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An Essay about The Squatter and the Don: a historical fiction about life for Criollos after the US-Mexican War
In María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, first mention of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo appears in Chapter Two. Don Mariano summarizes for his wife, Doña Josefa, how the Treaty caused much of the trouble in which they were brewing: “By the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo the American nation pledged its honor to respect our land titles…however, the discovery of gold brought to California the riff-raff of the world…most of them coveting our lands…There was, and still is, plenty of good government land…But no. The forbidden fruit is the sweetest…So, to win their votes…our representatives in Congress helped to pass laws declaring all lands in California open to preemption…having pledged the national word to respect our rights, it would be…an open violation of pledged honor, to take the lands without some pretext of a legal process…we became obliged to present our titles…While these legal proceedings are going on, the squatters locate their claims and raise crops on our lands, which they convert into money to fight our titles” (66). Don Mariano’s disappointment and resentment for the broken American pledge can be heard in those words.
Clarence Darrell’s views of the Californios’ plight reflect much of the same sentiment and also mention the Treaty by context: “…my belief is that Congress had no more right to pass any law which could give an excuse to trespass upon your property, than to pass any law inviting people to your table…I think our theory of government is so lofty, so grand and exalted, that we much watch jealously that Congress may not misinterpret it, misrepresent the sentiments…and thus make a caricature of our beautiful ideal…it would have been better to have passed a law of confiscation. Then we would have stood before the world with the responsibility of that barbarous act upon our own shoulders” (97). Though Don Mariano later became sick with grief over the loss of his land and class status, he never entirely blamed the squatters. He also blames the government that led them there. Once again, the Treaty is mentioned by context, “…I shall always consider that the law has deluded and misled them, and helped them to develop their natural inclination to appropriate what belonged to someone else” (161).
As for how the Treaty affected the Alamares, the subsequent Land Act of 1851 meant to alleviate the vagueness of the Treaty concerning property rights in the new territory, forced the Alamares to present their title to the Land Commission for review. The litigation process went on for so long that like many others in his predicament, he lost his rancho to taxes, litigation fees, and the loss of what may have saved him, his cattle. Thus the Alamares were yanked down from their social position of wealthy landowners to another working class family barely scraping by.
This was not the only “legal process” which became the ruin of the Alamares. As earlier stated, the squatters would shoot the Don’s cattle, but they couldn’t be touched because of the “No fence” law passed in California. This law protected agriculture from the cattle that naturally ate it. In Don Mariano’s words, “…any man can come to my land…plant ten acres of grain, without any fence, and then catch my cattle which…will got to eat it. Then he…makes me pay damages and so much per head for keeping them…Or, if the grain fields are large enough to bring more money by keeping the cattle away, then the settler shoots the cattle at any time…only taking care that no one sees him in the act…” (64).
As seen by the struggle between the “title characters,” squatters and dons, or Anglo-Americans and Americans of Spanish descent, many intersections take place between class and race throughout the entirety of the book. Taking the squatter vs. don scenario first, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita point out in their introduction to The Squatter and the Don how “intermarriage across ethnic and class lines offers a resolution”(36). The marriage between Clarence Darrell (the son of a squatter) and Mercedes de Alamar (the daughter of a don) is an example of this resolution. Their marriage allows for the book’s fictional line of narration to move beyond the ethnicity struggle. The issue with class also comes up a couple of times in the narration as well. There are many examples of how Anglo-Americans and Californios of different classes react to each other. To upper-class Anglos, like Gunther and Selden, Californio women like Mercedes “were an exotic group, whose company is sought after, given their social refinement and beauty”(37). To lower-class Anglos, like most of Don Mariano’s squatters, Californios are greedy, “have too much land”(66), and the squatters call them “greasers”(37). To upper-class Californios, such as Doña Josefa, who doesn’t allow Clarence and Mercedes to marry until after she learns that he’s paid for his land and is no long a squatter, lower-class Anglos are mean ruffians indifferent to the way the Californios are being victimized. Oddly enough (though this was the mindset of that time period), Burton did not mention how Indians saw any other class, and the only mention of class perceptions indicated that Indians were lazy and dependent on everyone else.
Lastly, for Gabriel and Lizzie (Californios), their fall from the wealthy status lost their positions in what she considered to be the best of society: “Her family, being of the very highest in New York, were courted and caressed in exaggerated degree on their arrival in San Diego…When Gabriel came to his position in the bank, she was again warmly received…[then] he had lost his place at the bank…he endeavored to get something else to do. This was bad enough, but when she tried to help him, then her fashionable friends disappeared…If [Gabriel] had been rich, his nationality [native Californian] could have been forgiven, but no one will willingly tolerate a poor native Californian”(324).
Thankfully, all of the grief garnered by the Alamares, Darrells, and Mechlins over the class/race struggles and litigation problems were somewhat resolved by the end of the book. In Doris Sommer’s “Irresistible Romance,” she explains how romances often allowed for a peaceful resolution that may not have been possible from the historical point of view. According to Sommer, the way romances were written in the nineteenth century “distinguished romance as more boldly allegorical than the novel”(75). After establishing this observation, she goes on to say that the romance was therefore used as propaganda for “nation-building”(77) by recording a nation’s history using the romance’s model. She also states that “this natural and familial grounding, along with its rhetoric of productive sexuality, provides a model for apparently non-violent national consolidation during periods of internecine conflict”(76). So those who wrote romances meant to use them to teach the population of their country about its history by overlaying it with a romantic, fictional story, and therefore provided endings (whether happy or sad) to the historical conflict. So authors had created a reconciliation between two sides, or in the case of The Squatter and the Don, between Mexico and the United States.
So now that we know that The Squatter and the Don was written as a model of the romance which seeks to achieve an allegorical resolution for the historical and fictional lines of narration, one last thing to observe is the allegory of who represents what in the book and who in the fictional line of narration represents what in the historical line of narration. Don Mariano, and his family, represent the US-Mexican culture, which was oppressed by the greed of the Anglo-American culture, represented by the squatters, namely Mr. Darrell. Also, Clarence Darrell represents a part of the picture somewhere in between the two. He is the one who saves many of the characters in the end from financial ruin, and from their own grief as well, the resolution to the fictional side of narration. Also, though he’s Mr. Darrell’s son, he believes the way Don Mariano does, and marries Don Mariano’s daughter. So he represents the blending of cultures that is sought as an ending for the historical narration. So in this sense Clarence has become the allegorical ending: he’s the product of a blending of cultures (historically) and he’s the savior of those in the book who become destitute (fictionally).