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A native Californian. Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton lived in the Northeastern United States during the 1860s, a decade of dramatic economic growth and political conflict. During the same period that an affluent urban bourgeoisie was emerging in the Northeast, the family and friends Ruiz de Burton had left behind in California were losing their land, their livelihoods, and their political influence. Born into the elite, rancher class of Californios, or Mexican Californians. Ruiz de Burton went to the Northeast in 1859 with her husband. U.S. Army officer Henry S. Burton In subsequent year's, a decline in the cattle market, continued immigration, and unfavorable land laws combined to transform the formerly powerful Californios into an impoverished minority. Their downfall was nearly complete when Ruiz de Burton returned to California after her husband's death in 1869. By that time, she had already completed Who Would Have Thought It?, a novel in which she contends that the rising fortunes of middle class Yankees had been secured through the exploitation of propertied Mexicans Published in Philadelphia under anonymous authorship by J.B. Lippincott in 1872, the novel presents a scathing satirical critique of the society that the author observed and participated in during her residence in the urban Northeast.(1)
The first of two novels that Ruiz de Burton wrote in English. Who Would Have Thought It? explores the historical conflicts surrounding the mid-century incorporation of Mexican land and people into the United States through a story of the adoption of a wealthy Mexican girl by a Yankee family. The novel begins in 1857, on the day that Dr. James Norval returns to his home in New England from a four-year geological expedition to California James brings with him a ten-year-old, dark-skinned girl named Lola Medina and a wagon full of precious stones and metals. He tells his astonished family that he has rescued Lola from a life of captivity: she was born just a few months after her mother. Dona Theresa Medina, was captured in Sonora by Apaches and sold to a group of Mohaves in California. In addition to promising to raise Lola until he finds her father. James has taken charge of the fortune in gems and gold that her mother somehow managed to collect during her...