SOURCE: “Porter's ‘Hacienda’ and the Theme of Change,” in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 4, July, 1965, pp. 403–15.

In the following essay, Perry appraises Porter's story “Hacienda” as a combination of her major thematic concerns, concluding that change is the most important theme in the piece.

Katherine Anne Porter's “Hacienda” is one of those stories whose meaning is blurred by topicality. This story, as many of its readers know, had its genesis in a series of impressions Miss Porter gathered during an extended visit to the Tetlapayac Hacienda, one of the settings for Que Viva Mexico. This ill-fated masterpiece, directed by the famous Sergei Eisenstein, aroused great controversy in the States when Upton Sinclair, the film's financial backer, suddenly curtailed production of the film and refused Eisenstein the right to edit it. What followed was an extended legal struggle over the rights to the film in which Sinclair was ultimately the...