The Squatter And The Don Essay Research — страница 2

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matter their color, class, or ethnicity. Her intended audience wasn t solely to be that of her own racial ethnicity, specifically because she spoke kindly of the people she must have abhorred the most. She didn t alienate one particular race, but rather showed the underlying humanness of all, be it good and genuine or evil and callus. By reaching out to everybody, Ruiz de Burton is able to comfortably tell her story in a way in which everybody can pull in the information and understand how race and power have walked hand-in-hand in creating the problems that she s writing about. Ruiz de Burton is successful in bringing her points about for several reasons. First of all, she doesn t try to make herself sound like a hero to end all of the problems by trying to incorporate plots to

make wrongs into rights. This could have easily been done, but by doing so it would have taken the focus off of what she was trying to accomplish in telling the plight of the native Californios. Also, she s straight-forward and delivers to us an interesting blend of thoughts that make us realize what the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago actually brought forth upon the Californios population that wasn t white, and the population that was white. The brutality and greed of the government to expand their territory is what stuck out the most though. It s well known that our government has long stepped on people on the way to their imperialistic-capalism laced grand society. Much is also known about how much injustice the government did to the Native American indigenous

population, but little known about how the US government handled the Mexicans. Ruiz de Burton showed through this novel many of the unjust and corrupt acts the US used to keep this population down and pose little threat to their interests. Eyes were opened to problems and actions never thought of or gained from US History textbooks. One final strength is that she used romance as a major theme of the book. A person that isn t interested in a romance novel, quickly became interested in following the path of Clarence and Mercedes, making the novel run smoothly and quickly. This is a great book for anyone who isn t aware of the corruption in the government in dealing with aspects of Mexican-United States relations, or how race and power created a constant power struggle and

misunderstanding of one another. It provides a conquered viewpoint to the conquered and the conqueror.