Who Would Have Thought It?

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-1895) was a Mexican American writer. Born into a prominent family in Baja California, Ruiz de Burton grew up during the Mexican-American War. Following the surrender of her hometown of La Paz in 1847, she met Captain Henry S. Burton, an American Army officer. In 1848, after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Ruiz de Burton became an American citizen. Despite the controversy surrounding their religious and national differences, she married Burton in 1849 and moved with him to San Diego the following year with their newborn daughter, Nellie. There, Ruiz de Burton ran a theater for soldiers while her husband commanded the local Army post. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the family moved east, where Ruiz de Burton befriended First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and socialized in the nation’s highest political and military circles. Having contracted malaria during the war, Henry Burton died in 1869, leaving his wife and children with significant financial burdens. Over the next few decades, Ruiz de Burton worked to reclaim her home in California while repaying her husband’s debts, launching several business ventures and fighting off numerous lawsuits. Despite all of this, Ruiz de Burton managed to publish two novels during her lifetime, becoming the first Mexican American author to write and publish in English. Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) are considered pioneering works of Chicano literature for their exploration of ethnicity, gender, class, race, and power, as well as for their illumination of issues central to the Californio experience.