1898] Hacienda 



for a day and a night at the ample hacienda of Abundant 

 Atequiza, a great rancbo twenty-four miles out of hos P ltaht y 

 Guadalajara, near Lake Chapala, Jalisco; for Senor 

 Joaquin Cuesta, head of the house, whom I had 

 previously met in San Francisco, had invited us to 

 visit him when in his neighborhood. The lordly 

 courtesy and hospitality of our host we found 

 thoroughly delightful. Going about the estate, I 

 was much interested in the contrast between pro- 

 gressive American methods and the primitive cus- 

 toms of an unscientific people. Don Joaquin, for 

 example, was operating a modern flouring mill 

 stocked with machinery from Rochester, New York, 

 but the soil was still plowed with crooked sticks 

 because the peons persistently refused to have 

 anything to do with gringo inventions. 



With the revolution of 1912 came the downfall Great 

 of the hacienda system, and the seizure of the land ** t 

 by the people, who now usually hold it in com- the people 

 munistic fashion. As is generally recognized, this 

 upheaval paralleled that in France in the eighteenth 

 century and the recent one in Russia; inevitable 

 also as it was, it necessarily involved terrible in- 

 justice and misery to a tenderly reared class which 

 had, however, not been the one to suffer before ! The 

 fate of Atequiza formed no exception to the common 

 lot, and Modesto Rolland, a Mexican friend, tells 

 me that the courtly and kindly Don Joaquin was 

 shot by Francisco Villa in a raid in Jalisco. 



Throughout our travels, notably at Guadalupe 

 Hidalgo, Zacatecas, and Cholula, we were in- 

 terested in the votive chapels. To them people 

 afflicted by one or another malady, ranging from 

 earthquakes to the "evil eye," come from near and 



641 3 



