author
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton
1832–1895
A sharp, pioneering voice in 19th-century American literature, this Californio writer used fiction to explore race, power, and the upheaval that followed the U.S. takeover of Mexican lands. Her work is now widely recognized as an early and important contribution to Mexican American writing in English.
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, on July 3, 1832, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton lived through the political and cultural shocks of the Mexican-American War and its aftermath. She later married Henry S. Burton, a U.S. Army officer, and moved through both Mexican Californio and Anglo American worlds, an experience that deeply shaped her writing.
She is best known as the first Mexican-American woman to be published in English. Her major works include Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts (1876), and The Squatter and the Don (1885), a novel that examines land loss, legal injustice, and the pressures faced by Californios in the United States.
Today, Ruiz de Burton is remembered not just as a literary pioneer, but as a perceptive social critic whose fiction tackled questions of identity, class, and belonging with unusual directness. Although she died in Chicago on August 12, 1895, her writing continues to be rediscovered by readers interested in the layered history of the American West.