Competing Land Claims and Racial Hierarchies in the Works of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Alexander Posey, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Charles Lummis

Abstract

This project explicates the ways in which writers from different cultural groups (Anglo American, American Indian, and Mexican American) used literature to defend the land claims of increasingly marginalized peoples within the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. Each of the writers I discuss (Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Alexander Posey, Charles Lummis, and Helen Hunt Jackson) constructs and manipulates racial hierarchies in order to assert the comparative virtues of the cultural group for whom they advocate. I explore each writer's perceptions of proper land use and legitimate land claims and how these perceptions are informed by disparate cultural inheritances. By looking at authors from different backgrounds, writing from different regions in the United States, I am able to establish the frequency with which racialist assumptions guided popular opinion and U.S. law around the turn of the twentieth century--specifically in regards to land claims. I situate my reading of literary works within the historical context that made competitions for land particularly fierce during this period.