María Amparo Ruiz de Burton

Born in 1832 in Baja California, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton became one of the first Mexican American women to publish novels in English. She lived through the upheaval that followed the U.S.-Mexico War and drew on that world in her writing, turning questions of citizenship, land rights, class, and identity into vivid fiction.

She is best known for Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don, novels that examine prejudice, corruption, and the pressures placed on Californios in the United States. For many years her work was little known, but it has since been recovered and widely studied for the way it captures the social and political tensions of 19th-century America.

Ruiz de Burton died in 1895, but her reputation has grown steadily since then. Today she is often remembered as a pioneering voice whose novels opened an important space for Mexican American perspectives in American literature.