Marissa K. López
No es la raza Mexicana diferente de la Americana para que se crea que solo en nuestro cuerpo se reconcentran las enfermedades.
(The Mexican race is not different from the American race and one should not think that disease takes hold in only our bodies.)
—Mexican Laborers’ Petition to the Mexican Consul in the United States1
A quarter of the way into María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don (1885), the titular Don, Mariano Alamar, makes a business proposal to a gathering of squatters who have settled on his land. When he is met with resistance and scorn, “Don Mariano reddened with a thrill of annoyance.”2 A few pages later, his youngest daughter, Mercedes, meets the son of one of these squatters, Clarence Darrell, whom she will later marry. Clarence and Mercedes feel a strong mutual attraction, and Mercedes’ “face was suffused with burning blushes” (93). Clarence saves his blushes for Mercedes’ father. He “blushed with pleasure and bowed” when Don Mariano compliments his combination of fine feeling and business sense (98). Clarence can, however, muster romantic changes of complexion. Faced with a competitor for Mercedes’ affection—a Mr. Selden, who blushes in response to Mercedes’ blushes in a San Francisco theater—“Clarence’s face also flushed, and then turned pale” (145). Clarence’s passion comes in part from his father, William, who “felt the hot blush come to his face” when he defends Don Mariano toward the end of the novel (271). The protagonists in The Squatter and the Don, as evidenced by these examples, do a significant amount of blushing.
The novel understands this blushing as an index of refined sentiment, a symbol of that which sets Squatter’s protagonists apart from the railroad monopolies wreaking havoc on the social and geographic terrain of late-nineteenth-century California, companies like the Central Pacific, which one character describes as having “no soul to feel responsibility, no heart for human pity, no face for manly blush” (Squatter 296). Blushing also, as John González notes, is a way for the novel to assert the whiteness of its protagonists.3 A brown face does not register a blush quite as spectacularly as a white face. Decades after The Squatter and the Don was first published, however, brown faces became just as much casualties of the “soulless, heartless, shameless monster” that was the Central Pacific as the blushing faces of the Alamares and their allies (Squatter 296).
In June 1916, for example, a Mexican laborer living in a camp for railroad workers in Palmdale, California, came down with a case of typhus. This caused no small amount of anxiety in the city, spurring a rash of hygiene education programs aimed at the laborers and providing ammunition to those arguing for tighter controls on Mexican immigration.4 As several of the laborers noted, however, in a petition to the Mexican consul from which I take my epigraph, disease is not a feature endemic to Mexican bodies at the exclusion of Anglo Americans. Poor sanitation and squalid living conditions, rather than a genetic tendency toward slovenliness, rendered the Mexicans in Palmdale more vulnerable to typhus, the laborers argued. These petitioners were seeking help ameliorating the situation in the camp, while also objecting to the ways in which public health programs had taken control of the sociopolitical meaning of mexicanidad. To be Mexican, at this moment in Palmdale, was to be diseased.
Both these laborers and the genteel Mexicans in Squatter leverage their corporeality. While the rail workers assert their material bodies as evidence of their humanity, Squatter’s investment in the body relies on the immaterial, on the Mexican body’s access to the abstractions of whiteness, its ability to register emotion rather than manifest physical feeling. These two Mexican communities are separated by time and class, but taken together they evoke the story of what the railroad’s arrival means for Mexicans in California over the course of a generation spanning the turn of the last century: First, the railroad divests the landed Mexican gentry of Alta California of their material wealth, then it creates a public image of Mexicans as diseased, dirty, and displaced. That divestment and public transformation is part of the tale Squatter is telling. The novel understands itself, as did its contemporary reviewers, as an anti-rail diatribe and a defense of Mexican whiteness. Even as it asserts the whiteness of its central characters, however, Squatter is conscious on some level of their impending racialization. Those instances where racial distinctions become fuzzy make visible the ebb and flow of a range of artificial categories seen as grounded in the seemingly incontrovertible truths of the human body; the differences between emotion and physical feeling, for instance, or technology and the human begin to seem tenuous as well over the course of the novel.
These binaries begin to unravel in a series of overlapping domains: The novel is consciously interested in rail as a social institution, but its discussion of actual trains is much more evocative; Ruiz de Burton wants her readers to take emotion seriously as political argument, and yet her treatment of illness and physical deformity is much more striking; and finally, the novel is heavily invested in presenting the Alamares as white but instead documents the evolution of something we might call Mexican feeling. Trains, feelings, and bodies intersect in San Diego, where much of Squatter’s action is set, and which comes to serve in the novel as a kind of affective field that has a profound influence on these three domains. San Diego’s putative healing qualities function as an ironic backdrop to the disintegration and reformation of the binaries the novel is so invested in maintaining.
The Squatter and the Don thus relies on a set of seeming contradictions that hinge on a paradox of the human body: It appears self-contained but actually exists symbiotically with its natural and mechanical environment. In this interconnection, about which Squatter seems not explicitly aware, we might see the novel as aesthetically dismodern rather than sentimental, realist, or even modern, as scholars have read it. By dismodern I mean to invoke Lennard Davis’s articulation of the term as a critique of postmodernity. The postmodern subject, Davis argues, is a “ruse to disguise the hegemony of normalcy.”5 That is, according to Davis, postmodern subjectivity assumes the equality of various subjectivities as deviations from a universal norm; the fundamental political problem, Davis argues, is not one of inequality, but the assumption of a norm from which there is a standard deviation. Dismodernism asserts “that difference is what all of us have in common.” Rather than postmodernism’s focus on cultural difference, Davis argues for fundamental physical difference and “dysfunction,” and for “dependence, not individual independence” as an ethical foundation.6
The stakes of this argument for Davis lie in the replacement of a Foucauldian binary of docility and power with one of “impairment and normalcy.” Davis is deeply engaged with postmodernism’s impact on our social, political, and physical futures; but dismodernity offers a way of looking backward as well as forward. In reading the physical body as the site where the political and the aesthetic converge, Davis is motivated by an understanding of the modern and the postmodern as retreats from the political. Ramón Saldívar positions himself against such readings of the modern in The Borderlands of Culture, his intellectual biography of Américo Paredes. Saldívar frames the U.S.–Mexico borderlands as a site where European and Pan-American ideas of modernity come together, producing an “alternative version of modernity, which [Saldívar] describe[s] as a ‘subaltern modernity’” that gives the lie to critiques of modernism as apolitical and ahistorical.7
Both Davis and Saldívar deploy the body—disabled and racialized, respectively—as critical interventions into dialogues about aesthetics and identity. Both understand the ways in which modernity relies on an idea of a subaltern subject incompletely recuperated by the postmodern. Saldívar locates this phenomenon solidly in the Americas, in the border region between the United States and Mexico, specifically. Davis’s dismodernity provides an additional way to articulate those ideas and to bring racial and ethnic alterity into dialogue with other modes of physical difference, a dialogue that productively frames The Squatter and the Don, which comes at the cusp of the modern age. There Ruiz de Burton grapples with capitalism’s transformation of the human and its reworking of physical space. Race and ethnicity factor deeply and constitutively into Squatter’s analyses, though the novel is read mainly as an avoidance of race or a celebration of whiteness. For scholars of nineteenth-century Latina/o literature, then, dismodernity and the Latina/o modern make possible a reading of The Squatter and the Don in which the vagaries of the human body are understood as national allegory that transcends Ruiz de Burton’s limited intentions.
Ruiz de Burton intended, as her subtitle makes clear, for Squatter to be “A Novel Descriptive of Contemporary Occurrences in California,” a novel, in other words, about the railroad and the aftermath of the U.S.–Mexico War. Scholars have tended to focus on the latter at the expense of the former. Such treatments usually center on the United States’ failure to live up to the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.–Mexico War of 1846–48 and guaranteed the property rights of Mexican landowners who chose to remain in the newly ceded territory. The creation of the Land Commission in 1851 to adjudicate disputed grants and the subsequent divestment of rancheros like Ruiz de Burton and the characters she portrays in her novel are where chicanidad is often thought to begin. For Squatter’s narrator, however, that divestment is inextricable from the railroad’s arrival in California. Not long after taking land from the “Spanish people,” observes the narrator, on the grounds that so much should not belong to so few, “this same congress mind you, goes to work and gives to railroad companies millions upon millions of acres of land” (163). Though the narrator’s umbrage is rooted in the perceived wrong done to Mexican Americans, the complaint participates in the broader anti-rail feeling that swept late-nineteenth-century California.
Rail, then, is a cornerstone of Squatter’s Mexican American concerns, but it is also how the narrator inserts those concerns into a national conversation, and many people were talking about trains when Ruiz de Burton was writing. The railroad, one of the most significant technological innovations of the nineteenth century, was a prominent feature of the era’s cultural production. Trains, observes Amy Richter, are everywhere in nineteenth-century U.S. fiction, serving as shorthand for technical and corporate innovation, social diversity, and national integration, especially after the Civil War.8 In “To a Locomotive in Winter” (1892), for example, Walt Whitman praised a train’s “black cylindric body” and “long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple” as the “type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent.”9 For Whitman a train was a “fierce-throated beauty,” but writing earlier in the century, Nathaniel Hawthorne approached Clifford and Hepzibah’s train ride in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) more abstractly, as Clifford opines that the train can “spiritualize travel” (227). Feeling themselves “drawn into the great current of life itself” (223), the siblings observe what the narrator refers to as “the usual interior life of the railroad” (224), which strikes them as “life itself” (225).10
Whitman and Hawthorne, as were many authors, are taken with the technical wonder of the train and the social diversity it invites as travelers mingle in the cars and are ferried from one place to another. Rail narratives were not always so sanguine, however. Richter notes that although trains had the much-promoted potential to erase social and sectional divisions, their ability to collapse the distance between places and people often highlighted dissent and social anxieties of the period (15). Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) is an obvious example. In The Gilded Age (1873), as well, Mark Twain and Charles Warner take aim at rail-inspired land speculation and fraud as well as the unchecked power of rail corporations, themes also at the heart of William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).11 The social anxieties expressed in railroad narratives centered on racial issues, however, just as often as they did on corporate greed.
While trains were indeed a means of integrating the nation—think of the trains that bring Caroline Meeber into Chicago and New York in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), or even the trains that bring Mercedes Alamar, in Squatter, to the East Coast vacation homes of her sister’s in-laws—they were also often a site of segregation. Harriet Jacobs’s experience purchasing tickets from Philadelphia to New York in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) illustrates this neatly when she discovers that first-class train tickets “could not be had for any money” because “colored people” are barred from first class. “This was the first chill to my enthusiasm about the free states,” she writes.12 Thirty years later, in A Voice from the South (1892), Anna Julia Cooper recounts similar exclusions.13
Segregation, corporate angst, and technological wonder characterize the bulk of nineteenth-century railroad fiction. This diverse array of texts can also be broadly described as concerned, like Squatter, with the changing nature of life in the United States in the wake of new relationships between corporations and citizens. Squatter’s narrator is as outraged as those of The Octopus and The Gilded Age over the railroad monopolies’ rapacious greed, yet the narrator remains aloof from the class and race concerns of writers like Jacobs and Cooper. Moreover, Squatter’s narrator is not at all seduced by the “rumble and the tumult” of the open cars in which Clifford and Hepzibah ride (Hawthorne 225). When the characters in Squatter board trains, they enter private cars that mirror the comforts of home and keep them paradoxically separate from the rest of the train-riding public into which they wish to assimilate.
Squatter’s interest in rail lies less with individual characters’ interactions with trains and more with the railroad corporation as a social institution whose relationship with California, as William Deverell recounts, was rather contentious. Opposition to the railroad was a defining feature of California politics, particularly in the 1870s, when Squatter is set, and when tensions reach such a pitch as to force a constitutional convention in the state in the hopes of reigning in rail’s extensive influence. The state initially welcomed the railroad with little opposition as a modernizing force for good, but it turned out to be a difficult force to reckon with. Apart from the railroad’s noise, speed, and occasional dangers, California residents soon began to realize the cost of harboring such a huge corporate giant as the Central Pacific. The recognition was slow, however, because the Central Pacific Railroad was really the first thing like itself in the United States: a massive, all-encompassing, hugely influential entity. The Central Pacific railroad fundamentally and irrevocably altered California’s political landscape just as surely as the train forever changed time, space, and subjectivity.
Though early opposition to the railroad was voiced by competing transportation interests—such as steamship and other freight and cargo lines like Wells Fargo—when the railroad failed to deliver on its utopian promises to the people of California, public opinion began to turn. Railroad opponents, however, constituted a multifaceted majority that was often at odds with itself. “Individuals might agree that there was a railroad problem,” writes Deverell, “but disagreed on just exactly what this supposedly singular problem looked like.”14 The “problem” had much to do with the fact that by the late 1870s the Central Pacific was California’s largest landowner, employer, and company. When the constitutional convention failed to regulate rail adequately, the economic downturn of the “terrible seventies” created a traumatized class of working poor who gravitated toward the xenophobic populism of Dennis Kearney and the Workingmen’s Party.15
Though Squatter’s genteel characters and narrator are economic victims just as much as Kearney’s followers, neither the party nor Kearney appears in the novel. Squatter does, however, express anger over the very same events that rallied Kearney’s followers, such as the massacre at Mussel Slough and the revelation of the Colton letters.16 Adding insult to injury, the Central Pacific, in the words of Squatter’s narrator, “refuse[d] to pay taxes on their gigantic property” (337), a reference to their claim that taxes imposed upon them by the new constitution were illegal.17
Squatter, as contemporary reviewers received it, thus actively participates in the statewide anti-rail dialog, despite refusing a connection to the working classes of California. The San Francisco Chronicle referred to it as an “anti-monopoly novel,” and The Daily Examiner noted that in addition to its being about the violations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Squatter treated “the injury which San Diego and the lower coast counties suffered by the absorption of the Texas Pacific into the Southern Pacific, and the general demoralization . . . caused by the introduction of the railroad monopoly as a factor in the political affairs of this State and Coast.”18 The Daily Alta’s reviewer was less sympathetic, complaining that “the fervid eloquence of the author is reserved to depict the baleful effect which the non-construction of the Texas Pacific Railroad has had upon Southern California” and suggesting that “expound[ing] some pet views regarding what ought to be the morality of business” is the novel’s main objective.19
True, the narrator does not withhold opinions about business. After all, in the end San Diego and its inhabitants are brought to ruin by the railroad, the inhuman business at Squatter’s heart. Why, however, does the narrator harbor such hatred for the railroad, and does this hatred serve as nothing more in the novel than a vehicle by which the narrator can express “pet views” about capitalism’s purported amorality? Gentlemanly Clarence, who mixes business, pleasure, and personal relationships, is presented in contradistinction to the impersonal, unfeeling Central Pacific, which the narrator blames for San Diego’s financial ruin, but such blame seems unfounded. “In our opinion,” writes The Daily Alta, “this [holding the railroad responsible for San Diego’s collapse] is hardly a fair deduction, however much distress might have befallen upon the victims of reckless speculation.”20 The Daily Alta does have a point; by 1885 the Atchison and Topeka railway had arrived in southern California and the population in Los Angeles was steadily growing as rail networks increased throughout the decade.21 There was enough rail activity in and around San Diego by the late 1880s to make the narrator’s vehemence, and James Mechlin’s eventual suicide, seem excessive.
The motivating energy behind the novel’s disquisitions on rail’s excesses comes not from the business of rail but from the physical experience of riding trains, the emotional and social dislocations of which Squatter’s narrator glosses over. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch and many others have observed, trains make possible wholly novel conceptions of the self as an object incorporated into a larger system of motion, of space as a thing easily traversed and overcome, and of landscape as simultaneously static and moving.22 In the late nineteenth century, trains were the consummate symbol of a modernity that was fast eroding the individual’s significance. As Mark Seltzer notes, rail travel produces an uncertain, anxious agency in that while one experiences motion on the train, it is motion caused by an external force. The individual is not responsible for his or her own movement, and it is a movement unlike any other: One can see that one is moving, but one does not feel it.23 Apprehending what Seltzer calls “panoramas in perspective” produces at once a sense of spatial mastery and subordination to motion.
Hawthorne, to illustrate, describes Clifford and Hepzibah’s simultaneous excitement and disorientation as they see “the world racing past them” on the train. A village vanishes “as if swallowed by an earthquake”; buildings are “set adrift” and the natural landscape is “unfixed from its agelong rest and moving at whirlwind speed” (224). The two travelers take this all in with a mixture of wonder, excitement, and fear. Mercedes Alamar, on the other hand, remains unfazed as she witnesses a similar display on her train ride from San Francisco to New York, a trip her mother has arranged in order to disrupt the budding romance between Mercedes and Clarence Darrell. After they part, on a train, Mercedes retires alone to her compartment, so overcome by grief that she does not notice what the narrator describes as a “flying wall of verdure,” trees engaging in “grotesque antics” for her entertainment, transforming “that portion of the Pacific slope into a flying gymnasium” (155). Clifford and Hepzibah marvel at the drifting landscape, but Mercedes does not even see the topsy-turvy foliage that does much more than simply float past. Writing about views from a moving train, Michel de Certeau describes the kind of immobile landscape appreciated by Clifford and Hepzibah. Trees and such “do not move. They have only the movement that is brought about from moment to moment by changes in perspective.”24 Like Seltzer, de Certeau emphasizes the estrangement from one’s own body provoked by the uncertainty about where movement is located, yet Mercedes resists that estrangement. She sees nothing, serene in her immobility while things move around her.
Resist is perhaps too grandiose a word for what can arguably also be read as Mercedes’ melodramatic teen angst. Yet her behavior in this scene is striking if we grant, as Mark Seltzer argues, that turn-of-the-century American culture is characterized by an acute awareness and anxiety over “the ‘discovery’ that bodies and persons are things that can be made” (3)—that is, of the mechanization of the body, the subordination of nature to industry. The railroad rendered human bodies as cogs in a machine, and I began this chapter by exemplifying how railroads were able to control the meaning and significance of Mexican bodies in particular. Squatter consciously works against rail’s growing influence with character monologues and narratorial asides denouncing the Central Pacific. This pushback, however, remains largely directed at the railroad as a social institution; trains as mechanical objects complicate things significantly. We can read Mercedes’ sensory apathy on the train as a way for the novel to resist the railroad—as a way, in other words, to posit human against machine. In other moments, however, human and machine come together quite productively in Squatter.
Mercedes might resist the train’s disorienting power, but in several instances the narrator uses machines to explain human emotion. In a fit of anger, for example, Clarence’s father, William, is described as “an overturned locomotive which had run off its track, and become hopelessly ditched” (216). The train that carries Clarence away from Mercedes is deployed similarly as emotional icon when the narrator calls it a “magician” that not only understands the lovers’ pain upon separation but also gives it voice with its whistle. Mercedes’ “heart gave accelerated throbs when she heard those shrieks . . . it seemed to her as if expressive of [Clarence’s] pain at being torn from her . . . the locomotive understood it all and shrieked to say he did so, because he knew that she too wished to shriek like that” (154). In these instances characters who take issue with the railroad are nevertheless intimately, and sentimentally, connected to trains.
The narrator sees those trains, as does Hawthorne, as almost spiritual. Overwhelmed by the changes heralded by trains’ speed and power, Clifford, in The House of the Seven Gables, thinks, “the world is growing too ethereal and spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer.” In his mind, trains, like mesmerism, embody electric energy: “the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence.” All three—trains, electricity, mesmerism—have rendered, in his opinion, “the world of matter a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time” (230). This nerve, according to Clifford, is the telegraph, which takes thoughts from people’s heads, like mesmerism, and transports them across space and time, collapsing distance and materializing the abstract, like the train. Squatter’s narrator makes a similar connection in a description of Mercedes’ heart “beat[ing] with telegraphic velocity” (262) when she is separated from Clarence again later in the novel. Mercedes might be numb to the train’s power, but she embodies a sister technology that, in Hawthorne’s rendering at least, expresses the train’s mystical reach.
Calling Mercedes’ heart “telegraphic” performs the anxieties and preoccupations Seltzer describes and reveals an even deeper conflict about whether a clear distinction between bodies and machines can be made. Squatter asserts that emotion makes the difference between human and machine, and it understands emotion as distinct from the kinds of physical feelings the Palmdale laborers experienced during their bouts with typhus. The physical body, in other words, plays a second, racialized fiddle to the primacy of emotion, understood in the novel as the purview of whiteness. This distinction the novel makes is a false one, however. Physical and emotional feelings are as inextricable as human and machine, and the boundaries between them all are as porous as those between Native, Anglo, and Mexican. Emotions, moreover, much as the novel understands them as separate from physical feeling, can be read as traces of the political work performed by the sick and disabled body in Squatter.
The body in Squatter, as a repository of human feeling, is a hedge against a modernity characterized by an unfeeling rationalism that pervades economic and racial thought. The novel cannot maintain that distinction between human and machine, however, which is also theoretically suspect. Sentimentality is not the opposite of the modern, and human emotion might well be the product of the very capitalism with which Squatter’s narrator takes issue. The notion of a purely rational modernity has been challenged by theorists such as Eva Illouz, for example, who argues for the existence of an “emotional capitalism” as the process by which economic and emotional relationships define and shape each other. Excavating modernism’s “emotionality” changes “standard analyses of what constitutes modern selfhood and identity,” Illouz argues.25 In Squatter, excavating the imagery of trains helps articulate the importance of the body, and subsequently of race, in the novel. At Squatter’s core are questions not just about the railroad’s impact on California politics and culture but also about the relationship between trains and people. Every appearance of trains in the novel is an occasion to wonder how the train redefines the human, and what difference mexicanidad makes. How, in other words, is the Mexican body articulated in the exchanges between people, trains, and railroads in The Squatter and the Don?
Critical discussions of the body in Squatter have been held largely in sentimental terms. They have, moreover, used the linkages between whiteness and feeling, forged by such canonical sentimental authors as Helen Hunt Jackson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to argue against a reading of Squatter as a resistant text, a turn that David Luis-Brown complicates in Waves of Decolonization. Sentimentalism, as Luis-Brown succinctly defines it, “comprises a cluster of tactics by which writers effect reform by representing the public sphere in terms of domestic tropes—emotions, love, and family—and thereby claim moral authority through representations of areas of life that were commonly construed as irrelevant to politic[s].”26 Critics have linked the emergence of sentimental fiction with the consolidation of English and North American middle classes, and since the 1990s scholars have been concerned to show the imperial implications of these domestic concerns.
Long dominated by the debate, epitomized in the work of Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins, concerning whether sentimentality degraded a strong, idealistic American culture, or encouraged deeper social engagement, later work on sentimentalism sought to push the boundaries of the field beyond the private home and printed text.27 In States of Sympathy (1997), for example, Elizabeth Barnes reads the affect of eighteenth-century fiction as foundational to American political philosophy. Similarly, Laura Wexler’s Tender Violence (2000) argued that women’s photography at the turn of the last century articulated a domestic vision imbricated in the period’s imperial racism. Luis-Brown’s work keeps pace with this critical turn toward linking affect with imperialism, but he notes that while sentimentalism was “ideally suited to representations of populations victimized by empire” (36), the form could also be turned against imperial ends by writers of color who sought to instantiate a non-Anglo, feeling subjectivity.
Though Luis-Brown calls sentimentalism a “highly protean form” (47) whose politics shift with the social location of its author, a key assumption with which he must contend, and which Squatter blithely reinforces, is that the capacity to feel is congruent only with whiteness. Thus, sympathetic as he is to Ruiz de Burton’s project, Luis-Brown, along with others who have written about it, reads Squatter as complicit with, rather than resistant to, Anglo American imperial racism. The arguments of David Luis-Brown, John González, Jesse Alemán, and others that Squatter’s sentimental turn is meant to align the Alamar family with Anglo gentility—to reify, rather than unsettle, whiteness—are not untrue, but these arguments are made wholly within the confines of the sentimental, and a playful, tongue-in-cheek tone lurks beneath the surface of the novel’s dalliance with it as well as with the tidy resolutions of the historical romance, its sister form. “Really, I think our romance is spoiled,” jokes Mercedes’ brother-in-law George after Clarence and Mercedes have overcome Doña Josefa’s objection to their relationship. “It would have been so fine—like a dime novel—to have carried you off bodily,” George quips, playfully diffusing the melodramatic potential of the scene (132).
The Squatter and the Don thus keeps the sentimental at arms length, simultaneously seeking access to its white privilege while conceiving itself as generically distinct in key ways. The reader is meant to take Squatter seriously. George’s comments make that plain, as does Mercedes’ reading material. When Mercedes, flustered by her feelings for Clarence, hides behind her book, her sister Carlota says that her “novel must be very interesting.” Madame Halier, Mercedes’ tutor, retorts, “It is not a novel—it is French history” (113). Squatter, in its very subtitle, self-consciously treads the line between literature and history. And feelings, it further asserts, are not to be trifled with; they are the stuff of high-minded texts.
All of which begs the question: What work is the body doing in Squatter if we are to consider it beyond the confines of the sentimental? As both John González and Jesse Alemán have noted, the novel deploys the body—specifically, as González argues, the body’s ability to blush—in order to assert the Alamares’ whiteness, but the novel’s assertions are fraught and not entirely successful. Just as the binary of human and machine is a false one, so too is the division between the races porous in Squatter. For example, Alamar patriarch Don Mariano’s reference to “we, the natives of California, the Spano-Americans” is meant to erase the actual native presence in California, not to identify the Alamares as Native American. In the same conversation, however, he ventriloquizes popular beliefs about the Mexican ranchers as “lazy, thriftless, ignorant natives” who own too much land (162). Don Mariano’s speech is a moment where the narrative almost becomes conscious of Mexican American racialization: His self-conception of “native” is giving way to Anglo readings of Mexican Americans, which are just as derogatory and problematic as the novel’s views of Native Americans. In a similar moment of dawning consciousness, Victoriano, Mariano’s son, notices that the family cows look “just like ourselves, the poor natives” as they are being led to slaughter (208).
In these moments Squatter works against itself as the characters articulate the novel’s awareness of emerging racial hierarchies even as the narrator struggles to assert their whiteness. Don Mariano and his son have emotions about the political realities that disempower them, emotions meant to set them apart from the racialized, laboring classes. If, however, as Melanie Dawson argues in her reading of Squatter as a realist novel, “sympathy can be a modern condition . . . that [confronts] the cultural inequities that the novel addresses,” then emotions can, as Eva Illouz asserts, be a function of capital in the same way that race is.28
Granting that emoting bodies are constructed by capital just as much as laboring bodies troubles Squatter’s desire to use the sentimental body as a defense against an encroaching modernity represented by the railroad. There is, however, a kind of knowledge articulated in the body that the corporation (despite the obvious corporeal pun) cannot access. Squatter’s protagonists may experience emotions that correspond to the novel’s conscious political arguments, but the bodies in this novel feel things that the novel cannot fully articulate. In the cataloging of the physical feelings and conditions of Squatter’s characters, their bodies emerge as affective registers of the changing political climate of late-nineteenth-century California.
Squatter’s use of physical health as a political metaphor is, of course, a sentimental convention. When, for example, Mercedes tells George and Clarence, “I dislike wines” (133), she speaks the language of temperance activists that pervades late-nineteenth-century U.S. fiction, as does Elvira, who asserts that when “we women have suffrage . . . we will make things uncomfortable for inebriates and tobacco smokers” (141). “Life,” Clarence’s father observes, moreover, “is not worth living without health” (71). As Jennifer Tuttle notes, the arc of Squatter’s plot can be understood as beginning in an idyll of good health, then descending into despair and illness caused in no small part by the arrival of Anglo settlers (71).29 The Alamar and Mechlin families are particularly afflicted by the political headaches the squatters introduce. James Mechlin’s “very fine nervous organization ill-fitted him for the rough contact” of settlers (78), and, the narrator explains, “it was a noted fact, well recognized by the two families, that misfortunes made them all more or less physically ill” (315). Beneath these conventional surface concerns, however, considerations of race, nation, and physical health come together in a complex network on display in Clarence’s bout with typhus, which he contracts in Yuma, Arizona, after his forced separation from Mercedes (264). His illness symbolizes his forlorn, lovesick state, but it also construes him as a Mexican ally.
As illustrated by the Palmdale laborers, in the early twentieth century typhus was seen as a Mexican disease in the southwestern United States. As Alexandra Stern has documented, however, as early as the 1890s Mexico had instituted typhus quarantine and fumigation sites along its border with the United States, twenty years before the United States began taking such measures.30 Mexico, in other words, saw typhus as a threat from the north, a belief expressed in Clarence’s contracting the disease in Arizona. Typhus helps depict Clarence as a romantic hero, but it also unearths a host of thorny political questions linked to disease, nation, and the racialized body. Clarence’s illness, like his later travels through the “majestic ruins” of Mexico (284), allows him to cross physical and metaphysical borders of illness, fear, debilitation, and eventual union with Mercedes; it is the eye of the storm separating order from chaos in the novel, sickness from health, Mexican from Anglo. In contrast to this abstract, turbulent zone of transformative disease, Ruiz de Burton posits the very concrete space of San Diego as a healthy, regulating environment framing the novel’s concerns about health, racial integration, and the relationship between human and machine.
San Diego’s “salubrious air” (67) and “genial climate” (68) promote healthy living, as do its trees, which are “the healthiest in the world.” The land is naturally well drained—“You never hear of any malarial fevers in San Diego”—and will be even more so, residents hope, when money earned from the railroad will finance sewers (70). San Diego is the kind of place, contends Squatter’s narrator, where a man like James Mechlin, who “had lost his health” (67), can recover it. San Diego is also the kind of place that can redeem a squatter like Clarence’s father, William. Though he comes to settle on the Alamar rancho along with Gasbang and Matthews, his former employees, William “felt no sympathy, no liking for any of those men” (69). The narrator distinguishes him early on by identifying him with the refined Mechlins and Alamares as one who experiences sympathy. Further, just as James Mechlin’s illness is caused by delicate nerves, William is similarly sensitive. Startled by a rifle shot soon after arriving in San Diego, he says, lightheartedly, “I didn’t know I had nerves. I believe that is what women call it” (71). William even blushes “the blush of remorseful shame” (271) later in the novel when he realizes his misconduct.
San Diego’s “salubrious air” has the power to restore James Mechlin’s physical health and to inspire William to embody the force of his fine feelings when, for example, he feels “a pang shoot through his heart” watching George play with his (George’s) infant son (270). William also recognizes his own frailty and dependency when Gabriel binds him in his lazo during an argument. The full-body bruise William suffers is nothing compared with the emotional pain he suffers from the rift the argument causes between him and his family. William’s recognizing the errors of his squatting ways and the equality of Mexican and Anglo Americans is predicated on his own physical and emotional healing. Both James Mechlin and Wiliam Darrell are thwarted along this San Diego road to bodily and mental health, however, by the disease of Anglo settlement.
It is not, however, entirely fair to blame “Anglo” settlement for the deterioration of health in Squatter. The Mechlins and the Darrells are Anglo American, after all. The end of the U.S.–Mexico War does open the gate to Anglo immigrants to California, but the distinction made in Squatter is more one of class than race. The novel works, in fact, to unite squatters and Mexican Californians against a common enemy that renders them, according to Don Mariano, “all sufferers, victims of a defective legislation and subverted moral principles” (74). This toxic, political amorality is represented in the novel by the Anglo settlers who, paradoxically, have the most to say about health.
When William first arrives in San Diego, he is greeted by Gasbang and Matthews, his former employees, who have invited him to settle with them on the Alamar rancho. Gasbang’s “broad, vulgar face . . . compressed, thin, bloodless lips, his small, pale, restless eyes and flat nose” suggest the low nature revealed as the plot unfolds. “Matthews’ visage was equally noticeable for its ugliness,” opines the narrator (69), and at the end of the novel he has gone “back to his old love of whisky . . . burning poison circulated in his veins,” and his sister has him committed to an insane asylum (269). Yet it is through the decidedly unhealthy Gasbang and Matthews that the reader learns about most of San Diego’s naturally sanitary drainage and healthful climate.
Such unreliable promoters as Gasbang and Matthews cast doubt on San Diego’s long-term health. While James Mechlin recovered his nerves, and William Darrell had an emotional epiphany there, it seems as soon as San Diego’s health becomes an object for reflection, or commodification, it evaporates. As Squatter’s plot unfolds, each character’s health begins to deteriorate and health becomes an illusion, an ideal toward which the characters strive. James Mechlin, for example, falls ill before the start of the novel, and the reader first encounters him on an upswing. “[Y]ou were sick but now you are well. Don’t be lazy,” his wife chides in his first scene (66). Disappointment after disappointment drives him to suicide at novel’s end, however (305). Likewise, the “cold in his lungs” (280) that Don Mariano catches on a cattle drive evolves into a “congestive chill” (300) that eventually kills him (304).
More significant than the characters who die are those who recover, albeit unsteadily. Mercedes, for example, suffers through two nervous fevers before marrying Clarence. Clarence, meanwhile, feels “sick in mind and body . . . thoroughly heartsick” (260) at having to leave Mercedes and is struck with a case of typhoid fever so serious that “he lay on a sick bed, delirious with a raging fever that seemed to be drying the very fountain of his young life” (267). That Clarence and Mercedes emerge from illness while James and Don Mariano die suggests an analogy between the economic transformation of California and a devastating sickness, a glass through which the nation must pass darkly in order to be reconceived, or made anew.
Reading Clarence’s and Mercedes’ recoveries and their eventual marriage as the happy culmination of illness and California’s transition to U.S. rule is overly optimistic, however. Don Mariano’s son Gabriel’s fall offers the narrator a chance to make that perfectly clear. Forced to work as a manual laborer, Gabriel tumbles off a ladder while carrying bricks, a fall in which “the entire history of the native Californians of Spanish descent was epitomized” (325). Gabriel, near death, physically and spiritually broken, embodies the history of Mexican California. While California’s transformation offers Clarence and Mercedes a nominally happy ending, the novel, through bodily descriptions of other characters, paints the advent of the United States as a disabling tragedy, not unlike the trials of Little Eva in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.31
Even though Clarence and Mercedes are reunited at novel’s end, and the Alamar family is saved from financial ruin by Clarence’s wealth, a note of sadness pervades the conclusion. The characters must still grapple with the deaths of Don Mariano and James Mechlin, and Doña Josefa, Mercedes’ mother, reflects, from a position of relative comfort, on what the railroad has wrought. “Her husband would have been alive, and Mr. Mechlin, also, and her sons would not have been driven to poverty and distress, and perhaps lost their health forever” if the railroad “had not blighted San Diego’s prosperity” (335). The railroad indirectly creates an absence, through the death and disablement of key characters, that underpins the new reality the characters must forge for themselves as they move into the twentieth century.
Squatter renders the absence, or loss, caused by the railroad in starkly physical terms. The nervous condition afflicting James Mechlin at the beginning of the novel seems almost quaint when compared with the self-inflicted rifle wound that ends his life, as if the physical ailments of the past are somehow not adequate to capture the enormity of devastation in postwar, post-rail California. James’s son, George, also takes a bullet, and though his wound is not fatal, it results in a lifelong limp, a danger “to him far more terrible than death” (274). George’s wound, unlike his father’s, is not self-inflicted. Shot by Matthews, the alcoholic squatter committed to an insane asylum by his sister, George, like Victoriano, will forever bear the physical scars of California’s transformed landscape. Tano’s legs go mysteriously numb on the same cattle drive that corrupted his father’s health. The condition, which brings occasional “attacks more or less serious of the same lameness which deprived him of the use of his limbs,” is chronic and incurable (285).
George and Tano, the afflicted sons of the dead patriarchs James and Don Mariano, represent a new, physically compromised generation: the future of California. Despite the twinge of physical nostalgia here, and the suggestion that a previously intact body now lies defeated on the train tracks, death and dismemberment seem woven into the historical fabric of the United States when Mercedes, Elvira, and their East Coast traveling party encounter a group of veterans as they tour the nation’s capital. The “five or six old men with very white beards” walked toward the group “as if weakened by sickness; one walked on crutches and one had lost an arm” (196). The party learns that the men are veterans of the U.S.–Mexico and U.S. Civil wars; they are at the Capitol petitioning for a pension that Congress is working hard to deny, despite knowing “how valuable were the services of those who went to Mexico to conquer a vast domain” (197). The very act of nation-making, these bodies suggests, involves physical destruction. Though the characters in Squatter experience emotions of despair over Mexico’s physical compromising to the United States, their physical trajectories undercut this, indicating that the nation is an always already imperfect body, predicated on frailty, built by maimed veterans, and moving forward through its wounded citizens.
The sick, broken, and dead bodies in The Squatter and the Don are meant to symbolize, without a doubt, the ways in which the railroad, monopoly capitalism, and Anglo racism eviscerated the Mexican Californian culture that had taken root through the first half of the nineteenth century. This formulation, however, rests on the assumption of an ideal, perfect body symbolizing national unity and political peace. Such a body does not exist in Squatter, even though the novel’s bodily logic seems to demand it. Furthermore, the veterans at the Capitol suggest the impossibility of such national bodies.
From the physical impairments in Squatter the reader deduces that nations comprise a series of faulty bodies, whose imperfections reference an intact wholeness, an impossible physical perfection, an ideal absence at the heart of the nation. Such perfection is the dream of a modernity represented in Squatter by the railroad and its regulation of space, time, distance, and bodies. In its corporate form, the railroad, according to James Mechlin, has “no heart for human pity” (296) and yet, in its corporeal form, the actual trains are all too human, as when they shriek in consort with Mercedes’ pain (154).
Squatter thus demands the possibility of physical perfection and mechanistic apathy—an intact Mexican California destroyed by the “heartless” railroad—while simultaneously proving both illusory. A dismodern aesthetic illuminates the ways in which Mexican and Anglo bodies are constituted in and through the trains cutting across the physical and abstract spaces in Squatter—San Diego and the corporate spaces of rail. Trains, feelings, and bodies are interdependent in the novel, not opposed to one another. In concert with ideas of a Latina/o, or subaltern, modernity, as articulated by Ramón Saldívar, dismodernity makes possible a metahistorical reading of the physical travails of Squatter’s characters. That is, rather than reading Mariano’s death or Tano’s crippling as Mexican American political grievance of limited scope and impact, we can read Squatter’s broken bodies and sympathetic machines as arguments about the frailty of nations. In the Latino nineteenth century, then, through this reading of Ruiz de Burton, we begin to see other stories, other frameworks emerging alongside the stories of racial oppression and opposition we’ve come to anticipate. We see the human body, the material world, capital, the natural world, and social institutions like companies and nations all taking shape and expanding simultaneously. They appear as concentric circles, or expanding networks wherein the body, as Squatter argues, is always already imperfect, and the nations that contain them are always already composite, multiform, and interdependent.
1 Quoted in Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 67.
2 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, Second edition (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997), 87. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
3 John M. González, “The Whiteness of the Blush: The Cultural Politics of Racial Formation in The Squatter and the Don” in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives, ed. Amelia Maria de la Luz Montes and Anne Elizabeth Goldman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 153–68.
4 Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?, 61.
5 Lennard J. Davis, “The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category,” in The Disability Studies Reader, Second edition, ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 241.
6 Ibid., 239.
7 Ramón Saldívar, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 17.
8 Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 4.
9 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Library of America, 1992), 583.
10 Clifford and Hepzibah have fled after Judge Pyncheon, their wealthy cousin, dies mysteriously in their house. The novel centers on this house, haunted by history and restless ancestors. Hawthorne balances the lugubrious weight of the past in the novel with dazzling new technologies like photography and trains. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, 1851 (New York: Signet Classics, 1961). Hereafter cited parenthetically.
11 Inspired by the events at Mussel Slough, The Octopus concerns the land struggles between wheat farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and the fictional Pacific and Southwestern railroad. In The Gilded Age, Twain and Warner describe a small Missouri town’s desperate attempts to boost property values by attracting a railroad, while conversely, Howells shows how railroads use their monopoly power to drive down property values in The Rise of Silas Lapham when the titular Lapham’s financial problems are deepened by a railroad’s plans to build near his property.
12 Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, 1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 162.
13 Cooper’s collection of essays focuses on the education and empowerment of African American women as the key to racial uplift.
14 William Francis Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 16, 41.
15 Ibid., 42. Kearney, an Irish immigrant living in San Francisco, led a third-party worker’s movement in the late 1870s, the Workingmen’s Party of California, which “attacked the Chinese, vilified capitalists, and blasted alleged political corruption” (Deverell 43).
16 In May 1880, in a culmination of tensions that had been building for years, six people were killed when U.S. marshals came to evacuate settlers off land that belonged to the Southern Pacific (Deverell 57). The Colton letters, between David Colton, and Collis Huntington, made public by Colton’s widow, detailed lobbying and other efforts on the part of the Central Pacific throughout the 1870s, including questionable financial dealings and strong suggestions of bribery (Deverell 61).
17 The California Supreme Court eventually upheld the Central Pacific’s position, to the astonishment and anger of the state’s people (Deverell 62).
18 Quoted in Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001), 568, 565.
19 Quoted in Ibid., 567.
20 Conflicts, 567.
21 Deverell, 62.
22 A German cultural historian and sociologist, Schivelbusch detailed in The Railway Journey (1977) the emergence of an industrialized consciousness that takes shape around train travel and the regulation of space and time instigated by the railroad.
23 Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 17. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
24 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 112.
25 Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Modern Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Malden, 2007), 2.
26 David Luis-Brown, Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 37. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
27 In The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas argues that sentimental fiction written by women undermined the strong, cultural foundation Puritan thinkers had honed; eight years later Jane Tompkins, in Sensational Designs (1985), built on Douglas’s scholarship but argued that sentimentality fostered, rather than destabilized, an ethics of political responsibility.
28 Melanie V. Dawson, “Ruiz de Burton’s Emotional Landscape: Property and Feeling in The Squatter and the Don.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 63.1 (2008), 52.
29 Jennifer S. Tuttle, “The Symptoms of Conquest: Race, Class, and the Nervous Body in The Squatter and the Don,” in Montes and Goldman, 71.
30 Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 59.
31 Eva’s near-drowning and eventual untimely death signal the loss of U.S. innocence in the face of the peculiar institution of slavery.