Andrea is a fourth-year transfer majoring in English. Her research considers a battery of US laws that significantly reduced Mexican-Americans’ property rights and legal status throughout the nineteenth century. When the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the peace treaty promised that Mexicans who suddenly lived in the United States of America would retain the privileges that they previously enjoyed pertaining to citizenship and property. Yet, empirical records show this is not the case. Property battles loom over Mexican-American author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don. Set in post-Mexican-American War California, landowning Mexican-American families confront new laws regarding their properties, which Articles VIII, IX, and X of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo previously secured. Even more frustrating to many Mexican-American land-owning elites, these new laws reflected a change in the American mindset. Anglo-Americans no longer thought of formerly white-passing Mexican-Americans as equal in terms of standing before the law and “whiteness.” This research project examines the ways and extent to which Ruiz de Burton’s novel expresses such legal and social changes, closely scrutinizing primary and secondary sources to more completely understand citizenship for Californios in the nineteenth century.