author
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
1832–1895
A sharp, pioneering voice in 19th-century American literature, she wrote novels that bring the upheaval of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands to life. Her work mixes satire, politics, and social observation in ways that still feel fresh.
1 Audiobook
The Squatter and the Don A Novel Descriptive of Contemporary Occurrences in California
by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
About the author
Born in Loreto, Baja California, in 1832, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton lived through the aftermath of the Mexican-American War and the dramatic changes that followed in California. Sources consistently describe her as a Californio writer and one of the earliest Mexican American authors to publish fiction in English.
She is best known for the novels Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don, works that explore race, class, land rights, and power in 19th-century America. Her writing is often noted for its wit and for the way it captures the perspective of Californios navigating conquest, displacement, and life in the United States.
Ruiz de Burton died in 1895, but her reputation has grown over time as readers and scholars have returned to her work. Today she is widely remembered as a pioneering Latina author whose fiction offers an important window into American history and culture.