DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton Letter

 

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Context: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton is one of the most important Mexican-American voices of the nineteenth century and the first author to write in English. Her views on race, class and gender provide an important glimpse into contestations of power in the U.S. in the nineteenth century.  

 

 

M.A. Ruiz de Burton, letter to M.G. Vallejo, February 15, 1869

 

I feel … a true hatred and contempt (as a good Mexican) for this certain “Manifest Destiny.” Of all the wicked phrases invented by stupid people, there is not one more odious for me than that, the most offensive, the most insulting; it raises the blood in my temples where I hear of it, and I see it instantly in photographs, all that the Yankees have done to make us, the Mexicans, suffer: the robbery of Texas, the war, the robbery of California, the death of Maximilian. If I were to believe in “Manifest Destiny,” I would cease to believe in justice or Divine wisdom. No, friend of mind, this Manifest Destiny is nothing more than “Manifest Yankee trash” …

 

Edited by: Professor Prithi Kanakamedala

Source: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton to Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, 1850 to 1887 (Huntington Library, Manuscripts). 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.