The Squatter and the Don

The Squater and the Don by María Ruiz de Burton is an excellent book that narrate the powerless of the Californios after the Americans take the Mexican land and signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Ruiz the Burton use a romantic story that reflect her own experiences to denunce the unjustices of the americans and the powerless of Californios. In this novel the principal characters are two families: the Alamares that represent the Don and the Darell that represent the Squatters. But then in the novel the Darrel passed to be settles because the Darells's son pay to Don Mariano the land. Ruiz de Burton try to reconciliate this two different nations when Darell's son get married with Mercedes (Don Mariano's daughter). I like a lot this novel because in contrast to her first novel Who Would Thought It? the women in this novel have more participation or voice through the novel. And I think that it is other Ruiz de Burton's strategy. She try to give voice to all the people that in other novels don't have voice. Other thing that I like a lot is the introduction by Rosaura Sanchez and Beatriz Pita. I think that they did a great job in analizing the novel through a contemporary point of view. I enjoy how they gave a bibliography of Ruiz the Burton and how we can see part of that in the novel. I also like how their specific explanatians and details help me to understand better the novel and connect things that are related. Inclusive they related the novel of Ruiz de Burton with the expansionism of the United States through the Caribean. I really recommend this novel to all the people that want to learn more about some of the concequences after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and learn more about California History.

I really enjoyed The Squatter and the Don, by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, because this novel does a wonderful job of depicting life in America after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. This novel follows two main families, the Darrells and the Alamares. The Darrell family is squatters which means they take over land in California from the native Californians. On the other hand, the Alamar family has lived in California for years. The novel also follows a love story between Clarence Darrell and Mercedes Alamar. The conflict between these two diverse families helps the reader better understand the reasons for living the lives these individuals do. After the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Americans adopted a new way of thinking entitled Manifest Destiny. This idea was to expand America from "sea to shining sea." The Homestead Act of 1854 went along with this philosophy and pushed Americans out west in the hopes of cheap land. This novel deals with the problems the native Californians face when east coast Americans push into their territories and ultimately destroy their lives. The Squatter and the Don gives a voice to the subalterns whom are the individuals which historically do not have voices in stories. It is important to get a perspective from the subalterns because they are not the people whose views are typically expressed in novels. Overall this is an interesting novel and I defiantly recommend reading it in order to get another perspective on the effects of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo on native Californians.

The Recovery Project of Arte Públio Press was instrumental in our contemporary knowledge of this book. Though published in 1885, the text had not been acknowledged. Sánchez's and Pita's introduction is very detailed, and provides a lot of contextual information that the Modern Library edition does not provide. Arte Público Press is the greatest publisher of US Latino literature, and the Press first brought Amparo Ruiz de Burton's text to the contemporary public. I wonder why it was necessary to bring out another edition, as the Modern Library did, given that Arte Público Press was able to contextualize its text within the area of US expansion, manifest destiny, and domesticity. The scholarship in the Arte Público Edition is first rate, as are all the introductions in these series. ARte Público also published, by Ruiz de Burton, _Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton_ and _Who Would Have Tought It_? both edited by Rosaura Sánchez and Beatric Pita. It makes no sense that anybody would buy the Modern Library edition, given the seriously rooted, hitorically discursive scholarhip of the Arte Público edition.

There are surprises in The Squatter and the Don which people in San Diego will miss as no one alive will be able to make the connections between the people Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton satirizes in her novel and their living counterparts. Events in the novel center around the demise of a project to connect San Diego to the East Coast by means of the Texas Pacific Railroad. Equal in importance was the usurpation by squatters with the help of the California state legislature and the judiciary of land that did not belong to them. The Squatter and the Don is steeped in indignation. The love story is subsidiary to the recital of abuses. It is the glue that keeps the reader interested in seeing how the skullduggery plays out. Supporting players are bad because of circumstances, weakness, and lack of moral principles.The Squatter and the Don can be seen as a Mexican-American parallel to Ramona , a novel that pillories Anglo-American mistreatment of California Indians.. The author claims her Mexican-American characters have much in common with their Anglo neighbors. They are ambitious, educated, hard working, and aware of new modes of thought . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herbert Spencer and Thomas Carlyle.. As the novel heads toward its conclusion, the author links the plight of Mexican-American rancheros to that of San Diego citizens. Both are affected by the chicanery of despoilers who profit from their misery. If one can get by some of the romantic syrup and the trite ending, The Squatter and the Don is a novel that touches on human and political corruption and anticipates the bold work of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.

The book is a 19th century romance novel which speaks about more than simply matters of the heart. Ruiz de Burton combines political narrative from the Spano-Californio point of view. Her other book is funnier but a bit scattered. jo