THE UNSUSTAINABLE "HACIENDA": THE RHETORIC OF PROGRESS IN JOVITA GONZÁLEZ AND EVE RALEIGH'S "CABALLERO"

Kaup critiques Jovita Gonzalez and Eve Raleigh's Caballero: A Historical Novel. He remarks that in it, the authors anachronistically project a process--delayed on the Rio Grande corridor until the early 20th century--back into the mid-19th century past. After 1900, the old Mexican hacienda order, which saw land as a family patrimony, not as profitable commodity, was replaced by farm society and its new social and capitalist structures, redefining work relations between landowners and landless workers as anonymous and formal, based on wage contracts.