María Amparo Ruiz de Burton was the first writer of Mexican origin to write and publish English-language novels in the United States. Her life, correspondence, and work convey, often urgently, the tensions embedded in race, gender, and social position during the radical political and economic upheavals of the nineteenth century. Ruiz de Burton’s acute eye captured events on the grand scale and the smallest domestic level, though her observations were not necessarily free from bias and personal interpretation.
The daughter of Isabel Ruiz and Jesús Maitorena (also spelled Maytorena), María Amparo was born on July 3, 1831, in Baja California. No mention of Maitorena exists in the author’s personal records; the name she used was Ruiz, which carried significant social currency. María Amparo’s grandfather Don José Manuel Ruiz was instrumental in establishing missions in the Mexican frontier area and was governor of Baja California from 1822 to 1825, after Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821; his brother Captain Francisco María Ruiz was commander of the San Diego presidio, or military fort (1801–13 and 1817–18). Ruiz de Burton capitalized on this prestige, just as she did first as the wife of U.S. Army officer Henry Stanton Burton, who eventually became a brevetted brigadier general, and then later as his widow. Power—social, political, economic—was of constant concern to Ruiz de Burton; she deeply felt, and resisted, the lack of esteem held for individuals of Spanish and Mexican descent, as well as for women.
As shown in her numerous, lively letters to friends, Ruiz de Burton strongly identified with her region of birth and with the population known as californios, Mexican and Spanish landowners, usually wealthy, of Baja and Alta (Lower and Upper) California. When María Amparo was young, the Ruiz family followed the provincial capital in its move from Loreto to La Paz, where she lived until she was sixteen. The region was sparsely populated, mostly with ranchos and farms; culturally, the capital boasted little more than an open port. In 1847, María Amparo met Lieutenant Colonel Henry S. Burton, commander of an invading expedition of New York Volunteers. At this point in the Mexican-American War, the United States controlled Alta California and the region’s lower half looked likely to follow. Yet bajacalifornios resisted until shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and decreed Baja California would remain part of Mexico while ceding the northern half of the country to the United States. Mexicans living in Alta California were given the choice of becoming American citizens or retreating south to what remained of their country. The U.S. government complied with its earlier promises to Baja California residents and offered them asylum in the United States; María Amparo and her mother took refuge in Monterey, California, where they lived with María’s sister and brother-in-law.
In 1849, María Amparo wed Burton in a civil ceremony that scandalized her Catholic community—her new husband was a Protestant. Though subsequently rejected by Catholic society, María Amparo became part of the close group of military officers and their wives. She concentrated on mastering her English, all the while lamenting Monterey’s provincialism. Perhaps her most important contact, who developed into a vibrant correspondent and intimate friend, was Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a wealthy and prominent San Francisco ranchero with whom Ruiz de Burton shared a passion for literature and some political sympathies.
In 1852, Captain Burton was ordered to serve as commander of the garrison in San Diego, then an area of open grazing land and californio-owned cattle ranches that were slowly but steadily being turned into farms by waves of Anglo settlers, or squatters. The previous year, the Land Act of 1851 had passed, forming a Land Commission in San Francisco which ordered that all Mexican land grant titles be reviewed. This protracted process often involved years of plodding through the judicial system, appealing decisions and losing fortunes on lawyer’s fees. Ruiz de Burton’s own experiences under this law and her friend M. G. Vallejo’s loss of his landholdings are the basis for the downfall of the Alamar family in The Squatter and the Don. In the developing Southwest, land was both home—regional and, to some extent, political identification—and financial capital. In 1853, Henry S. Burton bought Jamul Ranch, originally belonging to former California governor Pío Pico. Even closer to Ruiz de Burton’s heart was the large ranch in Ensenada de Todos Santos, Baja California, deeded to her grandfather in 1805 for outstanding service to the Spanish crown. The author fought her entire life to secure her land claims—in part because few other economic opportunities were available, especially for a Mexican-American woman—entering full force into the intricacies of the U.S. and Mexican legal systems. Though she enjoyed some successes, ultimately there was little to show for her efforts during her lifetime.
The Burtons’ ten-year stay on the East Coast began in 1859. The couple was not always together during the first few years—Captain Burton made business- and military-related trips to California—but from 1862 until her husband’s death in 1869, María Amparo followed Burton to his various stations at military forts up and down the Atlantic Coast. Twice he was in charge of prisoners of war, a subject that appears in the author’s first novel, Who Would Have Thought It? Throughout this decade away from California, Ruiz de Burton experienced feelings both of isolation and of excitement. She became critically aware of the racism embedded in the American expansionist agenda and was not at home either ethnically, as one of the few Mexican-Americans, or in the significantly more urbanized environment of cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. One thrill, however, was the communication with and exposure to politicians of all kinds, including diplomats, congressmen, military officers, and even presidents—the Burtons attended Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. María Amparo pursued close contacts with the Mexican Legation, keeping herself informed of events (and, by extension, her landholdings) in her native Baja California.
Ruiz de Burton’s attitudes toward her home country resonate with sympathy and indignity. She simultaneously pitied and blamed Mexico for its lack of industrial progress and expressed anger that the motherland abandoned its californio children, leaving them under the thumb of the predatory and often corrupt and racist American government. On at least one occasion, Ruiz de Burton called Americans the “mortal enemies” of Mexico. Such hostile sentiments, combined with assimilative desires toward Anglo culture, led her friend M. G. Vallejo to call the author “un alma atravesada,” a tortured soul. However, it is interesting and important to note that the author’s sympathies for conquered people do not extend to Native Americans, missionized intensely by the Spanish and treated with little more respect than African slaves in the southern United States.
During the more than twenty-five years of her widowhood, Ruiz de Burton engaged in several varied, ambitious projects. The most long-lasting of these were her literary endeavors. In 1872 she published Who Would Have Thought It?, a novel scathingly critical of northern (New England) society; in 1876, the play Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts (possibly performed years earlier at the Mission Theater in San Diego); in 1885 The Squatter and the Don, which exposes the pitiable plight of californios as their lands and dignity are taken away by a government with incestuous ties to the railroad monopoly, both institutions faulted as much for greed as for racism. Squatter was praised for its engaging narrative style, though its political content was naturally more controversial. Additionally, Ruiz de Burton authored (for the most part anonymously) many newspaper articles, a legal brief, and two business prospectuses.
Following her desire for economic gain and stability, Ruiz de Burton worked to secure and add value to Jamul Ranch, the title to which was finally secured in 1875, though in the end the widow retained but a small personal homestead of the heavily mortgaged property. She grew castor beans on a large scale and tried to create both a water reservoir and a cement company. Ruiz de Burton also strove to recruit investors for the Lower California Mining Company, formed with her husband in 1865, that aimed to exploit her landholdings in San Antonio, Baja California, reputedly rich in copper and silver.
Most consuming during the final years of the author’s life was the battle for her Ensenada ranch. She traveled several times to Mexico City to appeal her case in person. Even after Ruiz de Burton received the title from Mexican president Benito Juárez, the lands remained in jeopardy. Family rancor reared its head in 1892 when her mother filed suit, alleging that her daughter improperly asserted sole ownership over the properties. Tirelessly, Ruiz de Burton spent her last living days and resources trying to secure the Ensenada land. She died in Chicago of gastric fever on August 12, 1895, while trying to interest a local lawyer in her case. Forty-seven years after her death, this lawyer settled the suit in her favor.