South-of-the-border spreads

Usage examples of haciendas.

Some of the priests and frays, however, clearly disdained that creed, clerics who rode in on horseback, wore shirts of fine linen and stockings of silk, whose monasteries were wealthy haciendas run by slave labor, and who lived like kings on the backs and sweat of the indio peóns they had ostensibly come to save.

My Aztec ancestors built temples in the valley to please the sun, moon, and rain gods, but after the indio gods were vanquished by Cortes and his conquistadors, the land and the indios upon it were divided into large haciendas, feudal domains owned by Spanish grandees.

Forbidden to leave the haciendas, they were the property of their Spanish masters.

They were brought to work the sugarcane haciendas after the Spanish discovered they could "grow" gold in the form of sweet sugar.

I learned something about the indios of New Spain: The domesticated indios, raised like work animals on haciendas and in cities, were different than the ones who were not corrupted by the conquerors.

But the larger the village or the closer to haciendas we got, the more careful I became about portraying my indio heritage.

Many haciendas were as large as encomienda grants, having villages or even small towns within their borders.

Hacendados had to protect themselves, and their haciendas were as much fortresses as houses.

As soon as the coach pulled up, we were greeted by several women, all of whom, like Isabella, were absentee owners of haciendas and their daughters.

Nevertheless, Arden Haciendas, as Joyce had informed me a year earlier when Thomas had moved there, were socially the in thing, as they had won a prize for the architect.

Inside, the Haciendas were open-plan with rooms at odd angles to each other, which explained the odd-angled exteriors.

They fought their first stand the dawn following and they fought them running for eight days and nights on the plain and among the rocks in the mountains and from the walls and azoteas of abandoned haciendas and they lost not a man.

They passed abandoned haciendas and roadside graves and by midmorning they had picked up the track of the Apaches again coming in off the desert to the west and advancing before them through the loose sand of the riverbottom.

On the floor in front of me are Chinese pagodas and Mexican haciendas and Cape Cod colonial houses, all combined.

Secure in the knowledge that their beachfront haciendas will still be standing when the smoke clears, they giddily fiddle with the little people’s rules and morals.