Hacienda

Warm sunlight lay upon the hacienda called Casa Grande.

The hot day was over, and the light failing rapidly, when Appleby, who had just finished comida, sat by a window of the hacienda San Cristoval with an English newspaper upon his knee.

The writer Juan Rulfo, whose 1955 novel, “Pedro Páramo,” still stands as the central monument of modern Mexican literature, grew up in Jalisco and vividly depicted its arid, sun-blasted landscapes in his writing, while the architect Luis Barragán, who moved from Guadalajara to Mexico City in the 1930s, carried with him an appreciation for his home state’s cloisters, haciendas and humble country buildings, which he translated in his own work as austere, inscrutable volumes of stucco.