Imperial (105 page)

In 1999, the Cabazon Band of Cahuilla Mission Indians, population twenty-five, subsisted on a gross acreage of thirteen hundred and eighty-two near Indio; while the Cahuilla Band of Mission Indians, population two hundred and sixty, could be visited on their gross acreage of not quite nineteen thousand near Anza.

I have never to my knowledge spoken with one.

WATER IS HERE

Next group: In 1911, the population of the Martinez tribe is three hundred and twenty men,
generally well employed.
They hold their land in common. You’ll be relieved to know that the agent restricts each allotment to ten acres per Indian. That way the rest of us can get our hundred and sixty. Meanwhile, the Torres reservation boasts more than nineteen thousand acres and a population of two hundred and thirteen. In my time there will be a joint Torres-Martinez Indian reservation, of which Imperial County’s portion makes up eight thousand acres. Thanks to the Salton Sea, much of it is underwater.

TOUCHED UP WITH RED PAINT

East of the Colorado lived the Yuma, Halchichoma and Mohave tribes, all of them warlike; from San Diego up along the line to Jacumba and just into Imperial County, much evidence remains of the Diegueño, now called by their own name, the Kumeyaay.

In the Imperial Valley itself, settlers found the Kamia, who were not identical with the Kumeyaay, and also the Cocopah or Cucapah, whom Judge Farr benevolently describes as
closely related to the Yumas, though more industrious than the latter.
One or both of those two latter tribes quarried obsidian in the valley. (South of Laguna Salada, there was a hill where one could pick up Apache tears.)

Here I must tell you that Diegueños are actually Ipai. Kamia are Tipai. In the
Handbook of North American Indians,
the protohistorical Ipai and Tipai territories are depicted as an undifferentiated shaded zone on which Ipai has been inscribed northwards of Tipai. This area begins northwestward at the Pacific coast, at Agua Hedionda, not far south of the San Luis Rey River, which it first parallels, then follows; continuing eastwards along and slightly north of San Felipe Creek, then goes due east across the lower fifth of the Salton Sea, continues east about halfway across Imperial County, then slants southeast along a boundary marked
Sand Hills.
At the same latitude as Cuyapaipe, it suddenly slants southwest. So far it has been bordered by the Cahuilla on the north and the Quechan on the east. Now on the east it is bordered by the Cocopah. It goes down to the Río Hardy, makes an arc northwest to southwest through the Cocopah Mountains almost to La Rumerosa, then goes due south to La Huerta de los Indios, continues evenly southwest to the Pacific coast some twenty-five miles south of Todos Santos Bay.
¹⁹⁸
The essayist calls these boundaries
fluid.

What are those people now? Well, here’s the Campo Band of Diegueño Mission Indians in 1999, two hundred and ninety souls on fifteen and a half thousand gross acres . . .

If you wish to see more, then when entering Imperial County, feel free to stop at the Desert View Tower’s green chollas in spring amidst the sunny granite boulders of a certain Ratcliffe’s creature-garden; and here you may wish to admire the
yohnee stone,
which somebody in the vicinity who does not want his name used admits to have touched up with red paint, just to make it more decorative.

Speaking of vulviforms,
of the five yoni formations at W-1133, three are vertical and closely resemble vulvas. The other two are horizontal and also resemble eyes.
Were I to do these people justice, I would seek to understand the roasting ceremony after which Diegueño girls were introduced to a vulva stone. One anthropologist believes that the numerous yoni rocks in this zone
represent vaginal openings into the uterus of mother earth.

How does she know? How would I ever know?

INSCRIPTION ILLEGIBLE

Although the Diegueño, as we just now read, used to maintain a presence into part of the Mexicali Valley, the only Indians I myself have met who speak of that part of Imperial as their homeland are the Cucapah, there orthographized to Cucapá.—I once met the man who’d worked for the Bureau of Reclamation from 1948 to 1950, surveying the area from the international line south to the Gulf of California. I asked him what he remembered from his experiences, and he said: Well, we found a cave with Indian corn in it. I only got down there once, but what I vividly recall is that they had a grapefruit-packing plant in Yuma and their culls, they would throw them into the river and we would pull ’em out and eat ’em up. And south of the border there were some Indians with long poles, and they were pullin’ ’em in. Very unfriendly Indians.—I asked him which Indians they were, and he said that they were so difficult to approach that he never found out.

The Yuma, Maricopa and Cucapah all sold captives to Mexicans; the Mohave did not. The Yuma were allied with the Mohaves. The Kamia traded foods with the Diegueño. The Yuma and Cucapah were long-term enemies. Does any of this help you? These facts remind me of the Hetzel photograph of
mud volcanoes six miles from the village of Cucapaugh Indians in L....
—inscription illegible—the print faded to milky-green, the squat mush-heaps and the wide oval mush-craters steaming into the fog of the ruined photographic paper, like Escher’s famous print of the hand which draws itself.

“WE SAY ONE THING AND THEY SAY ANOTHER”

In 1776, it seems that the Cajuenches, Valliacuamais and Cucupash are all in a state of “contentment” to meet the Spaniards, and
I praise God for such a good disposition in which they receive the fathers and the Spaniards in their lands, to be taught the doctrine, to which I am dedicated.

In 1796, Governor Arrillaga meets some Cucapah along the as yet unnamed Río Hardy, which in my epoch is famous for being the conveyance for six to eleven thousand acre-feet per year of
agricultural drainage water;
and the Cucapah act friendly at first—cigarettes for watermelons!
I spotted several little huts, some people, and their farms of melons, watermelons, and pumpkin.
It is drier than that now. In a twinkling, the Cucapah have begun to menace the party, and Arrillaga feels obliged to warn his boy guide that should they be led into danger, he will kill him at lance-point.
I continued my journey in good order,
firing when attacked. The end of these skirmishes reflected the usual technological disparities: five Indians killed, one of Arrillaga’s soldiers and eight of his horses wounded, and one mule killed with a sharpened stick.
I must frankly confess,
he concludes,
that, although the previous afternoon they gave me ample reason to punish them, I had pity on their wretched state . . . I could have destroyed their rancherías and families . . .

Writing in from the early twentieth century, Otis P. Tout reports that
Cocopah Indians could get all the liquor they wanted in Mexicali. The men would bring their women to
Calexico
town Saturday nights, get them drunk, tie them to mesquite bushes in bunches and then ‘enjoy’ their own drunken carousals. But woe to him, white, Mexican or Indian, who touched a drunken Cocopah woman!

(We fought over women, since we couldn’t marry in the family.—That was what a Cucapah man told me, down in Southside.)

A Cucapah man from 1900 stares at the camera, his black hair falling in two streams, many white necklaces about his throat, his forehead furrowed as he gazes at us with alert suspicion. I saw his portrait once, in a museum in Mexicali.

Twice I visited Cucapah El Mayor: blue barrels for water and for trash, gravel shaded by mesquites, cinderblock houses and metal latrines, like the ones on construction sites, whitish grime. The community El Mayor Indigenes Cucupá was the only primarily Cucapah settlement in the Mexicali Valley, but they also lived in other
ejidos
such as Oviedo Mota; they had another settlement in San Luis, called Posa Derviso.
¹⁹⁹
In 1932 a certain Mexicali Delegation promised the future that
the aforementioned territory, consisting of 54,381.00 hectares, shall hereby be known as Territory “Los Cucapás,”
and there you have it.

In 2002, Lupe Vásquez took me to visit Pascuala on the Hill of the Metates. She was the oldest Cucapah alive, Lupe said, hearing which, being a gringo, I eagerly asked for exact numbers. First she was a hundred and twenty. Then she was a hundred. Then we compromised on eighty or ninety.

In 2003 there were thirty-eight families in El Mayor—four hundred throughout Mexico, and some in Somerton, Arizona.

Yolanda Sánchez Ogás, who had written a book about the Cucapah and was a friend of several of them, said: Mestizos came here in the nineteenth century, and gringos starting at the building of canals. Cucapahs worked building the canals. This is
la patria de los Cucapahs;
the region of the Colorado Delta was all theirs, on both sides of the border in that whole area. Guillermo Andrade made a pueblo; he was the first owner of the Delta. He made Ciudad Lerdo. There are documents where they give the names of Cucapah Indian chiefs who worked in Ciudad Lerdo cutting hemp.

Article Twenty-seven of the Mexican Constitution is about land, Yolanda continued. There are three kinds of property: first, small property, either in an
ejido
or in a communal property. The Cucapah have the second. They possess title to one hundred and forty-three thousand hectares. It belongs to all who live in El Mayor.—When Díaz was here, she said, her tone becoming angry and bitter, all this land was one plantation belonging to Otis Chandler.

That day Yolanda introduced me to darkhaired Juana Torres Glez Cucapá, to Antonia Torres Cucapá and to Jaziel Soto Torres Cucapá. Two of them were sisters.

Maybe ten people out of thirty families in this community can speak Cucapah, they said.

What makes the Cucapah unique? I asked them as we sat at a round table under a mesquite tree, chewing sour-sweet mesquite seeds.

The necklaces that we make, they replied, and the skirts. We make them out of the bark of the willow. The beaded headbands, we wear them while we dance and then we sell them. The black one is two hundred pesos. It took me three days. It’s bad for my eyes, all the sewing. I just made it for the dance. It’s made out of glass beads. We used to make them out of shells.

They said that
mai
meant sky. Sky plus earth made
mot,
universe.

Everything was still—weak rivers and palms. From a neighboring white cube-house came Cucapah music on a cassette player, a droning chant like that of the Inuit.

Is there different thinking between Cucapah and Mexicans?

Yes. We say one thing and they say another . . .

“WE DON’T HAVE A GOOD DRUNK ANYMORE”

Now back to the people whom the Spaniards first met when they crossed the Colorado into Imperial.

In 1775 Font called the Yuma
shameless and excessive
in their promiscuity; he must not have enjoyed the rattling of the women’s treebark skirts. The men painted themselves with red hematite, black earth and white colors; the women usually only with red. Perhaps the blood-painting that Couts observed had something to do with this.
They usually kill some woman,
said Font,
or someone who has been careless, and try to capture a few children . . . to sell in the lands of the Spaniards.
His summation:
These people are as a rule gentle, gay, and happy.

In 1918 the California Board of Agriculture explained:
The Yuma reservation contains an area of 71-3/4 square miles, the Indians living in this section being the most primitive of the California tribes in manners and customs.

Richard Brogan and I were talking about the Bard Subdistrict, and he said: They have interesting water issues in the Bard. The river changed course. There was a No Man’s Land of supposed Indian territory then. In the fifties and sixties the Quechan Indians were destitute.

Ever see them out here?

A lot of them, in jail. As soon as they’re sober they’re good people. Wild people then. Jekyll and Hyde transformation. They were beloved by the sheriff’s office. We would leave their cell doors open. If one of the deputies was in trouble we would call them and four three-hundred-pound Indians would be on top of somebody.

(In other words,
the Yuma is quiet and docile now.
)

We don’t have a good drunk anymore, Mr. Brogan continued. Now it’s glue-sniffing and methamphetamine . . .

A MORONGAN INSPIRATION

Crossing the river into California, gazing down on the reservation’s wide green and yellow bottomlands, I received this greeting: WELCOME TO PARADISE CASINO.

I don’t know if you’ll find anybody who wants to talk, said the girl at the convenience store.

How about you?

Nope.

Well then, I said, I guess I don’t want to talk to you, either.

At the first house where I knocked, the people invited me in. Their names were Cameron and Diana Chino. He was Quechan; she was white. There was green leafy iceberg right across the dirt road, on Indian land leased out to agribusinesses which hired brownskinned men to tend and harvest it.

Mr. Chino was born and raised here. In 1991, when he was twenty, he had gone away. He had returned this June with some graphic-design ability and an interest in collecting samurai swords. He was a blocky, shaveheaded man; two days later I met the proprietor of a coffee shop in Mexicali who looked much like him.

I see a big change for the better, he said. Twelve years ago it was a little bit bad, propertywise. My family was the landowner here.

He estimated the population on the reservation at about five thousand. Most of them leased out their land, or worked at the casino or the tribal offices, such as the diabetes institute. Mr. Chino: said: The boundary of the res is pretty much up on Baseline Road, all the way up Ross Road, and then it veers off to another section and then up to the town of Bard. Anything not used by dates is reservation land. And the houses we have, they’re all the same throughout the whole area.