance plot on the right, with chapter numbers. When you meet an unfamiliar legal or Spanish term, use context first (L.11-12.4.a): rancho, Don, pre-emption, patent (in this book, the government’s final document confirming title).

A note on quotations. This lesson describes the novel rather than quoting it; you will quote the 1885 text directly in your log and essay, with chapter numbers.

Formative check

Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.