Imperial (132 page)

The parking attendant Lupita,
²⁵⁰
who when I interviewed her in 2003 had lived in Mexicali for exactly thirty years, said that the days of the “white gold” were gone by the time she arrived. I asked what else she remembered from those days, and she said: The airport used to be where the baseball stadium is, and the main road was up here. Where the Kenworth factory is now, on the way to San Felipe, it was all empty.

Was Mexicali better then or is it better now?

Before
was the time! she said sadly. Too many robbers now. Too many in my house: Five or six times they’ve taken my television, my radio.

She had worked then as a security guard in a disco. She smiled and remembered the beauty of the disco prostitutes; and her smile was that same sweet smile I had seen so many times in Imperial when people remembered the past.

And the past was still present, at least to those of us who live now, on this side of it (in other words, the past is past). The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
(whose information, I grant, might be secondhand and even out of date), describes the Mexicali of this period as follows:
The city is a transportation junction and the center of an irrigated farming region producing cotton, wheat, tomatoes, and oilseed crops.
That entry could have been written about 1950, perhaps even about 1940. Mexicali lay as still and stable as any long alley in the Chinesca, perfectly sunned and shadowed, adorned by her corrugated roofs, from which squares of green-papered light-stripes shone alternately. And if you prefer to hear the same information in Spanish, the same facts offered for sale as neatly as the stuffed sea turtles of San Felipe, I will gladly advise you that in 1978, nearly two hundred and twenty-five
mil hectares
produced more than two and a half
millones de toneladas.
In 1982, fifty
mil hectares
more than that produced about half a million
toneladas
less, with various swings and dips in between. By 1975 there might have been a few million people and toneladas more than in 1950, but what of that? Mexicali drowsed and labored on, in the thick of agricultural news.

Señora Olga Márquez, born in 1973, had continued for all her thirty-one years to dwell right there in Colonia Colorado No. 4, which lies a few kilometers east of the Mexicali-San Felipe Highway.

I lived right down the road, she said, and then I got married and moved here. The street went right through here, and this was a parcel of land (she pointed to a yard). They had cows back then. They grew Sudan grass and rye grass. And my grandmother was here. My grandmother made cheese here. They’ve been fishing in that canal for a long time.

What is the name of that canal?

It has a name, but I can’t remember.

How’s the life here for you?

I like it. I like the tranquillity and the ranch and the animals. Above all, I like to raise my children here.

What’s your opinion of Mexicali?

It’s nice. The people there are really nice. The stores are close and everything is close, but I like it even better here because things are more tranquil.

Where else have you been in your life?

Indio, La Quinta, even Bakersfield. I was visiting my uncles. I took my children to Disneyland.

Did you notice any differences between Americans and Mexicans?

The life up there is more enclosed. You go to work and you go home. That’s what it seems like to me.

And the life here, will this life stay like this for your children?

It will change, she said, her children smiling beside her.—Who knows? Maybe my children when they grow up will want to live in Mexicali. I want them to have good jobs.

What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve seen or experienced here in your life?

Living right beside my parents. And my brothers and sisters.

Standing outside her little house, with Centinela, known to Northside as Signal Mountain, a translucent blue stegosaurus to the northwest, she intimated that not much had altered here in the course of her entire life; and she liked it that way. Time was a smiling functionary of the municipal park, a man whose hose nourished the grass with the slowest possible water (yes, in Mexicali water travels at a different average speed than in the United States). The Thirteen Negro continued in its glory; I imagine that it was not much different in 1975 than it is tonight in 1998 when the man to my left stares into space and a blonde approaches the table of men to my right, extending her wrist to be kissed by each of them; in the next moment she has withdrawn to the next table to laugh into another woman’s ear; they are pointing at the two men and scheming, while the two men are plotting still more seriously with regard to the two women, measuring resources, proclivities and choice, at which point the dance is over, the musicians begin, and it gets so loud that conversation consists of shouting into another human being’s ear; at the table behind me, the campesino whom I suspect of being the thief of my baseball cap has now drunk enough to resemble a certain Olmec-style jade mask once offered to the Great Temple of Tenochtitlán: a broad, dark, smooth and shiny face, with downturned black crescent-slits for eyes and fleshy lips downturned in a grimace; that greenish-black mask appears to be stoically experiencing pain or some other unpleasantness, all the while gazing into the land of gods and dreams, as a devout victim might do when the Aztec priests cut his heart out. His eyes dull. His head slumps. He snores in the darkness while the flashing red dances of blood blare on and on. Indeed, the Thirteen Negro continued in its glory, as did the other wide, red-lit bars like happy hells, precursors of the boutique SEXY-SERVIEIO PAN AMERICANO DE PERFECCION, SA de CV where orange-faced girls beneath green neon stood yet more steadfast than the pillars of money-changing signs. Mexicali was growing, to be sure; but even in my epoch Imperial mostly appears uninhabited; Imperial is sun and dirt, with accidental concretions of people and wilderness in between.
²⁵¹

In 2000, a middle-aged, sun-honeyed woman with a long lush pigtail wormed through with grey rests her brawny arm upon the back of an old man in a cowboy hat as they watch television together in a restaurant: girls in black swimming suits raising their arms above their heads so that their breasts jut out. The girls smile winningly. It’s an exercise program. What might have been on television in 1975? The restaurant was here; it’s an old Mexican-Chinese place in the Chinesca. Perhaps there was no television in it then. The middle-aged woman would have been young and her man middle-aged. I ask whether they dined here a quarter-century ago, and she smilingly replies:
Claro!,
which is to say, of course.

Chapter 147

“THE LANGUAGE SEEMS TO BELONG SO TO THIS COUNTRY” (
ca.
1960-2003)

“You seem to be very fond of Spanish, Miss Worth,” he said, when the girl came back to the porch . . . Barbara laughed at his evident displeasure. “The language seems to belong so to this country. To me its colors are all soft and warm like the colors of the Desert.”

—Harold Bell Wright, 1911

O
ne June morning in 2003, when more-than-hundred-degree days were just starting to feel more likely than less-than-hundred-degree days, I read in the newspaper that five out of eight illegal aliens from Sinaloa had perished in a car crash near Ocotillo. A survivor who identified himself as the driver was, in keeping with the tenderhearted policies of these United States, arrested and charged with five counts of second-degree murder. How had he so identified himself? California Highway Patrolman Richard Bird explained that the man, whose name was Angulo,
indicated he had been driving.
That interview led to Angulo’s being arrested. The next day’s newspaper continued the story:
In continuing the investigation, Bird said, it was determined Angulo had not been talking about driving the vehicle.
The driver was dead. So it all ended happily for Angulo, whose name was actually Cruz (Angulo being his middle name), and whose fate now would merely be detention and deportation from Imperial. Patrolman Bird’s mistake must have been the result of linguistic difficulties.

Someday these difficulties would end; for the language of both American and Mexican Imperial was becoming Spanish, as had once been the case before Imperial got subdivided. American Imperial officially remains English-speaking even now as I write in 2007, but in practice English is sinking into the sand like spilled water. As early as 1934, half of all Calexicans are Mexican or Mexican-American. The Hispanicizing of this region accelerates in the 1950s. By the time the twentieth century had flowed three-quarters away, the Anglos for whose ostensible sake the valley had been irrigated comprise a distinctly less monumental presence than before.

Sixties to seventies, the place was doing some serious changing, said Kay Brockman Bishop. Just becoming more Mexican. You can easily go to Wal-Mart in Calexico and go through ten clerks before you can find one that can speak English. Sometimes I pretend not to speak Spanish just to see how they are. They’re nice, but you know. Calexico has worked itself up into a certain mindset, and it’s not a mindset that I agree with. I feel that if you’re going to come to the United States, then work yourself
into
the United States. Try to fit in. They want to stay Mexican
and
stay on this side. I just don’t think that’s fair. But they can get away with it in these border towns.

Whatever you might think of her judgment, her analysis remained undeniably valid; and in the random year 1985, the contestants for the Miss Calexico Pageant bore the revealingly non-Anglo-Saxon names of Nora Alicia Bermudez, Nidia G. Castellanos, Siria Eduviguez Calderon, Lucy Trujillo, Martha J. Chong and Fabiola Yuriko Maeda. In the following year, we could still find
Bill Polkinhorn representing De Anza and his Spanish riders;
all the same, the 1986 Miss Calexico was Martha Patricia Castellanos.

(César Chávez, 1984:
. . . twenty and thirty years from now . . . in the Imperial Valley and in many of the great cities of California—these communities will be dominated by farm workers and not by growers . . .
)

A different delineation line has not yet been entirely erased even now.
Contestant must be single, never have been married, nor may she be living with a male partner in lieu of legal marriage . . .
On the other side of the ditch there is a Christmas tree in the lobby of the Nuevo Pacífico and the nearest whore is wearing a festive red miniskirt. On Avenida Tejada all the pretty girls in doorways mouth kisses at me, and I feel warm inside as I wink back at them, not caring that the air stinks like the Río Nuevo. Thus Mexicali. But in Calexico I have almost never seen a whore, no doubt because
a girl’s strength of character and personality are reflected in a wholesome appearance.
No matter. In the olden days, Miss Calexico was Barbara Worth, who spoke Spanish for much the same reason that she played the piano. By the 1970s, Miss Calexico was likely to be Mexican-American.

This county was run by the Anglos, said Richard Brogan. The English language was the predominant language, and that’s not the case today. In this county there’s a significant bias. You can see the anti-white attitude every day.

Brogan named a Mexican-American woman who is mentioned in this book, and he said of her: She has an agenda, that’s what I see. Her husband is not as smooth as her; he’s not as intelligent. He’s a flat-out racist. She’s so flat-out smart and savvy that you will never know it from her.

I have already told you what he said about the organization called California Rural Legal Assistance:
They’re a legal representative of poor people but I don’t think there’s English spoken within their doors . . .

AND HE IS US

Not only the language is getting Latinized. In his wonderfully evenhanded essay about Northern and Latin American stereotypes of each other, Richard Pike lays out Northside’s view of Southside: animalistic, unregulated, hedonistic, servile, ignorant, idolatrous, lascivious, dishonest, corrupt in every sense. Barbara Worth’s Caucasian empire never resembled that; the rectitude of W. F. Holt was as reliable and sublimated as the All-American Canal. But now that Barbara has happily married, and Arid America has been syndicated into a wonderland of factories whose operations are almost as efficient as washing machines, we catch our breaths, look about us and perceive that we seem to be living in our own banana republic up here! The Watergate scandal, and Iran-Contra, and the criminality of George W. Bush’s administration; televangelists caught with prostitutes, a President and his intern, deficit spending, a politicized judiciary, secret prisons, mercenaries and torture—I do declare, Barbara; I just can’t help believing in people!
Latin Americanization,
explains Pike,
implies basically that Americans . . . have themselves assumed the identity of the Latin Other—as traditionally stereotyped.
They
have not become as we are, but
we,
regardless of station of life, have become as they are.

In Los Angeles a woman watches the infamous beating of the black man Rodney King. The acquittal of the police who did it will set off the riots of 1992. The woman’s husband wants to get away from the scene.
And he was just petrified—he grew up in a country where this is prevalent; police abuse is prevalent in Mexico.

The English language was the predominant language, and that’s not the case today. Calexico has worked itself up into a certain mindset, and it’s not a mindset that I agree with.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.