Born: 8 July 1832, United States
Died: 12 August 1895
Country most active: United States
Also known as: María Amparo Maytorena Ruiz
This entry is reprinted in full with permission from the National Women’s History Museum (United States of America). All rights reserved.
Considered the first Mexican-American novelist, and a precursor to the Chicano/a movement, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, captured these changes in two of her novels. Her first novel Who Would Have Thought It (1872) criticizes U.S. racism and imperialism and women’s marginality, and her second novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885), spoke out against Euro-American confiscation of Mexican lands and offered a Californio perspective on Manifest Destiny.