The Squatter and the Don

Content Warning: This section of the guide references racist policy, rhetoric, and violence (including allusions to chattel enslavement), sexist attitudes, animal death, gun violence, and possible death by suicide.

Don Mariano Alamar is the patriarch of the Alamar family and the titular don of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel. Mariano is generous, honest, and fair. Despite losing his lands to the squatters, he blames only the lawmakers who allowed this legal theft, not the specific squatters who have taken over his lands. He offers to help the squatters shift their farms to grazing land instead of faming land, even suggesting that he adopt the initial costs. Though Mariano insists that this offer is not entirely a matter of goodness but rather a scheme to protect his dwindling herd of cattle, other characters in the novel that are framed as moral authorities (such as Clarence) note that this is an exceedingly generous offer.

Mariano, like most of the novel’s characters, is relatively static throughout the text. Rather than operating as an agent of change within the novel, he stands in as an emblem of a previous era being tragically lost. While the novel focuses much of this loss on the hopes that