Maria Amparo Ruiz De Burton

Biography
• Born July 3 1832 in Baja, California.

• “Raised as a Heiress, she was the granddaughter of Don Jose Manuel Ruiz, who was the commandant of the presidio in Baja California ”

• “During the Mexican-American War, Ruiz de Burton witnessed the American invasion of La Paz that began in 1846.”

• “Married Henry Stanton Burton in 1849, who later became an Army General. They had two children Nellie and Henry. Her husband died of Malaria during the Civil War.”

• Published two books: Who Would Have Thought It? in 1872 and the Squatter and the Don in 1885. She published a play Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts: Taken From Cervantes' Novel of That Name in 1876

• “She published her first novel as "Mrs. Henry S. Burton" and her second one anonymously as "C. Loyal," an abbreviated form of Ciudadano Leal, "Loyal Citizen," a conventional method of closing official letters in nineteenth-century Mexico that Ruiz de Burton uses ironically to demonstrate her Mexican loyalties and signal her criticism of the corruption of American political ideals.”• Her books “are the earliest written in English by a Mexican-American in the United States.”

• “Her major themes were race, gender, and class.”

• “Ruiz de Burton spent roughly the last twenty years of her life fighting legal battles to assert her right to her family's land in California”

• Died Aug 12 1895

Who Would Have Thought It?

• In Who Would Have Thought It?, she “satires East Coast attitudes toward race during the Civil War.” “Ruiz de Burton uses irony and satire to mock American political discourses and practices by ridiculing socio-political structures of the period.”

• “The experience of Lola Medina, the supposed protagonist of the story, mirrors many aspects of Ruiz de Burton's own life. The character of Lola is a daughter of an aristocratic Spanish family from Mexico, who is adopted by a respected New England doctor and taken to the East Coast. Lola is well educated, perfectly fluent in Spanish and English, good mannered, yet disrespected by the doctor's protestant, white family and friends. Lola is ostracized due to her appearances.”

• “In Ruiz de Burtons own life, she was married young to a respected East Coast protestant man, yet always felt herself to be an outsider in New England, despite her education, wealth, and European lineage. Her appearance and name always gave her away.”

• “After publication, it remained relatively unnoticed for over one hundred years in American literary studies, demonstrating Ruiz de Burton's exclusion from American literary history and more broadly the marginal importance that Mexican-Americans had in American history.”

The Squatter and the Don

• “The Squatter and the Don is a historical romance that details not only the repercussions of the Land Act of 1851 after the US invasion of California but the rapid rise of the railroad monopoly in the state.”

• “The book is a historical novel about the relationship between Mercedes Alamar, the beautiful daughter of an aristocratic Californio family, and Clarence Darrell, an American who is affiliated with the Anglo squatters trying to claim the Alamar family's land”

• “In the book, the aristocratic Don Mariano proposes a plan that rests on cheap Indian labor to benefit himself and the Anglo squatters who have settled on his ranch.”

• She wrote: “By right, San Diego is the terminal point of a transcontinental railway and San Diego ought to be the shipping point for all that immense country, comprising Arizona, Southern California and Northern Mexico.”

• The Squatter and the Don “was inspired directly by her own experiences in the disputes over her land claims, and sought to contest official American histories of the conquest of California.”

Don Quixote de la Mancha: a Comedy in Five Acts: Taken from Cervantes's Novel of That Name

• “Many scholars interpret Ruiz de Burton's rewriting Cervantes' novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, as an effort to reclaim her cultural heritage on California lands”

• “Don Quixote's character is transformed from a Hidalgo into a Mexican-American, who rides through stolen lands believing that he is a Spanish savior who must right the wrongs that have injured his people and end the enchantment imposed by the occupiers.”

Critiques of Her Work
• “Some critics claim that Ruiz de Burton ‘sympathized with the defeated Confederacy, seeing in the South's defeat a mirror of the defeat of Mexico in 1848, and in Reconstruction, a clear imposition of Yankee hegemony on the Southern states.’”