This chapter maps sympathy’s place in the emplotment of what became known as the “New Southwest” after the U.S.–Mexican War. The chapter reads sympathy in the work of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who opposed U.S. settlers plotting out the American West. In Life Among the Piutes, Hopkins countered the proposals that would eventually become the Dawes Act of 1887, which prescribed allotment (parceling land for tribesmembers’ individual ownership) and severalty (stripping Native Americans of tribal citizenship). She guides Anglo readers in understanding “love thy neighbor as thyself” as a principle best expressed from far away. After Gwin’s Land Law of 1851, de Burton lost a fortune defending her family’s rancho against U.S. squatters. In The Squatter and the Don, she inverts the stock character of the “sad” Mexicano to associate U.S. Americans with tears and grief through the figures of the white railroad baron, corrupt lawyer, and settler citizen.
