50 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel CañasThe Hacienda
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
San Isidro
San Isidro is a symbolic setting that highlights the character’s traumas through supernatural events. In keeping with Gothic fiction, the hacienda takes on a life of its own as living memories come alive inside it. This illustrates The Existence of the Supernatural and the enduring impact of colonial trauma. Andrés believes that houses “absorb the feelings of the people who live in them. Sometimes those feelings are so strong you can feel them when you walk through the door” (124). However, because the murdered spirit of María Catalina dominates San Isidro, only negative feelings possess the house and therefore elicit traumatic responses from Beatriz Hernández Valenzuela and Padre Andrés.
Beatriz realizes that her past haunts her when the house attacks her at the end of the novel. The house represented freedom for Beatriz when she first arrived, but the supernatural events never let her forget her father’s death, her mother abandoning her, and the absence of love in her marriage. Beatriz married Rodolfo because his “money was liberation from Tía Fernanda’s reign of humiliation. Deliverance from desperate reliance on the fickle kindness of relatives [she] barely knew. [She] had sacrificed any hope of love in [her] marriage to secure [her] autonomy” (288-89). Once Beatriz accepts how the past has harmed her, she is able to face María Catalina’s ghost and move on from her trauma, symbolized by her moving away from San Isidro.
Additionally, San Isidro comes to represent a new hope for Mexico and its Indigenous people at the end of the novel. When she leaves, Beatriz gives the hacienda back to the people, symbolizing the type of justice that can heal colonial trauma. Part of the house burned in the book’s climax, but the hacienda is still habitable. This reflects how oppression can leave permanent marks, but it doesn’t have to mean total destruction.
Papá’s Map
Beatriz’s father’s map symbolizes Beatriz’s emotional connection to the comforts of childhood before the insurgents executed her father. The map is the only thing that Beatriz saves from the burning house the night her father dies. Every battle that was “marked in red ink on his map was for México” (16), and Beatriz clings to it as proof that her father is not the traitor that people say he is.
The map represents her father but also the loss of her earlier life, which she still grieves. Beatriz reveals a deeper connection to the map when she confides in Andrés about how when she was little, she wanted to be a general like her father. However, when she grew up, she realized that she did not understand what it meant to be a general or that “leading armies meant leading men to die” (134). She just enjoyed looking at maps because it meant she could be close to her father. Clinging to the past, therefore, represents holding on to misconceptions. When portions of the house burn at the end of the novel, Beatriz’s possessions, including the map, are destroyed. The map’s burning symbolizes Beatriz’s triumph in facing her past, accepting her present reality, and her courage in facing the future without the past weighing her down.
Fire
Fire is a motif that represents the colonial oppression that threatens to consume the main characters’ cultural identities. The first appearance of fire in the novel is when Beatriz has a flashback about the night her father died. The military officers burn Beatriz’s home down, and she and her mother barely escape the flames with her father’s map. The fire that Juana uses to try to kill Beatriz mirrors the night that Beatriz’s father died, except at the end of the novel, Beatriz chooses to accept her past and move on from how it damaged her. The imagery of fire also represents hell, which signifies Andrés’s fear of exposure and eternal punishment. Andrés’s father and María Catalina both tell Andrés that they hope he burns in hell, and this fear of eternal fire and public exclusion causes Andrés to keep his identity hidden for most of his life.
However, fire has purifying connotations as well. Beatriz and Andrés use fire to fight against María Catalina, lighting candles and burning copal. Since copal “purifies […] surroundings,” Andrés and Beatriz use it to fight the darkness (102). This also represents how Beatriz and Andrés are purified, or cleansed, from their trauma by facing their past rather than running from it. The book’s final fire, which kills Juana and damages San Isidro, reflects how new beginnings are possible, even if the past leaves lasting scars.
