The Hacienda Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
“Hacienda San Isidro. Madness and torment. This could never be a home for my mother, no matter how hard I worked to fix it, no matter how much porcelain and glass arrived from the capital. No matter how many exorcisms tried to drive the evil from its bones. Mama would never plant flowers in this garden, nor orange trees nor birds of paradise nor the olives that the hacendados had discussed introducing their own properties at dinner. It was a cursed place. It could never be home. Not for her. Not for me.”
Isabel Cañas’s debut novel The Hacienda is a gothic, supernatural, haunted house story set in 1823 rural Mexico following the Mexican War of Independence. Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca, others have said, which is a strikingly accurate comparison. The women protagonists in each novel move into their rich husbands’ or family’s isolated mansions, only to discover how haunted they are by the past. However, unlike its comparison points, The Hacienda— the youngest of the three novels— uniquely exposes the anxiety of housing insecurity, especially for women and especially during and after wartime. The horror of dead wives, violent men, and paranormal activity are compounded by a sense of being trapped in a house bent on destroying you, because there’s nowhere else for you to go. Our women protagonists must get creative and unearth the root of the hauntings before it’s too late. The Hacienda is about indigeneity, mother-daughter relationships, colorism and caste, witchcraft and the Inquisition, budding (and forbidden) love, and the determination needed to survive being home.
Beatriz arrives at her newly wed’s ancestral estate, Hacienda San Isidro, expecting to make the mansion her home so that her mother can come visit, despite her mother’s opposition to her marriage. But immediately Beatriz notices something strange about the hacienda, and about her new family; both hold dark secrets. After her husband leaves for the capital, Beatriz must face the house alone, and it nearly kills her. When she meets a local priest, Padre Andres, she finally finds someone who feels the house as she feels it, who recognizes something wrong, who believes her and doesn’t think she’s hysterical, who can actually help her. But even after enlisting Andres’s aid, the house resists. When Beatriz discovers a dead body in one of the walls, a mystery opens before her: Who is this in the wall? Who put her there? Why? What does her husband know? And why does the evidence disappear when others are looking? Is she the one haunting the house? Together with Padre Andres and his family, Beatriz must uncover the truth if she ever wants to escape the clutches of the hacienda.
Although the author included five or six mentions the “azure sky”, I thought the novel excitingly and dazzlingly written. I’m eager to read her next novel, Vampires of El Norte.