The opening of the novel establishes the Condor Oil Company’s voracious land-grab tactics and then centers on La Rosa Blanca, an eight-hundred-hectare hacienda owned by Hacinto Yanyez. Agents arrive to lease or buy, brandishing promises and piles of gold, but Hacinto rejects them on principle, seeing the land as a trust for his descendants and his compadres rather than a saleable asset. Scenes of daily life on the hacienda—kinship ties, work rhythms, songs, and the compadre system—underscore what would be lost if the community were uprooted, while even the foreman Margarito refuses higher wages in the oil camps because they mean permanent exile. When negotiation fails, the agent departs in anger, hinting at coercion to come. A sharp cut to the company’s San Francisco headquarters introduces its smiling, slogan-plastered president, whose private indulgences and ruthless resolve reveal the impersonal force arrayed against the hacienda, setting the conflict in motion. (This is an automatically generated summary.)