The Squatter and the Don

The “no fence” law refers to the 1874 California law that determined that farmers were no longer required to protect planted fields from ranging livestock. This was a departure from the Trespass Act of 1850, which required the erection and maintenance of fences. This shift in law allowed farmers to forego the expense of fencing their fields. This allowed them to kill cattle that wandered into their fields, tempted by the growing crops. This law was considered a notable shift between legal preference for the cattlemen over the farmers to the reverse.

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton focuses on the racial difference between these two groups throughout the novel. The farmers were overwhelmingly white Anglo-Americans while the cattlemen were primarily Spano-Americans who had lived in California before its annexation to the United States. In the novel, this demographic divide and its inherent tensions become central to ongoing, escalating tensions about access to and control of land. Therefore, the “no fence” laws emerge in the novel as a symbol of hegemonic greed; the farmers, as the novel’s representation of the law suggests, are unsatisfied with a small, contained parcel of land. Instead, they desire all that the Spano-Americans own. Ruiz de Burton depicts the farmers as harboring opportunistic ambitions for land expansion at a time when San Diego was experiencing rapid transformation due to westward expansion and territorial annexation.