Neither Here nor There: Ruiz de Burton’s Genres of Resistance

Abstract

My essay takes a cultural studies approach to readings of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novels. The article turns to Ruiz de Burton’s personal correspondences, her Southern California newspaper articles, and her book reviews in order to evaluate the ways Ruiz de Burton’s own society viewed and understood her role in the late-nineteenth-century United States. While the scholarship has focused on the ways Ruiz de Burton’s biography informs the plots of her two novels, it has not considered in much depth the ways her non-literary writings draw our attention to the materiality of her novels as they circulated in a nineteenth-century literary marketplace. By returning to these archival texts we pivot our attention to the dialogic nature of Ruiz de Burton’s writing, to how she was communicating and speaking back to her Anglo-American countrymen and dominant United States institutions, not just resisting them. Ultimately, restoring analysis of her non-literary writings to readings of her novels opens up new ways of conceiving of Ruiz de Burton’s politics surrounding questions of national identity in the era of Manifest Destiny and western expansion.