María Amparo Ruiz de Burton

Abstract

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (b. 1832–d. 1895) was a Mexican-born woman who experienced the processes of Manifest Destiny and Reconstruction firsthand. At the end of the US-Mexico War (1848), Ruiz de Burton and her mother left their native Baja California for Monterey, Alta California, to reap the promised rewards of US citizenship. A descendant and friend of elite, landed, and politically prominent Mexicans and Californios, she technically married the enemy, Captain Henry S. Burton, a member of the US Army during the US-Mexico War who would go on to fight for the Union during the Civil War. This marriage enabled Ruiz de Burton to cross vast geographic and cultural terrains; within the span of a decade, she left California and interacted with both Republicans and Democrats in Rhode Island, New York, Washington, Delaware, and Virginia. Her movement in social circles that included such political figures as Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, Abraham Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis granted her a unique perspective of US-Mexico relations and what would soon become, with westward expansion and the transcontinental railroad, the socioeconomic displacement of her fellow Californios. An intelligent woman with a flair for writing and expressing political opinions, she was the first Mexican to publish fiction in English in the United States: her debut novel Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) was published anonymously by J.B. Lippincott & Co. of Philadelphia; her play Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts, Taken from Cervantes’ Novel of That Same Name (1876) was published by Carmany of San Francisco; and her second and final novel The Squatter and the Don (1885) was published under the pseudonym of C. Loyal by Samuel Carson & Co. of San Francisco. Since their republications as part of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project in the 1990s, the two novels have helped scholars mend a once-perceivable fissure in 19th-century literary history. They have also enhanced scholars’ understandings of Chicanx and Mexican American literature; US women’s literature; and US domestic, sentimental, and realist literature. The work offers an idiosyncratic historical outlook that is practically matchless. Ruiz de Burton experienced four major wars that radically altered the lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans—the Texas War of Independence, the US-Mexico War, the US Civil War, and the French Intervention in Mexico. Her fictional writings and posthumously published letters document the subsequent and fateful transformation of the United States and Mexico.