1870s San Diego County, where the fictional Amaro family clashed with esquatas, Anglo Americans who "improved" the Amaro family ranch in order to lay legal claim to the land. Considered the United States' first female Mexican-American author, Maria Ruiz de Burton had been politicized through her personal experiences in California after the Mexican American War. Before the publication of her novel, she wrote to her cousin, "It cannot be denied that the Californians have reason to complain. The Americans must know it; their boasted liberty and equality of rights seem to stop when it meets a Californian ... And now we have to beg for what we had the right to demand." The publication of Burton's novel coincided with several other important developments in California for Mexican Americans. The decade witnessed the official dismantling of Spanish usage in official government documents, around the same time the Gilded Age practice of voter suppression emerged to disenfranchise African American peoples from having a say in the functions of government. For Mexican Americans, in general, the Gilded Age was a period of abrupt economic change, political disenfranchisement, and demographic displacement. While there was significant immigrant labor entering the Southwest from Mexico during this period through the railroads, it was dwarfed by the tidal wave of Anglos moving West from New York and other ports of entry. While the 1880s brought major changes, the coming years would emerge as a retrenchment of racial animosity. Rise of Juan Crow If the 1880s represented a period of massive cultural and economic change for Mexican Americans in the U.S. Southwest, the 1890s were marked by renewed racial conflict and social unrest. In El Paso, which experienced a massive influx of white American migrants to the region after the completion of the Southern Pacific railway line, there was a widespread retrenchment of racial animosity. Interracial marriage, which had theretofore been tacitly allowed in some parts of Texas, became a crime increasingly targeted by Texan officials. Throughout the state, a new code of racial relations and series of ordinances worked to create segregated racial neighborhoods. These laws targeted Native Americans, black Americans, Asians, and Mexican Americans. They have been described as Juan Crow, the rough equivalent to the Jim Crow laws emerging in the South. In El Paso, Mexicans Americans were demonized as ignorant, and therefore both ineligible and unworthy of the vote. White Texans also frequently characterized them