That same year, though, Californios felt the sting of the Foreign Miners Tax, which forced a $20 tax on all noncitizens-defined as Mexican, Mexican American, Latin American miners-prospecting in California. The 1850 Indenture Act, which many Californios supported, mimicked the rancho system by arresting vagrant mestizos and Indians and hiring them out as indentured servants. It seemed Californios would maintain the power they enjoyed under the Mexican rancho system. Even before the convention, Californios emphasized their sangre azul, their pure Spanish blood, to distinguish themselves from mestizos, Indians, and blacks. The 1849 California constitution, for instance, recognized Mexican men as white citizens, a marker of racial privilege that recurs throughout the novel. LAWS OF THE LANDīesides the 1848 treaty, several other events fuel Squatter's historical critique. She died in 1895, destitute and largely unsuccessful in her legal battles. Far from her halcyon days of the early 1850s, she spent the rest of her life fighting economic hardship, land litigation, and the social displacement that turned many Californios into paupers. In 1869 Burton died of malarial fever, and after a decade's absence, María returned to California a widowed mother of two. On one occasion, she met privately with Varina Davis, the wife of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and they bad-mouthed the Yankees. While Burton earned a promotion to brevet brigadier general in the Union army, María grew skeptical of Yankee culture. With the Civil War looming, the Burtons headed east in 1859 and lived at various times in Rhode Island, New York, Washington, D.C., and Virginia.
The land grant would figure heavily in Ruiz de Burton's future misfortunes. Burton also bought Rancho Jamul, a large land grant tract granted to California's former Mexican governor, Pío Pico, in 1831.
They moved to San Diego in 1852, where Burton commanded the army post while María raised Nellie, their newborn daughter, and two years later gave birth to Henry Halleck. Their 1849 marriage symbolized the war's end and promised a happy merger between Yankees and Californios. He was an invading Yankee officer, a Protestant, and a leading American figure in California she was a member of a prominent Mexican family, a Catholic, and claimed a large Mexican land grant. Theirs was a romance that embodied the times. So Captain Burton transported over four hundred Mexicans to Monterey, California, and sixteen-year-old María was one of the travelers. When the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war, however, the United States decided to annex Alta California, along with the rest of the present-day Southwest, but leave Baja California to Mexico. Annexation into the Union appealed to Alta and Baja California's landed Mexican gentry, who created a regional identity as "Californios." After several skirmishes, the Baja Californians generally welcomed the occupying army, and in turn the captain of the invading New York Volunteers, Henry Stanton Burton of Connecticut, promised the Mexicans annexation and U.S. invasion of La Paz, Baja California, during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). LOVE AND WARīorn in 1832 in Loreto, Baja California, Mexico, to an elite family, María Amparo Ruiz witnessed the 1847 U.S. With The Squatter and the Don (1885) in particular, Ruiz de Burton narrates the historical and cultural contradictions of becoming Mexican American in the United States. Ruiz de Burton's critique of racism in the United States prefigures contemporary Chicano/Chicana writings, but her novels also emphasize the whiteness of upper-class Mexican Americans to distinguish them from mestizos and Native or African Americans. Yet her genteel historical romances trouble Mexican American literary history, which maintains that folktales and corridos (ballads) mark Chicano/Chicana literature's working-class origins. Her writings, which include a play based on Don Quixote, copious letters, and legal briefs written to protect her California land claims, debunk nineteenth-century representations of Mexican Americans as monolingual Spanish speakers at best and illiterate at worst. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832–1895) was the first female Mexican American writer to publish two novels in English in the United States, and while they both feature romances between Mexicans and Americans, her narratives denounce U.S.
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