Hacienda cattle brand
Forty years ago, traveling by train in Mexico, I saw, in remote areas, what appeared to be miniature villages. I made sketches of them from the train and later visited some of the sites and learned they were ancient haciendas. Over the years since then, I have visited 330 haciendas and made the first art record of these estates. I traveled on horseback, on foot, by bus, train, car, truck, motorbike, and mule-drawn, narrow-gauge railway. I saw that haciendas had become mere place-names as they disintegrated or were bulldozed.
Walk into a handsome mansion and you find twenty or thirty empty rooms. To escape the revolution, the owner fled years earlier. Earthquakes, weather, and abandonment have riddled walls and floors. The residence stands roofless, windowless, doorless—constructed of stone, brick and adobe, or a combination of these. Church and chapel exist at every hacienda and they are still used by neighbors and peasants who may occupy the manor house. There are dates on bell skirts, on walls or beams of a storage bodega, on escutcheons, on archways; often they are carved in the mesquite floor of a chapel or church.
In the tropics, flame trees, bougainvillea, red-orange galeanas, lavender jacaranda, and yellow primavera flower among ruins. In northern areas, pine, tall eucalypti, mesquite, cedar, pepper, and chinaberry remain.
I sketched under the tropic sun, in corrals, in a bullring, under an Indian laurel; I poked through empty rooms.
As I sketched, burro trains passed, their sacks loaded with charcoal or corn; goat bells tapped as a herd grazed; ox teams hauled carts with wooden wheels; blackbirds crowded a treetop; a cowboy tipped his hat.
There was always courtesy. I drank pulque from a communal gourd; I shared pineapple grown in Tecomán; I was entertained at town houses of hacendados. On the estates there was silence from the days of the viceroys, the silence of padres, the silence of abandonment.