What the plantation has been to the history and literature of the 
American South, the hacienda has been to Mexico and the American 
Southwest. In Remembering the Hacienda, Vincent Pérez makes the 
case that the hacienda offers the emblem of an "antebellum," agrarian 
social order that predates the United States.

    It is the site in which the Mexican American community's "heroic," 
genteel forebears lived in dignity and pride, and it is the heritage 
from which they were cast out as "orphans," both in mother Mexico 
by the Revolution and in the American Southwest when the wars of 
1836 and 1846–48 and capitalist land grabs dispossessed the 
Mexican hacendados. The hacienda, Pérez argues, had its own 
orphans, too: Indians, mestizos, women, and peons.

    To trace the importance of the hacienda and its heroes and 
orphans in Mexican American culture, Pérez examines five novels 
and autobiographies: Jovita González and Eve Raleigh's Caballero: 
A Historical Novel (written in the 1930s and 1940s and later 
published by Texas A&M University Press), María Maparo Ruiz de 
Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885), Mariano Guadalupe 
Vallejo's Historical and Personal Memoirs Relating to Alta, California 
(1874), Leo Carrillo's The California I Love (1961), and Francisco 
Róbles Pérez's immigrant autobiography "Memorias." The last work 
is Pérez's own grandfather's life narrative.

_________________________________________________________

VINCENT PÉREZ, an associate professor at the University of 
Nevada–Las Vegas, holds a Ph.D. in modern thought and literature 
from Stanford University.


Number Eleven: Rio Grande/Río Bravo: Borderlands Culture and 
Traditions


What people are saying about this book

". . . a valuable contribution to an ongoing search for new historical 
paradigms in Chicana/o studies, especially in the emergent debates 
about the power and limitation of narrative. . . . well-conceived, 
clearly organized, and lucidly written."—Louis Mendoza, University 
of Minnesota

". . . a timely study of early Mexican American texts . . . written in an 
engaging style."—Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez, University of 
California–Merced