This chapter provides a critical analysis of the literary work of nineteenth-century Californiana author, María Amparo Ruíz de Burton. Through a detailed examination of her novels, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), the chapter addresses the ways in which Mexican American women used literature to archive their collective memories, or testimonios. Ruiz de Burton's narrative approach is the first in a series of novels written by Mexican American women to document nineteenth-century Borderlands history. The chapter argues that Ruiz de Burton uses testimonio in her first novel to reveal the ways in which women of Mexican/Spanish descent were subject to both material and cultural loss post-1848, while her second novel serves as a personal testimony and collective history of Californio dispossession at the hands of enterprising Euro Americans.
Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women.
