"White Slaves of California": Race, Religion, and the Railroad in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don
type: CreativeWork
description: In The Squatter and the Don (1885), Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton depicts the decline of the Alamars, a patrician Californio family, in the years after California was annexed by the United States. This thesis explores the different rhetorical maneuvers Ruiz de Burton makes to place the Californios in a broad, enfranchising Anglo-American national paradigm. The novel negotiates the messy, competing histories of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonialism, ultimately making the case for the enduring presence of Spanish missionization in the region, as well as the cultural assimilability of the Californio population. While the novel has frequently been read as a critique of American exceptionalism, imperialist expansion, and nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, this thesis attends to how Ruiz de Burton’s political project does not unsettle or disrupt structures of settler colonialism; but is ultimately concerned with maintaining the class interests that the Californio Alamar family are bereft of. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I offer a reading that looks at the confluence of race-making, the railroad, religion, and unfree labor.
abstract: In The Squatter and the Don (1885), Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton depicts the decline of the Alamars, a patrician Californio family, in the years after California was annexed by the United States. This thesis explores the different rhetorical maneuvers Ruiz de Burton makes to place the Californios in a broad, enfranchising Anglo-American national paradigm. The novel negotiates the messy, competing histories of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonialism, ultimately making the case for the enduring presence of Spanish missionization in the region, as well as the cultural assimilability of the Californio population. While the novel has frequently been read as a critique of American exceptionalism, imperialist expansion, and nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, this thesis attends to how Ruiz de Burton’s political project does not unsettle or disrupt structures of settler colonialism; but is ultimately concerned with maintaining the class interests that the Californio Alamar family are bereft of. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I offer a reading that looks at the confluence of race-making, the railroad, religion, and unfree labor.
author: Buonanno, Katie
keywords: American Literature, American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, History, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies, Religion, California, Catholicism, nineteenth century, Mexico
date published: 2024-09-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:05Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York