Because pearls were a vital part of Mexico's heritage, the dream of retaining or regaining prestige as a producer died hard. Faced with destruction of its rich oyster beds, the only answer was to switch from pearl fishing to pearl farming.

Believe it or not, Mexico, which was the world's first commercial producer of natural black pearls, became the world's first commercial producer of cultured black pearls. The year was 1903-at exactly the same time Japan's Kochiki Mikimoto was perfecting his techniques for growing pearls.

Unlike Mikimoto, Vives, a medical doctor of French origin, did not engage in pearl-culturing as the term is understood today. Salt-water pearl culturing, as developed by Mikimoto, involved implanting a clam-shell nuclei wrapped in mantle tissue in the gonads of a mature pearl oyster, then waiting anywhere from two to four summers for the host oyster to secrete a heavy layer of pearl nacre around the bead, The end-result: round, lustrous pearls. With some variation, this is the method practiced in all ocean water pearl farms today.

Except Vives' farm.

He did not cultivate pearls. He cultivated oysters (in this case, Pinctada mazatlanica) to maturity in a protected site.

To assure large pearl harvests, Vives raised 8 million oysters in a spacious, protected growing area of 120 hectares (or 266,520 acres). With, on average, one in 10 oysters producing a pearl, harvests numbered 800,000 pearls a year until 1914 when the Mexican Revolutionary Army destroyed his farm-leaving his 1,000 workers jobless.

Mexico returned to limbo as a pearl producer.