The Imagined Inter-American Community of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-1895) is among the best-remembered authors of nineteenth-century Mexican-American literature. However, her assimilationist position and her eminent social status are not characteristic of early Mexican-American writers in general, who tended to focus on resisting An...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Amerikastudien 2008-01, Vol.53 (1), p.77-95
Main Author: Raab, Josef
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American literature
Group identity
Hispanic Americans
Imagined communities
Latin American culture
Latin American literature
Novels
Squatters rights
Upper class
War
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Summary:María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1832-1895) is among the best-remembered authors of nineteenth-century Mexican-American literature. However, her assimilationist position and her eminent social status are not characteristic of early Mexican-American writers in general, who tended to focus on resisting Anglo dominance. In her two major novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), Ruiz de Burton acknowledges that there is a distinct mexicanidad, a defining cultural identity of people of Mexican descent. But her narrative construction of a group identity is not based on ethnicity: while her fictions exclude Mexican farm laborers, indios, mestizos, and the lower classes from this imagined community, they propagate an alliance of the wealthy and righteous among U.S. Mexicans as well as U.S. Anglos. This imagined community is exemplified by the central couple of The Squatter and the Don and is inspired by the author's own marriage to a land-owning Anglo army captain in California. Its defining features concentrate on the class-based values and customs that could define a future inter-American elite. Ruiz de Burton's elitism has created difficulties for the canon formation and self-definition of a Mexican-American literature that had traditionally highlighted ethnicity as well as working-class experiences and that had been focused on Mexican opposition to the Anglo mainstream rather than on the imaginative creation of an Anglo-Mexican community.
ISSN:0340-2827