59 pages • 1 hour read
The Squatter and the Don
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Symbols & Motifs
The “No Fence” Law
The “no fence” law refers to the 1874 California law that determined that farmers were no longer required to protect planted fields from ranging livestock. This was a departure from the Trespass Act of 1850, which required the erection and maintenance of fences. This shift in law allowed farmers to forego the expense of fencing their fields. This allowed them to kill cattle that wandered into their fields, tempted by the growing crops. This law was considered a notable shift between legal preference for the cattlemen over the farmers to the reverse.
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton focuses on the racial difference between these two groups throughout the novel. The farmers were overwhelmingly white Anglo-Americans while the cattlemen were primarily Spano-Americans who had lived in California before its annexation to the United States. In the novel, this demographic divide and its inherent tensions become central to ongoing, escalating tensions about access to and control of land. Therefore, the “no fence” laws emerge in the novel as a symbol of hegemonic greed; the farmers, as the novel’s representation of the law suggests, are unsatisfied with a small, contained parcel of land. Instead, they desire all that the Spano-Americans own. Ruiz de Burton depicts the farmers as harboring opportunistic ambitions for land expansion at a time when San Diego was experiencing rapid transformation due to westward expansion and territorial annexation. As a result, the “no fence” law reveals tensions that emerge in the characters’ pursuit of land, ownership, and wealth—highlighting the Anglo-Americans’ desire to possess through ambitious, antagonistic tactics.
San Diego
San Diego and its potential growth are personified in the novel, with a short passage even taking on the narrative perspective of a feminized San Diego looking toward “her” potential future. This personification represents the affection that different characters feel for what Elvira refers to as “Poor San Diego! my poor, little, native town” (227). When San Diego loses its future via the Texas Pacific Railroad, the narrative frames this as the city being “strangled” and “killed.” Indeed, the text grieves the death of San Diego more explicitly than it does Mariano or James Mechlin, the human characters who die. The scope, this framework suggests, is bigger and more significant to many others; this grief is public, not private. To the Alamars, unlike the Huntingtons and Stanfords of the world, the fate of San Diego is personal, not merely a matter of money.
However, San Diego is a matter of money to the Alamars and the Mechlins, who lose their financial security slowly but surely as San Diego’s potential prosperity wanes and vanishes. Ruiz de Burton thus appeals to her readers’ sympathy on numerous levels. She seeks their emotional support for those who are forced to watch their beloved home die as well as the practical, fiscal sympathy from those who see San Diego residents and Southern Californians more broadly lose their homes and livelihoods.
Huntington’s Letters
At various points in the novel, Ruiz de Burton alludes to the 1882 release of letters written by railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington, which revealed the bribery and corruption that led to the failure of the Texas Pacific Railroad. This southern transcontinental railroad would have competed with the Central Pacific, a railroad in which Huntington had a significant financial stake. The mention of these letters, without including an explicit description of their contents, creates a connection between the reader and the author, establishing a shorthand based on a shared temporal and political context that the characters lack. The letters thus emerge as emblematic of the two conversations that Ruiz de Burton has within her narrative: that of the main plot, and that of the political landscape a decade later.
Huntington’s letters also indicate a point of political departure from which, the author argues, there can be a return. Her consistent urgings for her readers to mentally return to a time before corruption was an assumed force in politics imply that such a political landscape can be regained if only the American people decide to find this behavior again unacceptable. As with Clarence’s refusal to squat for free, an individual’s resistance is valuable within Ruiz de Burton’s political narrative—and her readers, she offers, should resist corruption.
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