59 pages • 1 hour read
The Squatter and the Don
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Background
Authorial Context: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton is one of the first Mexican American writers and the first female Chicana writer published in English. In her career, she wrote two novels. Who Would Have Thought It? was published in 1872; The Squatter and the Don, her more famous novel, was published in 1885. Ruiz de Burton also wrote one play, an 1876 adaptation of the novel Don Quixote. Ruiz de Burton’s writing was influenced by her witnessing of the Mexican–American war in her childhood, her marriage to prominent American soldier Henry Burton, and her travels across the United States for her husband’s work. As Burton was a Protestant, Ruiz de Burton gained insight into Anglo American Protestant society, particularly in New England, which might otherwise have been denied to a Catholic, Mexican American woman.
Ruiz de Burton’s work is notable for its connection to the writer’s life; she spent over two decades embroiled in legal battles to retain her husband’s lands (obtained via Mexican land grant) after he died in 1869, as does Don Mariano in The Squatter and the Don. Likewise, Lola Medina, the heroine of Who Would Have Thought It? descends from Spanish aristocrats like Ruiz de Burton. Ruiz de Burton’s work is further known for its criticism of the United States, both regarding its treatment of Mexico following the Mexican–American war and its foreign policy more broadly. She criticized the United States’s growing imperialism, which she saw as antithetical to its supposed purpose. She found the United States to be culturally lacking, criticizing it for being provincial in comparison to Europe, something echoed by her characters when they travel abroad.
Historical Context: San Diego in the 1870s and 1880s
San Diego was named the seat of the newly established County of San Diego in 1850, the same year that California became a US state. The city underwent various transformations in the first two decades following its establishment, including a brief time as an Army depot supporting Fort Yuma and as the western endpoint of the San Antonio–San Diego mail line, which took mail from the Eastern US to California in under 30 days, an unprecedented timeline.
In the early 1870s, San Diego began to grow, prompted in part by the federal charter granted to the Texas and Pacific Railway Company (sometimes known as the Texas Pacific Railroad or T&P), which planned its terminus in San Diego. A land rush (as documented in Squatter) took place in the mid-1870s, as different parties, anticipating the boom of the city once the railroad was connected, sought to make their fortunes on the still-small town. Influence from major players in the Central Pacific Railroad (also known as the transcontinental railroad) disrupted the growth of the Texas Pacific, which never reached San Diego. San Diego did receive a railroad in 1878. However, because it connected to other California cities instead of stretching east, it did not have the same economic effect as the Texas Pacific was promised to have.
Though this railroad would lead in part to the “boom” of inhabitants that arrived in San Diego over the 1880s, this prosperity was short-lived. The city began the decade with approximately 2,500 residents, which rapidly expanded to about 40,000 in 1887. This number dropped back to about 12,000 by the end of the decade, a shift attributed to the changes in railroad access at this time.
Literary Context: Whiteness and The Sentimental Novel
The sentimental novel was highly politically mobile in the 19th century, particularly concerning women’s reading and writing habits. Sentimental fiction contains protagonists (usually young, innocent heroines) who operate according to feeling rather than reason; this feeling is considered a more moral, truer way of being that originates from the supposed innate goodness of proper girlhood. These heroines typically meet with large-scale, often political, hardship beyond their control. Rather than seeking to influence these events, sentimental heroines “model” for readers appropriate emotional reactions. These emotional reactions are both political and apolitical; as 19th-century dictates around domesticity and idealized femininity commanded, the actions and processes of the broader political sphere were for men only, while women’s role was to cultivate the correct way to feel about those political machinations. Thus, the sentimental heroine taught readers how to feel “correctly,” particularly motivated by her tears. This metric—in which the sentimental heroine is sympathetic because she is appropriately womanly, and in which this appropriate womanhood is connected to whiteness—was a powerful political force in the 19th century, one of the few ways of being political that was allowed to women without accusations of moving beyond their scope of “appropriate” influence.
Ruiz de Burton’s use of the archetypes of sentimentality is complicated by her characters’ status as a racial “other.” The sentimental heroine, the ideal woman in the hegemonic view of 19th-century America, was white. In line with this constraint, the narrative praises Mercedes’s blonde curls, emphasizing her whiteness and Spanish-ness as opposed to any influences of Mexican-ness or Indigenous-ness that would make her, to a white 19th-century readership, unsympathetic or unsentimental. Mercedes’s continual deployment of sentimental characteristics orients the novel’s characterization of “Spano-Americans” as a specific ethnic group but not a separate racial one. “Spano-Americans,” the novel asserts, are white, and only the immoral (like many of the novel’s squatters) would see them differently.
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