Imperial (108 page)

My Dad believed that he was supposed to be the support of the family—he never took a vacation in his life—but the mother was the heart. Whatever she wanted, he thought that she was right. They had six kids, one of whom is now deceased. I was the one before last.

What makes the greatest impression on you when you remember your childhood?

I guess being free, being safe all the time. This was a safe little town. Everything was open. Something that I remember was crossing the border, which was like crossing the street. We lived just in one town. I hate the border wall now. When I lived in Mexico City, I hated the high walls. Here I was so happy all the time. Never thought about the heat. I guess I had a very protected time.

What did you do for fun?

We would go around on our bikes; we would go to the YMCA to take swimming lessons. Sometimes there were special events in the De Anza Hotel. The Fox Theater was the only theater in Calexico. And they had these matinees: “Tom and Jerry” for a double feature, cartoons of course . . . First of all, it was
safe.
Just like any little town, I guess you could say. I guess everybody knew each other. It was fun. You know, I could never say to you, God, it was intolerably hot! Because I didn’t know any better! It was just a regular life. Going to school Monday through Friday, partying in Mexicali on Saturdays and Sundays, that’s what I remember. Going up and down on Reforma flirting. All the life was going on in Mexicali. Most balls and theme parties were organized in the Casino de Mexicali. That’s gone now, long gone. It’s the mothers that will organize the theme parties now, not the girls. Halloween and like that.

So Mexicali wasn’t Sin City at that time?

Mexicali was the whorehouse of the Imperial Valley, I did read, but it was only here in the borderline that they had these nightclubs, and they were very low-class ones, the Cage and the Green Cat especially. And there were other terrible places, those women of the night and whatever! But no, I never saw Mexicali as a Sin City, because we only went for family affairs. There is always this morbid thing about finding out what is behind these dark places. Right after my wedding, which ended at three in the morning, my friends took us to the Cage, and I said, so this is it! You have seen across the way all those abandoned buildings parallel to the international line, right by the Hotel del Norte? That was El Gato Verde. And there was a restaurant, too, El León del Oro, and it was also a betting place, but it was a family place, and also an intellectual place where the men would like to get together and have their beers and whatever. We were only interested in the family fun. First we had to have our Mass, and then we’d go out flirting, and then we’d go out to a Chinese restaurant, either the Shangri-La or else the Restaurante 19 . . .

It says something about Zulema Rashid’s social class that although she flirted on Avenida Reforma every Sunday after Mass, she almost never attended Mass in that church on Reforma, the church which Rebeca Hernández had praised to me because
everybody is welcome. Did you see that dirty beggar who went all the way up to the altar on his knees?
—Here is how Zulema described it: It’s like a little postcard. It’s a very simple, provincial cathedral, a very plain church. And Zulema went on to say: Most of the people from the social elite, they would go to church in the Colonia Nueva, which has very nice residential houses, very well furnished. I would go often there, yes, because my grandmother lived very close by. Because of the heat, they wore pastel clothes. I never missed a Mass on Sunday, never. But maybe that was because I was afraid of committing a capital sin and dying and going to hell.—Laughingly, she added: I’m not scared of that now!

Did you ever go to church on the American side?

Oh, yes, to Our Lady of Guadalupe Church here in Calexico, on Fifth and Rockwood. By the way, there was also an Episcopalian church there, and it was a big mystery, a
big
mystery, and sometimes we would kind of sneak on in, like into a haunted house . . .

And where did you go to school?

There were two schools at the time. One was the public school; one was private. The private school belonged to the nuns from Jalisco. You will find my father’s name on the plaque, because he helped bring in the nuns. In that private school, ninety-five percent of the students were from Mexicali. But there was a little problem there. The nuns were from Guadalajara, so we got black points if we spoke Spanish during recess! We were all Mexicans, so it was very hard to make us speak English. All my friends were from Mexicali. I had no friends in Calexico. When I got married, we came to the courthouse to get married, but the ceremony was in Mexicali.

What was your goal in life at that time?

All I wanted to do ever since I was sixteen was to get married to Prince Charming and have twelve children! I just wanted to be a Mom the rest of my life. When I turned twenty, I went to this black-and-white ball which is very important traditionally in Mexico. It was in Hermosillo, Sonora. I was sent as an ambassador. I got the crown. But I wanted to study. I wanted to go to Mexico City, but my Mom said that was too far.

Did you have a
quinceañera
?

Oh, yes, I had one! Because I was very romantic at the time, so I wanted one! My sisters never did. My Dad didn’t believe in luxury. I wanted my fourteen maids and all the rest of it . . .

(Here I couldn’t help but remember the
quinceañera
of the child Luisa in that graffiti’d freeway plaza of Condominios Montealbán, with the Río Nuevo stinking up the spring night.
²⁰²
But why shouldn’t Zulema have had her fourteen maids? And why shouldn’t Luisa?)

And did you find Prince Charming?

I thought so at the time. Anyhow, I was very happy. I worked in the bank here and it was so dry and so strict and so boring. But in Mexicali as an accountant it was like partying all the time!

“A FORTHRIGHT, INQUISITIVE MIND”

In 1940, a woman who had toured Okie camps in hopes of uncovering
The Real Causes of Our Migrant Problem
shared this eternal truth with us:
If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s the big-heartedness of the men who head this country’s oil industry.
But when it came to agriculture, she still defined bigheartedness in nonindustrial terms:
It’s a sad change that has come over our farm owners . . . To them a farm is just a business that uses soil, water, sunlight, seed . . . in order to turn out food products.

Oh, but that was once upon a time. Now Imperial was
a wonderland of factories running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,
even if Zulema Rashid retained no definite impression of which miracle crop her father’s factory grew; Imperial was
The Largest Irrigated District in the World.

In 2004, stout old Richard Brogan made me a reasonably attractive case for the bigheartedness of Imperial-as-factory-wonderland. He said: The nature of the American farmer is that it’s a forthright, inquisitive mind. It’s like,
I’m gonna try and I’m gonna win and I hope you do, too. You might!
A very industrial, a very free-wheelingfree spirit. That’s not corporate agriculture; it’s large family agriculture. It’s very emotional. A family farm still cares. I do grant that the larger associations, whether they be corporate or large family, seem to be the successful controlling people in the produce business. When you turn that around, is it because produce makes money? I honestly believe that a lot of these people started with a hundred and sixty acres and went to ten thousands. That economic feature is certainly a controlling thing in a lot of ways.

He belonged to the Imperial Valley almost as much as Zulema Rashid. Indeed, he must have been a schoolboy there when she was a schoolgirl, for he said simply: My mother had TB when I was born and by the time that was corrected it was decided medically that the desert climate would be beneficial. I was born in La Jolla in 1944, but I grew up here.

What did it look like?

Well, I don’t know. Looked like big farmland. I didn’t understand what I was seeing the way I can now. I was driving a tractor at seventeen, eighteen years of age. When I was twenty-one, I finally became a deputy sheriff in this county. I still drove a tractor part-time . . .

THE ALGERIAN WONDERLAND

It is a wonderland of factories running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And what else was it?

Well, Calexico was a lot quieter, a lot whiter, said Kay Brockman Bishop. I ran into a friend the other day and
her
friend described her as the last white girl in Calexico. There’s still a lot of community here, but there was more back then. People went to dance class but there was not so much of that as 4-H and so forth. You went and helped your neighbors. If you saw smoke, you went and saw if they were in trouble.

We were sitting in sight of her childhood home. She pointed at it and said: It was originally a Sears Roebuck kit house. Has a screen porch that went all the way around it. It originally was two bedrooms and it had a great big kitchen.

My grandfather built it in 1904. When my grandfather moved down here, he had the idea of raising teams of buggy horses. Then the car was invented and that took care of that! So he started raising workhorses. Daddy used to say the worst place to be was in a pen of yearlings because they all wanted attention and they all wanted to fight.

My Dad was born in 1906 in L.A. and they brought him down here. He lived his whole life in that house. My Dad used to drive a schoolbus across the plank road to Yuma if they had a football game. That would have been in about 1922. Daddy shot this mountain lion right down the corner where you turned off 98 . . .—She showed me a newspaper clipping from 1947.

What did you do for fun?

Rode my horse. I had a girlfriend that lived about a mile and half from me and I rode to her house a lot. And when I was growing up—I was an only child—I got to do an awful lot of stuff. If Daddy had to haul grain to town, he would take me. I worked weekends moving cattle and I had to ride to work before daylight. Things are a little different down here when you have your own ranch. My son George was driving tractor when he was in first grade; he was raking hay. We had to refit the tractor for him.

Meanwhile, all through the middle of the next decade, which is to say after Alice Woodside’s husband had first seen Calexico and Mexicali,
Imperial Valley, the big, sunny, windy Algeria of the “Southland,”
was still annexing further and higher mesas for purposes of irrigation, populating her new territories with flax, alfalfa (six cuttings a year), sugar beets . . .

FRUIT, FLOWERS AND SUNSHINE

Why did they come here? Why did they stay? . . .
asks a woman who herself arrived in the Imperial Valley back in 1918.
Now one sees the answers, written in the fields, the homes and the towns; one hears the answers in the sound of working tractors on summer nights and the hum of air conditioners, in the winter concert series and in the train whistles as produce starts to the market place; one feels the answers in the winter sun and the summer evenings and in the certain knowledge that “home” is held fast in the “Hollow of God’s Hand.”

Imperial is fossils and vacation fun; Imperial is a picnic in painted canyon; Imperial is a shopping trip in Mexicali; Imperial is bird-hunting in the tules along the south shore of the Salton Sea.

Imperial is in God’s hand, all right.
No other area in the U.S. can produce any more crops per acre than those grown in Imperial Valley because of the year-round growing season, B. A. Harrigan, county agricultural commissioner, told the El Centro Kiwanis Club.
Imperial is sweet—so sweet! To be exact, Imperial yields one million eight hundred thousand pounds of honey in 1950. Speak of sweet!
At Calexico it was Christmas shopping time on Main Street with incredible perfect astonished Mexican beauties . . .
Speak of still more sweetness: In 1958, Richard Campbell remembers once upon a time in his fourteen years in Imperial Valley when December lettuce went to seven dollars a carton at a time that two or three would have been high. Why shouldn’t our lettuce go up to eight dollars in 1959?

Thanks to the Salton Sea’s mud volcanoes, Imperial at midcentury is number one among California counties for carbon dioxide production; Imperial is another “Cavalcade Parade,” God knows precisely when or why; the archivist didn’t, although in the background I see the old Allhambra Motel in Calexico, which is long gone now; three little girls in lacy white dresses advance, bearing round placards for FRUIT, FLOWERS, and SUNSHINE.

Chapter 108

THERE WAS ALWAYS FOOD ON THE TABLE (1950s)

I
n 2003, Stella Mendoza, who not long before had completed her term as President of the Imperial Irrigation District, had just baked cookies in her kitchen in Brawley, and she offered me all I wanted.

I was born in Brawley, she said. My Dad came across in the 1920s, when they were about eleven years old. They came by horse. They hired a Yaqui scout to bring them into Nogales. They came into the Imperial Valley where there was cotton. My mother met my Dad here. It used to be that families in groups of four or five would travel at the same time. Her father worked for the railroad in Arizona. The family lived there for two or three years, to save money to go to California. She lived there up to fifth grade, I believe. Then they ended up in the Imperial Valley. My Dad was ten years older than my Mom, and my mother’s parents didn’t like my Dad, because they said he was too old and he drank too much and he was a womanizer. So they went away to Sonora. Then they had nothing to eat. So he came back and got them and he was the best son-in-law.

We used to go from Brawley to Los Banos for the labor season, for the cantaloupes.

Well, going back to my childhood, well, growing up, with an extended family, it was a very small house but it was always full of friends and relatives, who were there for something to eat; and I grew up in that kind of an atmosphere. There were twelve of us and nine of us survived. My Dad provided for us. He was never a farmer but he worked for the farmers. In fact, my brother, when he was ten years old, he was run over by a melon truck in Los Banos. Eduardo. My mother was pregnant. He died two years before I was born. He just went to hang around, and he saw the truck pull away, and he jumped, and he slipped and fell, and by the time they took him to the hospital he was dead.