These continued indignities suffered by Mexicans and Mexican Americans did not go completely ignored, however. In 1885, María Ruiz de Burton, a Californian Mexican-American, published "The Squatter and the Don", a novel set in 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 Chicana 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.