ABSTRACT
Young, intelligent, and beautiful, albeit powerless, Mexican women play the central roles in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s two novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885). Ruiz de Burton’s young Mexican women, the most important protagonists of her two novels, demonstrate the ways that the U.S. took advantage of a vulnerable population in order to erase the Mexican American contribution to shaping the land we now call the U.S. Southwest. As their names suggest, the young women suffer cruel trials associated with land and its resources in the years following the 1848 U.S.–Mexico War. Dolores, of course, means “sorrows,” and Mercedes can mean “mercy” and also “land grants.” In this context, the secondary meaning of Mercedes’s name becomes more significant because the Mexican American population gained their lands through Spanish and Mexican-era land grants that were often invalidated in the U.S. courts after 1848, transforming a ranching aristocracy into a laboring class in a few short years (Montejano 1987, 50–74; Griswold de Castillo 1990, 62–107). Ruiz de Burton herself was a young woman during this time of transition, so it is not surprising that she writes indignantly about the injustices that she witnessed (and suffered) first hand (Aranda 2003, 95). Scholars recognize that hers was a voice of opposition to the U.S. political collusion with Anglo-American businessmen to exploit Mexican Americans and to take over their lands (Aranda 2003, 81–117; Rivera 2006, 82–109; Alemán 2004). Scholars also agree that Ruiz de Burton articulated a feminist argument in her novels, showing how women’s powerlessness occasions needless harm (Sanchez and Pita 2005; Casas 2007, 159–167). However, little attention has been given to the way that Ruiz de Burton’s writings comprise an early Mexican American environmentalism.
