María Ruiz de Burton
Mexican-American writer
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (July 3, 1832 – August 12, 1895) was a Californio author and intellectual, best known as the first female Mexican-American writer to be published in English. During her career, she published two books: Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885); and one play: Don Quixote de la Mancha: A Comedy in Five Acts: Taken From Cervantes' Novel of That Name (1876).
Ruiz de Burton's work is considered to be one of the first instances of Mexican-American literature, and gives the perspective of the conquered Mexican population that, despite being granted full rights of citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was a marginalized national minority. Her background provided her a critical distance from the New England Protestant culture into which she was brought by her marriage to her husband, a powerful and influential Protestant Union Army General, Henry S. Burton. Her life took her from coast to coast in the United States, which provided her with opportunity for first-hand observation of the U.S., its westward expansion, the American Civil War, and its aftermath. This vantage point and her status as a woman provided her with both an insider's and outsider's perspective on issues of ethnicity, power, gender, class, and race.
Early life
Family
María Amparo Ruiz de Burton was born on July 3, 1832, in Loreto, Baja California. Her grandfather, Jose Manuel Ruiz, commanded the Mexican troops along the northern frontier in Baja California and served as governor of the region from 1822 until 1825. For his services, he was granted over 3,500 hectares of land in the Ensenada region.
“María Ruiz de Burton” enters the record as mexican-American writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what María, Ruiz and Burton can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6782113. VIAF identifies the subject as 23236334. The Library of Congress control number is n92095298. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1832, 1895, 1872 and 1885.
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This entry incorporates text from “María Ruiz de Burton” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.