Sharada Balachandran Orihuela
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469640921
- eISBN:
- 9781469640945
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469640921.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights ...
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Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.Less
Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.
Karen R. Roybal
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781469633824
- eISBN:
- 9781469633848
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469633824.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This chapter provides a critical analysis of the literary work of nineteenth-century Californiana author, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton. Through a detailed examination of her novels, Who Would Have ...
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This chapter provides a critical analysis of the literary work of nineteenth-century Californiana author, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton. Through a detailed examination of her novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), the chapter addresses the ways in which Mexican American women used literature to archive their collective memories, or testimonios. Ruiz de Burton's narrative approach is the first in a series of novels written by Mexican American women to document nineteenth-century Borderlands history. The chapter argues that Ruiz de Burton uses testimonio in her first novel to reveal the ways in which women of Mexican/Spanish descent were subject to both material and cultural loss post-1848, while her second novel serves as a personal testimony and collective history of Californio dispossession at the hands of enterprising Euro Americans.Less
This chapter provides a critical analysis of the literary work of nineteenth-century Californiana author, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton. Through a detailed examination of her novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), the chapter addresses the ways in which Mexican American women used literature to archive their collective memories, or testimonios. Ruiz de Burton's narrative approach is the first in a series of novels written by Mexican American women to document nineteenth-century Borderlands history. The chapter argues that Ruiz de Burton uses testimonio in her first novel to reveal the ways in which women of Mexican/Spanish descent were subject to both material and cultural loss post-1848, while her second novel serves as a personal testimony and collective history of Californio dispossession at the hands of enterprising Euro Americans.
