SOURCE: “‘White Slaves’ and the ‘Arrogant Mestiza’: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona,” in American Literature, Vol. 69, No. 4, December, 1997, pp. 813-39.

In the following essay about Ramona and The Squatter and the Don, Luis-Brown theorizes that through their use of sentimentality, both works attempt to shape the reader's politics and to question white male authority over marginalized groups.

Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton are indisputably political novels, representing conflicts over land, class position, and racial status in California in the 1870s. These novels represent Anglos, Californios, and Indians as struggling for social position following the U.S. annexation of one-half of Mexico as a result of the Mexican War of 1846-1848.¹ However, although most critics view these texts as political, their insufficient historicization of narrative form has led them to misconstrue as...