ABSTRACT
Students often place Mexican American or Chicano/a literary history around the mid-twentieth century. They may have some knowledge of the 1960s Chicano Civil Rights Movement, and the literature of the historical period between 1950 and 2000. Lesser known to them may be the fact that a Mexican American novelist/playwright, named María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, was present during President Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861. More surprising to them is finding out this writer is a woman, multilingual, trained to litigate in court, and raised in Mexico at a time when land inheritance was matrilineal. Teaching these facts alone opens a whole new world to students and encourages them to find out more about what it means to be Latina or Latino in the United States. They soon learn that Mexican American literary history really began in 1848 with the signing of The Treaty of Guadalupe. (See also Jesse Alemán’s discussion of this phenomenon in Chapter 1 in this volume.)
