that I wrote to the architect-artist to inform him of my pleasure. Subsequently, I saw examples of his devotion to the great haciendas with their strong Mexican-Spanish coloration, and always I enjoyed his reminders of what life in colonial Mexico must have been like for the favored classes. It is rewarding to renew my acquaintance with this remarkable body of work, for it is a reassuring example of what a lifetime of scholarship can accomplish. +Preface+ The haciendas of Mexico have a special appeal for me. They represent a way of life that is now gone--some would say fortunately, since it was often a burdensome and cruel way of life for the peasant workers, a way of life that eventually motivated a revolution and the dissolution of the majority of hacienda landholdings. Many haciendas can be reached only with difficulty by horse or by foot, by boat or motorcycle or jeep. Their isolation from the culture of Europe, three hundred years ago, impresses the mind with its severity. In their isolation, these estates recall the brave attempts of hacienda families to re-establish cultivated patterns of living in the New World, with fine china and crystal, grand pianos and chapel organs, ornate furnishings, paintings, and tapestries. For my project, I received no financial rewards. Hence, I made repeated trips to Mexico, each funded by the modest savings accumulated in the United States between visits, with the hacienda project ever in mind. My wife, Elizabeth encouraged my efforts. She was my mainstay, my constant friend and faithful companion. Our son, Steven, was born in Mexico and was raised in a world punctuated by hacienda visits; he was my _compañero_ on many hacienda trips. The three of us usually returned to Mexico to stay for a year or two at a time. To find out where haciendas were located in a particular area, I turned to local government officials, owners of village stores, the postman, or the peasant who delivered charcoal on his burro. Mostly, I found the haciendas on random trips, when their archways and rooftops appeared in the distance. In 1941, when I began this project, few studies of the Mexican hacienda had been made. Only a handful of scholars had visited individual haciendas, and had gained first-hand familiarity with a limited number of them. To this day, with the possible exception of my own work, this is still true. And it is certain to remain true, since many of the haciendas I visited no longer exist. My own interest in that heritage was to re-create the special aura that my visits to more than three hundred haciendas had created. As an artist I felt an enduring affinity with a time that is no more, a heritage and tradition that may be recaptured only, I think, through the medium of art. This, then, is an attempt to survey the story of the haciendas. It is not a treatise about their economic structure, their political influence, or their historical importance in the establishment of New Spain. Despite the meager records relating to the many individual haciendas, there are excellent studies of regional haciendas in Mexico. The reader will find references to them in the Bibliography. The text was written to accompany a selection of my hacienda illustrations, including descriptions of hacienda life based on information received from personal contacts with hacienda families and caretakers who could still recall the old days. My impressions and commentary are offered to enable the reader to leave the twentieth century for a while and return to a period when the freshly colonized American continent witnessed the...