Imperial (12 page)

UNDELINEATED MATTERS

What cautious hopes I possessed of becoming someday able to comprehend, however provisionally, “what made the people of Imperial who they are” had already begun to melt almost as quickly as a coolerful of old ice cubes dumped onto the sidewalk in El Centro. The Libyan-trained Thai terrorist leader and the Serbian intellectual had proved far easier to “understand,” because, like me, they operated through the urban medium of
words.
Together we could construct, disassemble, inspect and blueprint thought-machines of remarkable and sometimes spurious complexity. With the finest-pinching calipers of definitions, explanations and synonyms, we could measure an idea or an expressible feeling with accuracy superior to what the competence of the translators generally permitted. Moreover, the city-dweller’s psyche is often altered by its large collection of nouns and verbs. The ability to express something can engender the desire to express it. In short, city people tend to be less shy than country people. More often than I deserved, they’ve shared their spiritual, sexual, vulnerable and murderous moments with me. Country people can be more open, of course, less glib, but correspondingly more sparse or more undifferentiated in their tellings of tales. One reason that the gun owners of America are losing their Second Amendment rights is that they tend to be less articulate than their opponents, who may not be able to clean a pistol or gut a moose but who know quite well how to employ crime statistics, give press conferences and “network” with bureaucrats. Similarly, the lives of ranchers, farmers and their hired help tend to be lived in significant part through the verbally inexpressible labor of the body. You can ask a man how he is feeling and what he is thinking; and if he’s been gripping his pair of hay-hooks into seventy-five-pound bales and raising them above his head for the next man to grab and raise to the next man, who aligns them with fervent care along the haystack’s edge, knowing that he alone has the responsibility of keeping that tall, squarish green monster now much higher than a house from toppling onto them all, and if that man you’re asking has been doing this until his shoulders ache and his arms begin to tremble and if he then keeps doing it and after that keeps doing it until the haystack is perfect, the hay secure, he might not answer you at all, or he might reply, smiling a little at the other workers: I’m not thinkin’ much right now.—Unless you have stacked a few bales yourself, his experience remains alien to you. And while we are on the subject of unknowableness, Mexico is one of the most alien places on earth. No wonder that the
pollos
are called “illegal aliens”! Beneath that quick-smiling or watchful Catholicism lurks another far more elaborate hierarchicalism which in turn subdivides all supposed “Mexicans” into myriads of local spiritualities whose half-secret survival through all the long torments of the Spanish conquest promises their own continuance in bright-colored globules of coherence irrelevant to, hence safe from, the scrutiny of American capitalists. Shouldn’t Imperial’s pale tan soil therefore be subdivided to reflect its various Mexican cultures? (Perhaps the borders could be dark citrus hedges.) For consider: I’ve heard tell of a town where they believe in three Christs. I’ve met a man in a restaurant in Mexicali who called himself an Aztec and spoke of Cuauhtémoc and the other exterminated priest-kings as if they were his relatives. Maybe they were. What did he really think about those ancient days when on the pyramids people’s hearts were cut out and their twitching carcasses hurled down steep, steep stairs? How long would it take me to learn what he thought? Once I visited a canyon high above Tijuana where smoothfaced oliveskinned Mixtec Indians of all ages were digging in a stone-piled hillside ditch. Behind them was a barrier of tires. They filled their wheelbarrow slowly with dirt and stones, while a transistor radio played; and down below them in their canyon were the dusty-plank-roofed houses, children and women and chickens in the shadows of trees, and clothes on the clotheslines in many bright colors as on the clotheslines above; and everything there was illegal; these people were squatters. Twenty-five years before, there had been only a few families. Now there were two thousand Indians in three adjoining canyons, and that was fifteen years ago, so I can hardly imagine what the place looks like now if I could even find it. I suppose I should incorporate it into Imperial because most of the money on which those people lived came from peddling chewing gum, puppets and toy animals on the streets, especially in the scarcely moving lines of cars waiting to cross back into American California; these vendors gave a certain color and content to the Mexican-American continuum. A wind rose up from the canyon, and the Mixtecs slowly chipped with picks and filled their wheelbarrow and stood around. We were guests, so they brought us sodas. They served themselves last. Their entire hillside was dirt of a parchment color resembling old map-flesh, and when the children scratched game-lines into it with dead sticks, that place became a map of itself, its delineation as real and eternal as any other even if it got scuffed out a minute later; and if you consider me frivolous, please tell me what and why a boundary is, or tell me how illegality is. Why must they live here, and not in your house? Those upper slopes were steep and hard and worn smooth, just baked hard dirt in the sun with litter and dirty paper and stinking decayed cloth; then they got steeper, at which point the Indians had cut tiny slippery steps into their substance and in still more difficult places affixed ladders down into their steep and narrow canyon where little girls in short dresses ran up and down the path. Piles of rocks and bones interrupted cement platforms. The canyon was terraced by means of tires, as neatly laid in as the boulders of New England farm walls. Upon these terraces, wooden house-boxes had been built and painted blue, yellow, green and firehouse red—all the hues of the clothes but far less bright than they, on account of Imperial’s nearly unremitting sunlight. Looking down onto those house-islands, we saw lethargic women sweeping the concrete around themselves in motions much slower than those of their own chickens. Dogs barked. A little girl wearing only shorts moved a chair under a tree. We went through a muddy slippery yard past more little children; we passed by a fence, descended three tire-steps, paralleled another residential delineation comprised of old bedspring mattresses, and there in the doorway of the next house a woman said: I born in Mexcali. That’s where I born. They have seven kids and I’m the youngest one. We were in Oaxaca. I remember that, but I don’t remember why. My Dad died about sixteen years. After he died, my Mom took us all the way from San Felipe, then we came to Calican to work the fields, then to Mexicali. Then after that we came to Tijuana. I speak English, and my other little stepsister, and my stepbrother does. My Mom sent me to school. But now I forget. Now I don’t know how to write my own name. My Mom, always she don’t understand this. She’s very mean to us. She thought my friend was my boyfriend. So she hate me. I was sixteen, and my husband was my boyfriend. She hit me. She was gonna take me to that place where you don’t go no more. I woke up that morning, then before lunch I told my teacher I couldn’t go to school no more. Then I went away with my husband, and we came back here. Now I was almost gonna be here three years now. I used to like to live here, but now, no more. I want to see green grass. Here it’s just dirt. I want to go away . . .—Later this woman began to speak of magical practices, about how to pray to the Virgin by means of a bowl of water, and how often the spirits of dead relatives required food. Perhaps if I had lived in her house for a month or a year, I might have made some progress in apprehending the properties of that particular globule, after which I could have entered into an apprenticeship somewhere else, then if I were humble, patient, greedy, generous, respectful, unscrupulous, lucky and self-reliant enough, seek out other zones and lessons, appropriating rather than living all those lives, until at the end of my own life, I might have been able to utter a provisional delineation:
Imperial is . . .—
But that canyon was difficult to get to. Nor did I speak Spanish. Nor was I willing to give myself more than intermittently to Imperial. After three hours I departed that canyon forever. In brief, I couldn’t quite expect to see into any of these Mexican lives as deeply as one can see into an open construction trench whose dark, raw, crumbly hole remains illuminated late at night by the glowing ferris wheels of the Imperial County Expo across the street . . .

MECCAN LIVES

If only these were the sole confusions and difficulties! But Imperial is not merely exotic to me, hence unknown; it’s also the kingdom of secrets. Imperial is the crawling headlights and glowing road-dots on the two lanes of Highway 111. Where 111 becomes Grapefruit Boulevard, that’s where you’ll find the sign that crows:
MECCA GOLD
—
CITRUS, FIGS, GRAPES
. And indeed it’s not far from that advertisement where the pale bells of ripe grapefruits toll lusciously in a green darkness whose leaves layer it with depths as enigmatic as the lightless zones beneath the sea. For this we’d better thank the water we’ve sucked from the Colorado River, since in unirrigated places the sand stretches as blankly as the map of Imperial County itself, being occupied only by a cast-off bottle or boot, or in exceptional cases by a shaggy wild palm which has grown and grown in every direction, thickening itself with fronds, until it’s lost much of its shape, hiding within itself. In Imperial, darkness is life; impenetrability is coolness. Hence those small and silent desert towns on whose streets every day is a shuttered Sunday, for the inhabitants harbor themselves at home, out of reach of the sun, or else they’re
gone
to factories and fields. Why be exposed to that searing eye in the sky? Whatever doesn’t hide gets half-bleached, half-effaced, like the lettering on the welcome-signs of those visionary cities around the Salton Sea. Is that convenience store open or closed? To find out, it’s necessary to press one’s nose against its dark-glazed windows. That’s why the everydayness of Imperial is
mystery.
An Anglo man from El Centro said to me: This is a secret, secret place. In a way, it’s like Nam. Just like the old guys don’t make friends with the new guys, because most of ’em won’t make it, here in the Imperial Valley you’ve got to ride out two summers before you’re in.—Only the most determined voyeurism has any hope of reaching into the shade beneath a man’s cap-brim, and then breaching the darkness of his sunglasses to read his eyes. Of course, it’s not climate which can explain the divide between the wide-eyed, open faces of the
pollos
on their native border-side and the guarded smiles of legal and illegal farm workers in Imperial County. But the necessary secrecy of life itself throughout that sunstruck zone renders the guardedness less conspicuous. Even on the Mexican side, whose streets are not nearly so lifeless, vendors shelter beneath the awnings of their wheeled stands, beggar-children squat in shade, and prostitutes lurk in cool bars wherever they can, or in doorways of blessed sunlessness. If the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans of Imperial have any one thing in common, it’s a resigned faith in the corruption of authority everywhere. For instance, one November a taxi driver from Indio claimed that the Border Patrol checkpoint at Salton City had been inactive “for six months.” He thought that illegal entries would be condoned until the end of the grape harvest in December.— If they don’t make it easy, he reasoned, who’s gonna pick the grapes? Don’t you think the farmers are gonna give a nice present for Immigration?—And to the exponents of this majority doctrine, authority is not only greedy and unprincipled, but dangerously malicious. It certainly seems to be. From the
CLASSIFIEDS-LEGALS
of the
Calexico Chronicle:
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that $903.00 (Nine Hundred, Three) U.S. currency was seized on May 29, 1999, from the person of Luis Alfred Garcia . . . by officers of the Brawley Police Department in connection with the violation of Health & Safety Code [sec] 11351.—Moreover, dear reader, NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that a 1990 Honda Accord bearing California License No.—————, VIN—————was seized on March 18, 1999 from the person of Paul Cesare de Jesus, on SR-86, . . . by officers of the Imperial County Narcotic Task Force in connection with the violation of Health & Safety Code sec. 11359, sec. 11360(a), sec. 12500(a) CVC (99-AF-007).—Why should Luis Alfred García lose his cash, or Paul Cesare de Jesús his car, for having bought or sold drugs? More to the point, why should the cash and car of those two men accrue to G-men whose business lay in seizing people’s property in order to finance the seizure of other people’s property? At least in Mexico when you pay
la mordida,
the bite, to the policeman who arrests you, you may get your freedom in exchange. In the United States you’ll get nothing. Punitive unto near-incorruptibility, the law of Northside executes statutes no more cruel and arbitrary than those of Southside, perhaps less, but unlike the law of Southside it does consistently execute them. I mentioned the vendors, beggar-children and prostitutes of Mexicali. In Sacramento, California, where I live, such people risk getting arrested. There used to be an excellent Mexican restaurant on wheels there; it had an Aztec name, and the burritos were as good as any in Mexicali. The sole proprietor couldn’t afford a business permit, so he trolled his stand to and fro until omnipotence stepped on him. He could barely speak English; I wonder if he understood why they closed him down, fined him and arrested him for not being able to pay the fine. Enough. That didn’t even happen in Imperial, so who am I to waste ink on his misfortune? The point is that to anxious semiliterate immigrants of any legal hue, authors, anthropologists, photographers and journalists—in short, record-taking outsiders—may well be authority’s spies. Hence it is better to tell them nothing. (The man from El Centro again: So many people over here are either selling drugs or busting drugs. You learn who’s who, and you shut your mouth.) On the Mexican side, people can afford to be more trusting, more confident, for it’s unlikely that I with my mild deportment, ignorance of the Spanish language and foreign address could be in collusion with Mexican authority. And if I’m not asking questions related to drugs or illegal immigration, I probably don’t work for the American government, either. But should my interlocutors and I happen to meet northwards of
la línea,
the line, who can say what I am? And so if we roll a trifle farther south on Highway 111, into Thermal, where the Jewel Date Co. building relieves us briefly from any eastern glare (the company itself, by the way, has moved), and if we then keep on past the Oasis Date Gardens and the subsequent desolaton of baked dust-flats, the traffic light with the sign which says MECCA, and if we in fact make the leftward turnoff into that aforementioned town, that small huddle of houses (to the east one quickly gets subsumed into fields; then the tan badlands of Painted Canyon with their smoke trees and soft sands run northeast all the way to Highway 10), the tightly closed enigma within it may not call any attention to itself. Just off the highway lies a small triangularish park of topheavy palms, a shade-haven where in summer Mexicans sleep on the grass, especially during the grape season, and where all year round certain shadowy souls sit in broken chairs. It could be a park in Mexicali, except that those shadowy men are much less friendly, and in place of, say, the brotherhood of sidewalk barbeque vendors perfuming the world with their savory white smoke; in place of the hulking, weary Indian peddler-woman strolling from shade to shade, with her shelf of stuffed animals strapped below her breasts, there’s exactly no one, thanks I suppose to that American practice I’ve mentioned of extorting licensing fees from street vendors who are too poor to pay them, and thanks without a doubt to the Border Patrol, and thanks also to that same reclusiveness of Imperial life-forms, which would translate anybody who wandered through those sizzling open spaces in hopes of doing business with the public into a suspicious anomaly, especially since there’s really no public to be found in Mecca, with the exception of those immensely private shadowy men. Just as from a distance, palm orchards seem to draw themselves up into compact armies of lushness, rich and dark between the desert and the Salton Sea, so these men appear to represent the same cause, compadres of idleness or perhaps illegality,
¹⁷
until one actually enters the park to see how in the afternoons, when their numbers are greatest, they subdivide into cliques. In their baseball caps or their white sombreros, they sit on chairs and sometimes even on kitchen stools in the park, watching the
DO NOT CROSS
yellow tape stirring in any breeze. In the stillness of their abiding, they resemble the lone dog who sleeps in the afternoon street. Hunching over cigarettes or kicking back their morning beers, they stare carefully at all the traffic going by, when there is any traffic, which is far from always.