Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives (review)

In the spring of 2000, María Eugenia Cotera published an article on Jovita González, an early twentieth-century Mexican American scholar at the University of Texas in Austin. Arguing that González's scholarship set a tone for future Chicano/a resistance narratives, Cotera's criticism ultimately disrupts the androcentric tendencies that plague Chicano/a historiography. I begin with Cotera's reclaiming of Jovita González as an important Chicana antecedent in order to frame Amelia María de la Luz Montes and Anne Elizabeth Goldman's reconfiguration of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. More than early regional literature, Ruiz de Burton's novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), simultaneously participate in and disrupt traditional American literary and historical canons. Like Cotera's reintroduction of Jovita González, Montes and Goldman's Ruiz de Burton anthology reinforces the fact that, as Emma Perez would say, "Chicanos are also women, Chicanas."

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton expands upon Rosaura Sánchez's and Beatrice Pita's introductions to the republication of Ruiz de Burton's novels in the 1990s. Montes and Goldman's anthology offers new interdisciplinary scholarship that "honor[s] the richness of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's canon and articulate[s] the contradictions of colonial identity in California" (3). Arranged in five parts, the anthology includes unprecedented observations on Ruiz de Burton's theatrical work and her 1876 play, Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy, in Five Acts, Taken from Cervantes' Novel of That Name. A final section offers practical approaches to teaching Ruiz de Burton's novels. Also included are relevant excerpts from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, several of Ruiz de Burton's personal letters, and a letter from Henry Wagner Halleck to Pablo de la Guerra concerning land rights in nineteenth-century California.

In the first section, José F. Aranda questions the notion that The Squatter and the Don "invokes the populist Mexican American tradition of contesting big business that includes Cesar Chávez, Delores Huerta, and the United Farmworkers Union" (15). Aranda's essay, "Returning California to the People," contends instead that The Squatter hails the "economic order that originated among nineteenth-century Californios of Spanish/Mexican descent" due to a greater economic shift in the United States after the Civil War (22). Aranda's reading thus problematically negates ethno-national perceptions of Ruiz de Burton's novel. Although I agree that The Squatter exalts an economic culture developed by Californios of a particular class and, subsequently, of a specific Spanish lineage, I disagree with Aranda's attempt to replace one reading with another. While Aranda locates the text in its historical moment, noting important events such as the 1880 Battle of Mussel Slough, other scholars have placed it within the historical development of a Mexican American and Chicano/a public voice, a voice that challenges the social, economic, and political subjugation of a people based upon the idea of racial inferiority. I believe there is room for both perspectives in Chicano/a Studies.

Part two, "Reading Race and Nation in Who Would Have Thought It?," deals with racial anxiety over national identity in the United States. Anne Elizabeth Goldman's "Beasts in the Jungle" brilliantly meets the section's expectations. By comparing Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) to Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It?, Goldman reveals a similarly employed method of satirizing the "puritan code" via "raced iconography to establish the city's parameters" (77). Both Basil Ransom and Lola Medina represent the regional (racial) peripheries of a racially-specific American center (78). Jesse Alemán's "Thank God Lolita is Away" expands on Goldman's work. Reading Who Would Have Thought It? as an effort to define Mexican American whiteness, Alemán presents both Mexico's racial hierarchy...