Blackwell Reference Online

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I like to start thinking about turn-into-the-twentieth-century American regionalism by way of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don , published in 1885. Even though both de Burton and her novel stand beyond most readers’ assumptions that regionalist writing primarily reflects the interests of Protestant, northeastern or southern literary establishments, The Squatter and the Don nevertheless features most of the issues that more readily-recognizable regionalist writing tackles: questions of place, and of particular peoples and their histories in that place; questions of borders: geographic, demographic, and social; the relationship between the local and the national, and among the local, the national, and the global. Ruiz de Burton was a Californio, a term that can describe all the people who lived in the southern and/or baja California region at the time, following the Mexican War, when it was annexed by the United States. For de Burton, however, a Californio was specifically an American-born aristocrat of Spanish descent. The Squatter and the Don is about the conflict between Anglos and Californios over who was actually going to possess the thousands of acres that had been originally deeded the Californios either by Spanish or Mexican authorities but that were now subject to US law. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848) guaranteed Californios their ... log in or subscribe to read full text