The Squatter and the Don

William Darrell is the “squatter” from the novel’s title. Darrell is one of the few characters who undergoes a significant change of political, social, and ethical positions. At the novel’s start, Darrell is against “squatterism,” though he still feels justified in taking some of Marino’s land as long as he sticks to the procedures laid out for legal settling. He vows to pay Mariano for the land as soon as Mariano’s legal case is settled. Darrell frames this as a moral action, willfully disregarding (as Clarence and Mrs. Darrell frequently remind him) that this does not make up for the losses that Mariano unjustly suffers while the case remains pending.

Indeed, while the decision lingers with the attorney general, Darrell becomes seduced by the admiration of the other squatters, despite finding them to be low-class and immoral people. Even so, his pride allows him to fall for their praise of his stance “against” Mariano. When Darrell learns that Clarence has already paid for the land (something Darrell has long maintained his intent to do), he lashes out due to pride. He attacks Mariano with a whip, though he ultimately strikes Victoriano and Emmett, not the Alamar patriarch. This leads to the separation between him and Clarence for many years.

In the end, Darrell comes to regret his actions, considering himself partially responsible for Alamar’s death. Though Clarence dismisses this fear, the novel supports it; Darrell becomes an irrelevant figure in his family’s lives, disappearing by the end of the narrative. Clarence instead takes up the mantle of head of the Darrell family, serving as both its chief provider and its moral arbiter.

Clarence Darrell is William Darrell’s son and one of the Northern California settlers who come to stake out portions of Mariano’s land. Unlike the other squatters, Clarence actually pays for the land he inhabits, offering Mariano fair market rate for the land that Darrell has staked as his own. He does so secretly, torn between his desire to act according to his principles and his loyalty to his father, whom he does not wish to insult or shame.

Clarence is an idealized hero in the novel; he is analogous to Don Mariano in that he represents the most moral version of an American settler portrayed by Ruiz de Burton. He is honorable, honest, and generous to the best of his ability throughout the text, dealing reasonably with the settlers and Mariano. When he falls in love with Mercedes, the idealized sentimental heroine, he takes her filial piety into account, even when it confuses their potential relationship. Even when this confusion leads to several years of separation, Clarence does not waver in his certainty that he is behaving correctly.

Clarence’s morality is rewarded monetarily and emotionally in the text. By pursing riches that do not (within the framework of the novel) depend on exploiting others, Clarence is shown as being ambitious rather than greedy, a contrast to the railroad men. Similarly, this time away from Mercedes shows him as an honest, loyal son to Mariano (his spiritual father in the text, given his differences with Darrell as the novel progresses), rather than as an indifferent romantic prospect. By the novel’s end, Clarence has oriented himself as the head of the joint Alamar-Darrell family, emerging as a figure of hope for the upcoming generation, even after their loss of San Diego and Mariano.

Mercedes Alamar is the youngest daughter of Mariano and Josefa Alamar, and Clarence’s love interest in the novel. Mercedes is a sentimentalized figure, considered respectful and obedient to her parents, susceptible to emotional distress, and loyal to the man she loves for his strict morality. As a sentimental heroine, Mercedes is an emotional barometer in the text; readers are meant to feel as she does about the events in the text. This emotional sensitivity comes close to seeming supernatural. When Mercedes weeps over a dream that suggests her marriage to Clarence will not go as scheduled, readers are led to trust this will occur in the upcoming chapters.

Mercedes’s appearance is emphasized as it connects to her proximity to whiteness; various characters regularly coo over her blonde curls and blue eyes, emphasizing that despite her Spanish heritage, she is not considered a racial “other” by characters in the narrative who prioritize white supremacist values. Her version of a “happy ending” sees her acting in constant service to her family, as she becomes a nurse to her injured brother, Gabriel, emphasizing the sentimental heroine’s role as an “angel of the house,” a 19th-century archetype that demanded wives and mothers be tranquil, happy women content to attend to unending domestic duties without any desires for themselves.

Peter Roper is a key antagonist in the novel, secondary only to the railroad men who control the fate of the Texas Pacific. Roper is a corrupt, unethical lawyer who arrives in San Diego at the novel’s midpoint, intending to become the primary legal power in the city, with no care for who is harmed as he achieves this task. Roper represents the decline of San Diego—he arrives when the Texas Pacific, long assumed, becomes in question. As the other investors in Southern California lose their livelihoods to San Diego’s decline, Roper becomes increasingly powerful, as he follows, albeit on a smaller scale, the same methods of corruption and bribery as do the railroad monopolists that stand in the novel’s primary antagonistic force.

Though Roper’s success reinforces Ruiz de Burton’s pessimism about the country’s fate in the face of corruption and greed, he does hit a limitation. When Roper makes crass jokes about his mother as part of a stump speech during his short-lived political candidacy, he sees the community turn against him despite his connections to a powerful judge. Ruiz de Burton thus suggests that there is hope despite the rampant corruption in California and that a point will arrive where the people will no longer stand for such injustice.