María Amparo Ruiz de Burton published her first novel in 1872 under a pseudonym. The concealment was practical: she was a Mexican-born woman writing in English about the experience of conquest, and the literary establishment of post-Civil War America was not particularly interested in that perspective. She published anyway, twice more, and became the first female Mexican-American writer to be published in English — a distinction that was recognized only a century after her death.
Ruiz de Burton was born in Baja California in 1832, the granddaughter of José Manuel Ruiz, who commanded Mexican troops along the northern frontier. Her world changed irrevocably in 1847 when she was among the Mexicans who witnessed the American occupation of La Paz during the Mexican-American War. She married Henry S. Burton, a Union Army general, in 1849 — a marriage that would take her from California to Washington to Rhode Island and back, giving her an education in American society that few Mexican women of her era could have imagined.
Her husband's position opened doors; her own intelligence and ambition kept them open. She corresponded with prominent figures of the era, engaged with political debates, and observed American society from an insider-outsider position that would become the foundation of her literary work. When Henry died in 1869, she was left with debts and a rancho in California that was being contested through the land-grant claims process — an experience that would provide material for her most important novel.
Who Would Have Thought It?, published in 1872, was a satirical novel about New England Protestant society — observed from the outside, with the sharp eyes of someone who had been admitted to the drawing rooms without ever being fully accepted as belonging. It was published pseudonymously, though the author's identity was not a serious secret among those who knew her.
The Squatter and the Don, published in 1885 under her own name, was more explicitly political. The novel dramatized the dispossession of Californio landowning families through the American land-grant claims process — a system in which the burden of proving ownership fell on the Mexican families who had held their grants under Spanish and Mexican law, while American squatters occupied the land during the often-years-long adjudication process. The novel drew directly on Ruiz de Burton's own experience with her Rancho Jamul property in San Diego County.
Ruiz de Burton's fiction was openly critical of the United States in ways that were unusual for the era and for a woman in her social position. She accused American foreign policy of imperialist tendencies that contradicted the nation's stated principles. She documented the way the land-grant system functioned as a mechanism for dispossessing the Mexican population that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had nominally guaranteed full rights of citizenship.
Her critical distance was intellectual as well as personal. She had observed New England Protestant culture closely enough to understand its internal logic and its blind spots. She could see what the American project looked like from the perspective of the people it was displacing, and she had the literary skill and the stubborn determination to write that perspective into the record.
Ruiz de Burton died in 1895, largely forgotten outside the small circle of scholars who had encountered her work. For nearly a century, she remained a footnote, her novels out of print and her life story largely unexamined.
The scholarly recovery of her work beginning in the 1990s restored her to the place in American literary history that her achievement warranted. The Squatter and the Don was reprinted in 1992 with a scholarly introduction that located it within the tradition of Chicano literature and the broader history of California's Californio population. Today she is recognized as a foundational figure in Mexican-American literature — the first, and for many decades the only, Mexican-born woman to have published novels in English.
She is buried at El Campo Santo Cemetery in Old Town San Diego, where the ground holds the remains of many of the Californio families whose world her fiction documented.
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton is associated with Old Town San Diego and Rancho Jamul in San Diego County, where her land-grant property became the subject of the legal battles she documented in her fiction.