II. Through the Eyes of Hacienda Visitors
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Through the years there were notable visitors to the haciendas who have left us their impressions: Bishop Landa, Father Alonso Ponce, Gemelli Gareri, Samuel de Champlain, John Chilton, Mora y Escobar, Sieur Bully, Fathers Balalenque and Acosta, Thomas Gage ("clerical spy"), Don Ernesto de Icaza, Emperor Iturbide, Emperor Maximilian I, Baron von Humboldt, Madame Calderón de la Barca, James Stephens, and Frederick Catherwood, among others.
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One of the most famous haciendas, in the state of Jalisco, is Ciénega de Mata, legalized by the Crown in 1697. Owned by the Rincón Gallardo family, it was a tract of eighty-seven estancias (ranches). According to Alfonso Rincón Gallardo, reminiscing about his father's estate, the residence was built during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is a two-story building with twenty rooms and spans or arches across the front. The church is gray limestone, like the residence, with a baroque façade. An elaborate coat-of-arms embellishes the entry. Sculptured pink stone cantera saints and angels fill various niches. The octagonal dome and tower are richly carved.
Gallardo appreciated the life at Ciénega, the brandings, the roundups, sheep pasturing, shearings, and weanings. "I liked to ride with the cowboys," he wrote, "those extraordinary horsemen, pleasant companions, tanned by sun and wind, simple in tastes, frank, never tiring—the classic men of the great haciendas."
Recalling his life he tells us:
Every morning after breakfast, all of us—my father dressed in his charro outfit; my mother attired English style—would set out on horseback, riding about the hacienda's vast fields of corn and barley. After the midday meal, back at the house, we walked about the stables, the granaries, and over a small hill that lay nearby; and sometimes we played fronton or went out riding again. At night, after supper, we read or played games. In this tranquil, pleasant manner, life went on, broken only by the annual festival, an event celebrated on a grand scale with parades, banquets, horse races, cockfights, boxing matches, and, in the evening, a fantastic display of fireworks.
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Brantz Mayer, secretary of the United States Legation in Mexico during 1841 and 1842, enjoyed a horseback visit to the Hacienda de San Nicolás, near Tetécala, in the state of Mexico. He admired the white buildings and the neatness of the estate: "The sugarcane fields were in capital order, the roads smooth, the fences maintained; cattle were under the care of herdsmen."
The mayordomo was hospitable and accommodated Mayer and his party with comfortable rooms. Following dinner, Mayer walked among the hacienda's fields of sugarcane. He inspected the tienda de raya (the general store), and the hacienda's offices, kitchens, parlors, bedrooms, and an "immense corridor of arches filled with caged birds, hung with hammocks, where the family pass most of the long warm days of summer."
At sunset the workers gathered under the arches of the residence and the administrator called the roll and each man replied with "Alabo a Dios" ("I praise God"). When all were dismissed they walked away singing a hymn to the Virgin.... That night a group of musicians played in a hut: violin, clarinet, flute, and drum.
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In 1833, travelers Emma Undsay Squier and her husband were guests at a tequila hacienda, Ometusco, about an hour and a half by horseback from Mexico City. From the railroad station, the complex appeared like a "salmon-pink birthday cake in the shape of a walled fortress." The buildings were surrounded by fields of maguey. The Squiers entered the grounds through a large gateway where soldiers lounged. The walled patio was enormous and paved with stone. Burros trotted by, bearing casks of freshly collected agua miel (sap of the maguey).
Ometusco was the size of a village; the hacendado's home was a palace of many rooms, kitchens, winding stairways, patios, poultry yards, corrals. The largest patio, centered by a stone fountain, was planted with flowers, trees, and flowering vines. A tiny school had its own patio. The chapel was elaborate. Guests enjoyed a billiard room in the main house. Each bedroom had beds protected by mosquito netting. The dining room could seat seventy persons at a mahogany table. Inlaid buffets glittered with silver and glassware, seldom to be seen after the revolutionary period of 1910-1914.
By 1952, the renowned Hacienda Cabezón had become a mere casco (a shell). Located about 48 miles from Guadalajara, near Ameca, the residence was designed in 1780 by the famous architect Francisco Eduardo de Tresguerras. Now, grunting, shuffling pigs have squatters' rights to the fifteen rooms. The building is roofless; its handpainted bedroom walls are open to the weather, all that remains of the handsome structure, once the focal point of fifteen or twenty sitios (ranches), is the chapel, pewless, clean, its walls faded red, gold, and yellow. Swallows fly in and out of their nests in the gold curlicues of the reredos.
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Cabezón has a single treasure: the Virgin of Candelaria, protected by a plate-glass case. Her face seems Andalusian. Colored scrolls, garlands, and angels frame her as she stands on a silver crescent moon, her figure the center of a gilded reredo. About 18 inches tall, she wears a white satin gown sewn with gold. A jeweled pearl crown rests on her hair, making her the perfect madonna. Close by, under the dark mesquite floor, members of the hacienda family are buried: Ignacio Cañedo de Valdivierlos (1836); Estanislao Cañedo (1887); Manuel Calixto Cañedo (1905).
According to a chiseled inscription, the floor was laid in 1858 and cost 166 pesos.
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The land belonging to the famous ecclesiastical hacienda, Santa Lucía, was purchased by the Jesuits on December 4, 1576. Legally, the estate's area measured 18.8 square miles, an area populated by Otomi, Tepaneca, and Chichimeca Indians. At the time of its purchase it had 16,800 sheep, 1,400 goats, 125 brood mares and colts, 1 stallion, 1 saddle horse, 2 donkey mares, 2 donkey stallions, and 8 slaves.
During the 1580s, construction work was carried out on residences, offices, storage buildings, corrals, sheds, and quarters for the slaves. A chapel was built in 1592. The hacienda produced barley, oats, beans, wheat, corn, chickpeas, and livestock: cattle, sheep, goats, mules, and horses, in increasing numbers each year. Santa Lucía prospered for nearly two centuries.
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Cuisillos is another Jalisco hacienda, a place of jacaranda, palms, eucalyptus, ash, and mesquite, near Cabezón. Horizon hills are often steel blue, and a low-lying volcano is often misty gray. Cuisillos, deeded in 1620, first belonged to Juan González de Apodaca, chief constable under Cortéz. During the sixteenth century it was one of the largest estates in Mexico and added substantial revenues to the Crown. Neoclassic, its casa principal (main house) and chapel form an L, and fronting the L is a grove of palms. The main house has thirty rooms, two tiled patios with a fountain in each; in the main patio there are fourteen fresco panels painted in 1910 of seascapes, landscapes, and scenes of women in the eighteenth century.
The grilled patio gate bears the renovation date 1910 and the hacienda brand and family monogram. All rooms are still roofed and floored. The house is putting up a valiant struggle. Its primitive kitchen has an igloo-shaped oven with a charcoal basket dangling from its chimney pipe. A corkscrew limestone stairway leads to the chapel tower where there are bronze bells whose skirt dates are 1895, 1895, 1896, and 1896; the fifth bell has no date. The chapel façade is ornate. The interior is simple: a small coro (choir gallery), with a small darkwood organ that is badly battered. The walls of the chapel are white and gold.
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A neighboring hacienda is architecturally imposing. The Hacienda Cañedo has a church that would be outstanding in any city. The building, of yellow limestone, is baroque-Italianate. It towers above the surrounding structures and is amazing for its spire and its twelve stone apostles in the forecourt—8-foot carvings of limestone on stone pedestals—native craft at its finest.
The church interior is blue, white, and gold. Sedate. The black mesquite floor has a carved strip leading to the altar, and the words on the strip indicate when the floor was laid and what it cost. Altar and decorations are simple: brass candle holders, vases with paper flowers. There are solid-backed wooden pews in cedar. The room expresses spaciousness.
The residence, which adjoins the church, is a stone mansion with badly scaled walls. All rooms are vacant except the kitchen, a charcoal-blackened room with smudged clay pots and a row of cracked white plates in racks above a tiled stone stove. Around this casco are other buildings, storage rooms—all stone, all neglected. At one time, according to a wall sign, there was a biblioteca rural (rural library) in the complex.
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In the state of Hidalgo, the Hacienda de San Francisco—a pulque estate—was refurbished in 1880. The twenty-room mansion stands in a giant field of maguey ringed by hills. Fifty carriages could park in front. Once there were twin swimming pools, a bullring, and fifty Japanese gardeners to maintain the gardens.
The residence has rooms around a flower-weed-garbage patio. The building is in a pseudo Arabian-Spanish style. On a wall there is a crank-style phone. There is electricity and a broken television antenna. A large sala (parlor) has a number of ornate tables, tufted velvet couches, and silk-damask chairs; imported brocaded drapes are fastened by gold sashes, all from France via train, ox cart, and tumpline. On the stairway leading to the roof, the hacienda workers killed the owner in 1910.
Occasionally there are guests, weekenders. Barefooted girls wearing braids serve among the antiques.
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Far south, in Yucatán, Yaxcopoíl is a working henequén hacienda, a survivor of two centuries, still semi-successful economically. Located about forty miles from Mérida, on the Uxmal-Campeche highway, the residence forms a U. Residence, chapel, offices, and storage space are eighteenth-century structures. The main house has thirteen arches along its broad veranda and micro-chapel. This section of the complex is connected by an imposing pillared breezeway to the dining room, kitchen, and servants' quarters.
The floor of the extensive patio between these buildings is paved with flagstone carved with Mayan glyphs and designs, appropriated from nearby ruins on the property. The residence is furnished in eighteenth and nineteenth-century styles with marble-topped tables, bronze and brass beds, dangling chain lamps with handpainted globes and shades, henequén hammocks, and tanned hides on tile floors. Bathroom fixtures are British and washbasins with silver faucets bear a porcelainized coat-of-arms.
There are reed chairs in the living room. Mediocre prints and a seventeenth-century religious canvas decorate the walls. The floor tiles are conventional in pattern; there are no rugs; the ceiling beams are stenciled in pastel floral designs. Double doors lead to the veranda. The dining room has a center table with a Tiffany-type lamp. In the office there are chairs, an oak desk, a handpress, and a bookcase.
In the micro-chapel, its wall decorated with gold and silver fleur-de-lys and pink roses, there is a large sixteenth-century canvas by an accomplished, anonymous artist: the descent from the cross, with eight or ten figures merging with the background. There are no chairs. The altar is small, insignificant. A white Seybold organ, a silver crucifix, a pair of silver candles on a side table complete the furnishings.
Behind the residence stands a theater with simple stone façade and pilaster figures of women representing spring, summer, autumn, and winter. A windmill spins behind a carved Mayan head perched on the roof line. The auditorium accommodates a couple of hundred people for movies and plays.
The henequén production mill consists of a large open shed with a corrugated roof. There is a machine press for crushing the maguey leaves, which are hauled in by narrow-gauge flat cars, pulled by mules or Ford-engine. There are fence-like racks behind the mill for drying thousands of fibers at one time. Employees here work on salary; today there are no feudal restrictions.
From the rooftop of the residence, Mayan ruins are visible as earthen mounds in the midst of maguey plantings. The seven mounds are an unexplored archaeological site.
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The imposing Hacienda San José Huejotzingo is near the city of Puebla in the state of Puebla. Its stark one-story red brick, white brick façade faces a lane of dying elm and willow. The residence measures 170 feet across the front. At each corner there is an ornamental tower. The house encloses two patios. Destroyed by revolutionaries, its chapel and storage areas are roofless, but the residential rooms have been reconditioned. They are filled with recuerdos (mementos): incunabula, antique firearms, a suit of Italian armor, oil paintings, Aztec figures, charro spurs, leather chests, colonial tables and chairs.
In the dining room are tall ecclesiastical wooden candelabra, carved cedar chairs, monogrammed chests, pre-Columbian objects, colonial pottery, and old dishes. Modern Tonalá pottery ornaments a nineteenth-century buffet. Throughout the residence the floors are red tile.
The central patio has a 5-foot limestone statue of St. Joseph, carved in 1624. It stands near a wall tile that reads: Margarita Barrados, died June 3, 1871. A stone plaque of a conquistador on horseback, in primitive style, decorates another wall.
The property—a corn, wheat, and cattle estate dating from Cortesian days—is owned by Juan Matienzo, who has made a hobby of reconstructing his ancestral home. Few other haciendas have Popocatépetl's 18,000-foot peak looming behind.
San Martín Rinconada, a feudal hacienda, is halfway between Puebla and Jalapa on the Jalapa route. The buildings are enclosed in a compound. The protective walls, 30 feet high, are in good condition—mellowed by age. Extensive cornfields surround the compound, which is about one half-block square.
An intricate grilled gateway opens to a plateresque church. The church clock keeps time, and the stone sundial by the corral also keeps time, hacienda time. Behind the church, a windowless chapel, with double doors for light and air, contains five mauled wooden desks, dusty benches of adzed wood, and a cracked blackboard. This was once a school.
Outside the compound, facing the church, are adobe huts roofed with straw. They accommodated the workers, their poultry, pigs, and dogs. Perhaps one hundred people lived in the twenty huts. A shingle-roofed pozo (well) supplies water for horses, cattle, and people, spilling it into a 20-foot wooden trough. Gun slots in the compound walls slant toward the well and trough. Zapatistas and Carrancistas threatened the hacienda in 1914; they banged on the residence door and demanded beef and saddle horses but left the property undamaged.
Now empty, the bedrooms are papered in gold and white and are semi-frescoed overhead. A minute patio, facing several bedrooms, has a few shabby cypress. The sala has no furnishings.
Stained-glass windows, humble panes of colored glass, light the auditorium that seated one hundred people. Behind a plaster life-size Christ on the altar hangs a dark red velvet drape; nearby, on the same wall, is a tortured Christus. A pair of prayer wheels stands by the altar. Chandeliers are encased in white covers, carefully tied. There are stubby oak candelabra with fat candles that have dripped wax. A foxed, framed letter is dated 1742.