Romancing Globalism in the California Borderlands: The Squatter and the Don's Pro-Rail Discourse and Maritime Desire

The panel recognizes that while we may never recover from our Ruiz de Burton addiction, we can re-cover the text in a more productive manner. “Romancing Globalism in the California Borderlands: The Squatter and the Don’s... [ view full abstract ]

The panel recognizes that while we may never recover from our Ruiz de Burton addiction, we can re-cover the text in a more productive manner. “Romancing Globalism in the California Borderlands: The Squatter and the Don’s Pro-Rail Discourse and Maritime Desire” performs that very function by taking up Alemán’s use of the word “fetish” in terms of what have become paradigms for interpreting Ruiz de Burton’s novels. Therefore, perhaps we do not need to “recover” from Ruiz de Burton as much as we need to uncover other frameworks that decentralize romance, interethnic marriages and the U.S. nation-state. The paper prioritizes economy before romance by centralizing overlooked narrations of transnational trade in the California borderlands and argues for the novel’s aim to enrich bourgeois Californio families as well as suture geographies cleaved by the Mexican American War via the development of robust border economies with San Diego as a global commercial hub. The essay brings forward the novel’s pro-rail discourse and its maritime commercial “desire” for achieving these ends, which Ruiz de Burton, a capitalist and economic visionary, aspired to with no avail in her lifetime. Ruiz de Burton’s published, but largely understudied, Spanish-language letters inform this paper's critical thrust.