A few weeks ago, I visited Hacienda Mucuyché, a place I had heard about, but was not prepared to feel.
From the moment I arrived, I sensed a kind of layered presence, as if I had stepped into a space that existed between times. The hacienda is undeniably beautiful. The architecture immediately drew me in, as architecture always does. I am drawn to built spaces because they are thresholds in themselves, places where inner lives and outer forces meet, where belief, power, and care are given form.
Much of Mucuyché is well preserved, while other areas sit somewhere between ruin and structure. Those spaces felt especially alive to me. They are no longer fully functional, but not erased either. They exist in a state of becoming and undoing at the same time. Walking through them felt like moving along a boundary rather than through a destination.
Being there reminded me of a visit I made many years ago to Oak Alley Plantation in New Orleans. Though the landscapes and cultures are different, the emotional experience was strikingly similar. Both places hold a tension that never resolves. Beauty, luxury, and abundance are present in the architecture and land. At the same time, grief and heartbreak are embedded just as deeply. These places ask you to stand inside that contradiction without choosing one truth over the other.
I am a sensitive person, and when I first encounter people or places, I am often flooded with emotion before I have language for it. I experience them first through feeling. At Mucuyché, that sensitivity was immediate. I felt admiration and discomfort existing side by side. It felt like standing at a threshold where opposing truths are both present, neither asking to be resolved.
The architectural influences at the hacienda are layered as well. There are clear traces of Moorish design in the arches, proportions, and ornamental details. These influences traveled from North Africa into Spain during centuries of Moorish presence, and from there into colonial architecture across the Americas. Seeing those forms here, filtered through yet another cultural and historical lens, reinforced how architecture becomes a record of passage, movement, and exchange. Each influence crosses into another, leaving traces behind.
As I moved through the grounds, I noticed a green cross placed high above one of the arches. I later learned that while the cross reflects Christian influence, its color carries an older meaning. For the Mayan people who worked on these haciendas, green was associated with life, renewal, and the four directions, particularly the east, where the sun rises and cycles begin again. The green cross did not replace one belief system with another. It held them together. Standing beneath it, I felt how belief adapts in order to survive, how older ways of seeing remain present, even when layered beneath something imposed.
I was visiting with a friend who knows the site well. We arrived too late for the English-language tour, and instead of turning us away, he generously offered to walk me through the hacienda himself. As we moved from space to space, he answered my many questions, helping me understand what I was seeing while also allowing room for what could not be explained.
Mucuyché was a henequén hacienda, once powered by a massive engine that drove an intricate system of belts and machinery. Even now, the structure feels astonishing. The scale is imposing. It speaks to a time when production and profit shaped not only labor, but land, bodies, and lives. This was an operation designed to extract, to transform, to move material from one state into another.
At the same time, the work began much closer to the body. Henequén, often referred to as “green gold,” brought immense wealth to the Yucatán, wealth still visible in the architecture and ambition of the site. My friend demonstrated how the fibers were first processed by hand, stripping the plant down to its long strands, then twisting and weaving them into rope. Watching this process felt like witnessing transformation at its most elemental. A plant crossing a threshold into material. Labor crossing into object. History carried forward into the present.
As I moved through the hacienda, I kept returning to the feeling of coexistence. Beauty and pain. Ingenuity and exploitation. Craft and coercion. None of it cancels the other out. The place holds all of it at once, suspended.
When I left Mucuyché, I didn’t feel resolved. I felt paused, as if I were standing in the doorway between understanding and unknowing. The experience didn’t ask me to make sense of it, only to remain attentive. That attentiveness has stayed with me and has quietly filtered into the work I’m making now.
Some places offer answers. Others offer thresholds. Mucuyché offered the latter, and asked only that I stay present as I crossed through.
If you’d like to see how experiences like this move into the paintings themselves, I share additional reflections, studio moments, and process work through my mailing list. It’s where I offer glimpses behind the scenes of my time here, and where the work inspired by these places gradually takes form, from early gestures to finished pieces. You’re welcome to join if it feels like a space you’d like to enter.