INGRESOS POR APLICACIÓN DE MÁRGENES A LOS CENTROS DE

foreign film crew and the wealthy Mexican owners of the hacienda. 59 Porter lengthened the second version from an article into a work of fiction, which is both more despairing and personal than the first. Porter was already making plans to leave Mexico when she visited the hacienda, and was looking for a subject which might accurately reflect how she felt about Mexico. It was a good moment to step back and reflect on what changes, if any, the revolution had brought.

Change, or more precisely the lack of change, is the theme of "Hacienda". "Hacienda" illuminates the many meanings of change, as the narrator explains at the beginning of the story: "Now that the true Revolution of blessed memory has come and gone in Mexico, the names of many things are changed, nearly always with the view to an appearance of heightened well-being for all creatures"(135).60 Darlene Harbour Unrue, in Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction (1 9 8 5 ), uses Porter's definition of change to suggest the themes of "Hacienda" where: "change sometimes is an illusion; mere motion is sometimes confused with change; immutability is impossible; and change itself does not ensure melioration. The appearance of change is mistaken for true change..."(87).

"Hacienda" continues the theme of the difficulty of change begun in "Maria Concepciôn". In "Hacienda" the renaming of the train classes illustrates the lack of real change and symbolises the hollowness of the revolution for Porter: "So you cannot ride third-class no matter how poor or humble-spirited or miserly you may be. You may go second in cheerful disorder and sociability, or first in sober ease."6l The train Journey is one indication of how little Mexico has changed since the revolution.

"Haciertda" recalls "The Mexican Trinity". The changes Porter had hoped the revolution would instigate have not happened, and the triumvirate still controls Mexico: the foreign interests, the hacendados and the church continue their grip on the Indian. Porter's portrait of the Mexican oligarchy is as unremittingly negative as it was in "Virgin Violeta". The hacienda has survived since the time of the Spanish conquest and its

hacendado, don Genaro, treats the tragedy of Justino as merely a discussion about property rights. Don Genaro considers the Indian peons to be his property. Just as his Spanish ancestors did: "I told him, Justino is my peon, his family have lived for three hundred years on our hacienda, this is MY business"(l 55). The disintegration of the 59 The article is based on a Journey Porter made to the Hacienda Tetlapayac, north-east of Mexico City, where the Russian film director, Sergei Eisenstein, had gone with his crew and an entourage of Mexican government officials in May 1931. He was filming the second of four major stories based on the Mexican Revolution, Que Viva Mexico!. The project was financed by the American writer Upton Sinclair, but the film was never completed.

60 "Hacienda" in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. 1 3 5 -1 7 0 . 61 Ibid.

hacienda because of don Genaro's refusal to modernise is symbolised by decadent sexual relationships. His affair with the actress, Lolita, is not unexpected. However, the affair of his bored wife, dofta Julia with Lolita is not only unexpected but sterile: no heir can come from this liaison. Porter suggests that the old order is being usurped in a depraved manner.62

The foreigners, with the exception of the narrator, are equally pernicious. Kennedy, the American with whom the narrator takes the train to the hacienda, has recently returned from " 'God's country', meaning to say California"(138) and sits in the train carriage, "among a dark inferior people"(135). He complains continually about the Indians, the dirt and the heat: he brings his own oranges with him from California to avoid eating local produce. Kennedy cannot take pleasure in anything he sees. The narrator is able to observe the landscape whilst Kennedy rants, and her description of a miniature Eden is at odds with his perception of Mexico:

Some day I shall make a poem to kittens washing themselves in the mornings; to Indians scrubbing their clothes to rags and their bodies to sleekness, with great slabs of sweet-smelling strong soap and wisps of henequen fiber, in the shade of trees, along river banks at midday; to horses rolling sprawling snorting rubbing themselves against the grass to cleanse theit healthy hides; to naked children shouting in pools; to hens singing in their dust baths; to sober fathers of families forgetting themselves in song under the discreet flood of tap-waten to birds on the boughs ruffling and oiling their feathers in delight; to girls and boys arranging themselves cleanly and comely to the greater glory of life (139).

The lyricism of Porter's description recalls the joyous portrait of the Indians in "Xochimilco". It also illustrates the subjectivity of perception: what the narrator delights in, Kennedy fails to see because he has decided Mexico has nothing to offer. However, it is not only the foreigners who cannot see Mexico. Betancourt, the cosmopolitan artist, is condemned to perpetually distort Mexico because: "Betancourt, Mexican by birth, French-Spanish by blood, French by education, was completely at the mercy of an ideal of elegance and detachment perpetually at war with a kind of Mexican nationalism which afflicted him like an inherited weakness of the nervous system"(l 52).

Betancourt is disabled by his internationalism. Further, his vision of Mexico is dominated not by a desire to see Mexico reflected accurately and truthfully to the outside world in fhe film, but by what he considers aesthetically attractive. His idea of elegance disallows any thing or person in the film he considers "hurtful to the national dignity". He cannot see the irony of his position: he forbids the camera to capture the very people who make up much of Mexico: "Beggars, the poor, the deformed, the old and ugly, trust 62 Givner discusses Porter's dislike of lesbians in her biography and describes how affronted Porter was by Gertrude Stein and Alice B ToWas (3 5 3 ).

Betancourt to wave them aw ay"(152). Betancourt's failure to tell the truth, with its resultant misrepresentation of Mexico, symbolises the artist's corruption for Porter. Similarly, the poet and singer, Carlos, who has composed nothing new for a long time, invents a corrido about Justino and his sister. 63 Carlos distorts the events to fit his composition and please his audience. Giving an accurate account of the tragic shooting and those involved does not interest him. Porter's damning portrait of the art adviser who performs a "pontifical" gesture while he offers "easy words" of insincere consolation on the death of Justino's sister marries, in Porter's eyes, the corruption of the church and the oligarchy.

Porter continued to believe it the duty of the artist to try to represent reality to the best of his ability. The irony of Porter's position was always her failure to understand that her writings were as imbued with her personality as those of the next writer. Porter never realised that the Mexico she represented in her articles and stories was limited. Her work concentrates on the Indian, the artist and the ex-patriate. The writer, Betram Wolfe, Rivera's biographer, in his review of the first version of "Hacienda" for the

Worker's Age, criticised Porter for her omission of the worker:

Everyone seems to be there in this little essay - everyone, that is, except the new Mexican, the worker, the already half-awakened peasant types that are still a minority and were not easy for Katherine Anne Porter to meet up with or to comprehend or to catch in her silver-filigreed prose, but these are the ones who will end the Mexico of Eisenstein's film and Miss Porter's book.64

Porter's Mexico never embraced the "new Mexican". Instead, she was preoccupied with the Indian as the barometer of the revolution's successes and failures. In her mind, the victim of all of the abuses of power by those in authority was, as ever, the Indian. Porter's description of the Indian here is as despairing as that in "The Fiesta of Guadalupe". The Indians' lives on the pulque hacienda have barely changed since the seventeenth century. Their status is little better than that of the animals on the hacienda: "The closed dark figures were full of instinctive suffering, without individual memory, or only the kind of memory animals may have, when they feel the whip they suffer but do 63 The corrido is a Mexican ballad. Porter wrote an article for Survey Graphic 5 (May 1924) about the corridos. Having read the ethnologist Dr Atl's chapter on corridos in his Artes Populares, (see footnote 70) and another book of corridos which Betram Wolfe (see the following footnote) lent her. Porter attempted to set on paper her love for the corrido. It was their every-day subject matter - love, life, death - which appealed to her most of all.

64 Bertram Wolfe (1 8 9 6 -1 9 7 7 ) was an American who came to Mexico with his wife to