Sentimental Diplomacy

Chapter 3 explores instances of “sentimental diplomacy” in the literary aftermath of the US–Mexican War and Indian Removal. It opens by arguing that the heroines of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—who seek to counter the violence and dispossession of late-nineteenth-century Californios—stand as unrecognized heirs to the women in John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel of Mexican banditry, Joaquín Murieta. Amidst the sensational violence of Joaquín Murieta, the first Native American novel, Mexican and Anglo-American women engage in a sentimental diplomacy that resists rampant racialized violence. In both The Squatter and the Don and Joaquín Murieta, sentimental diplomacy offers local possibilities for peace, but in neither novel can it overcome the war’s brutal legacy or the racism and systemic corruption that followed.