Who Would Have Thought It?

MarIa Amparo Ruiz De Burton (1832-1895) was born in Loreto, Baja Mexico to a military elite family. She experienced the Mexican American War, the Civil War, and the French invasion of Mexico. This led her to a life of writing. She is the first nineteenth-century Californian novelist, and nationally, she is the first Mexican American woman to publish a novel after the end of the Mexican-American War (1848). In addition to Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), she also published the novel, the Squatter and the Don (1885) and is the author of the play, Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts. Amelia MarIa de la Luz Montes is Associate Professor of English and Director of The Institute for Ethnic Studies at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the co-editor of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives (2004) and has published in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and theory. She also publishes fiction. She is currently at work on a fictional memoir and critical text on Latina writers and artists of the Midwest. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.