Women's History Month: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton
MARIA AMPARO RUIZ DE BURTON is considered to be the first Mexican-American author and the first Mexican-American author to write in English (Who Would Have Thought It? - 1872).
She was born to an aristocratic family in La Paz, Baja California, but hungered for a larger life. During the Mexican-American War (1845-1848), 15-year old Maria Amparo experienced the invasion of her town by American troops led by dashing U.S. Army Captain Henry Burton, and saw her chance. Burton was smitten; Maria Amparo promptly refused to go through with her arranged marriage to a wealthy older ranchero— and along with her mother she accompanied Captain Burton to his new post in Northern California. At seventeen she married him, and the couple bought Rancho Jamul, near San Diego, and began a family.
In 1859, Burton was ordered east, taking Maria Amparo and their two children with him. Beautiful, well-educated, and ambitious Maria Amparo was finally in her element. She threw herself into Washington’s balls, receptions and social life, and befriended Mary Todd Lincoln, whom she petitioned to persuade the President to promote Burton. She was soon doing diplomatic work with Mexican ambassadors to Washington.
During the Civil War Maria Amparo accompanied now-Colonel Burton as he was transferred from post to post. He was decorated for valor at Petersburg but also there contracted malarial fever. He died in 1869, leaving Maria Amparo a thirty-seven-year-old widow with two dependent children.
She returned to Rancho Jamul to build a new life, but discovered that her claim to the ranch and her family estate in Baja were both in jeopardy. The ranchos were being confiscated by white squatters, enabled by new, racist laws calling all land titles held by the Hispanic Californios into question.
To raise money to support her children and fund lawsuits to protect her property, Maria Amparo began writing. She published two novels for an English-speaking audience. (Who Would Have Thought It?, 1872, The Squatter and the Don, 1885.) The books critique white society in America, and depict the discrimination and racism experienced by many Latinos in the United States.
She remained locked in litigation over her lands until her death in 1895.
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After the Gold Rush is the epic story of the building of San Francisco as novelized history, told by the real people who built it, in their own words, from original source material such as newspapers, letters, court documents and the novels they wrote themselves.
Part 1 brings to life California’s rarely discussed Civil War and Reconstruction years. The characters are familiar American icons like Mark Twain, Governor Leland Stanford and mining baron George Hearst—and many more real historical figures who don’t happen to be straight white men but deserve to be equally well known.
California’s pioneers, dreamers, barons, immigrants, californios, civil rights leaders, villains. They knew each other, married each other, fought each other, and killed each other in “the most picturesque city, in the most romantic state, at the most dramatic moment in the history of the Republic.”
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