Imperial (137 page)

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.
There’s a lot of crying-in-your-beer stuff going on.

Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.
A gallon of gasoline or diesel produces more power in an hour than three hundred thousand pounds of horseflesh.
You can’t produce things the way you used to.

Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.
THE AZTECS ARE BACK
.

Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.
The public has been rather slow in adopting the area as a playground, but the day is rapidly approaching, when it will come into its own in a big way . . .

Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.

I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
OFFICIAL FIGURES SHOW NO COLORADO RIVER WATER AVAILABLE FOR CENTRAL ARIZONA PROJECT.

I like the tranquillity and the ranch and the animals.
In the meantime, revenues will be rising due to increased assessed values.

Before
was the time!

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.
And when they can specify that, and the State of California has the authority to do that [and] they can enforce this by legal machinery which can put a man in jail if he doesn’t do it, then I say that you are jeopardizing his rights.

By the time negotiations broke off on February 28, violent and debilitating strikes had been in effect . . .
INDEPENDENT GROWERS KEEP WORKERS HAPPY
.

When we had ten of ’em, a Queen and nine Princesses, we could go to L.A. and get anything on TV we wanted.
No doubt those were the good old days before we had Civil Rights Marches.

2

In some respects a stream is like a woman.
But they still use skimpy costumes and you see.

The looks of that ditch and the effluent were a distinct disappointment . . .
It got worse all the time. It’s not okay, the water. Again they have salt. And there’s not enough water.
Nine known species of edible fish inhabit its blue depths . . . There are no set standards of sewage disposal.

3

INDEPENDENT GROWERS KEEP WORKERS HAPPY.
No trace of such gas remains.

PART ELEVEN

POSTSCRIPTS

Chapter 154

THE PROHIBITED BALLADS (1913-2005)

Those of you who know about these things,
I know you will understand me,
and those who don’t get it,
little by little you will.
In this tyrannical world
there are many ways to live.

—Narcocorrido “From Nostril to Nostril,” sung by the band Koely at the Thirteen Negro, 2005

R
elative to Wallace Wilson under arrest for having cocaine in his possession,
Los Angeles advises Calexico in 1913, . . .
you need take no further action in this matter, as you state you have no positive evidence that the goods were smuggled. In this connection I have to advise you that cocaine does not come within the operation of the opium law, as this drug is not a derivative of opium. In future you need take no action against persons having cocaine in their possession, unless further advised by this office.

But in 2002 in one of my hometown’s myriad courtrooms, a baffled, curlyhaired female prisoner, black, gazes over her shoulder at me, her mouth open, looking as if she longs to run. An attorney, drumming fingers on a file, keeps saying something to her. I hear the repeated phrase
two years.

For cocaine possession, Miss Knox, sixteen months, two years or three years. If you violate probation, you’re subject to parole for . . .

Yes, ma’am, she replies to everything.

Do you understand what you are agreeing to? This plea would include all Sacramento County violations. You’re required to register as a convicted narcotics offender.

Yes, ma’am.

Do you give up the right to a speedy public trial, the right to confront all witnesses, to testify, to remain silent?

Yes, ma’am.

How do you plead?

Guilty. No contest.

Pick one.

No contest.

If you plead no contest I will find you guilty.

Yes, ma’am, whispers the girl in terrified bewilderment.

Next case. A tall blond boy (possession of meth), awaits punishment, his hands tightly clasped behind his back. The judge warns him he could be subject to sixteen months, two years or three years. If he gets probation he will need to register as a convicted narcotics offender.—
How do you plead?
the voice demands.

Guilty, he says, not only stiffly but monotonously, his fingers writhing behind his back.

He wanders back to his due place in the far rear of the courtroom and slams himself down in his seat with a sad and nervous smirk; his friend claps his shoulder.

And already here’s another defendant, gripping a soiled RENO cap behind his back, ruined by getting caught with cocaine! He’s a dirty, beaten-down old man whom they are going to beat down a little more. Will their pleasure be sixteen months, thirty-two months or three years? What’s the difference? He’s a drug criminal; he’s human trash.

... To all Sacramento County violations, . . . the judge is saying.

He pleads in a blurry mumble: No contest.

A promise of one year in county jail, the judge was saying. Go to probation within two business days and come back to the court on the thirtieth for your sentence.

When he turns around to leave, I see for the first time that he is black. A huge X-shaped bandage mars the lower righthand quadrant of his face.

These are citizens of Northside. Now, what happens when the line gets crossed?

In the village of Coalcomán in Michoacán, a certain Miguel Palominos, illiterate and ignorant of his age (he can’t even count), clean of any criminal record and the sole support of his mother and sisters, receives a bus ticket to Nogales, where a coyote brings him across the line and into northern California. Here a man named Jose takes him over. Miguel’s salary will be a thousand dollars per month, after the coyote has been paid. His task, shared with four others, is to water thirteen thousand marijuana plants. After two or three months, during which time he receives not a penny, sherriff’s deputies appear. Everybody escapes, except for Miguel Palominos, whom prosecutors hope to send away for fifteen years. (This is one of forty or fifty such cases in the past decade in the Sacramento jurisdiction alone. We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.) His defense attorney tells the jury what seems patently true: This man of about twenty-two years was used as a
throwaway.
The attorney also uses the term
“indentured servitude,” which is a polite phrase for slavery.
However, as I see from my newspaper,
federal law allows someone like Palominos to be held responsible for what others have plotted.
How wonderful federal law is.
Sympathy has no place in the courtroom, and the jurors were told that four times . . .

Thus runs the tale of Miguel Palominos, as complete as I know it: He was arrested in August 2002 and literally
held responsible
until the closing arguments in November 2003. Then what? That didn’t make the news.

And in Mexicali, across the street from the Hotel Paris, a woman who is so high that she is literally going through the motions of flying finally apes Icarus and slams face-first on the sidewalk. By the time her escort has accomplished the difficult mission of raising her to her feet, she is weeping with pain, but it is the relaxed, full weeping of a small child, accompanied by easy tears which seem to relieve her. Tomorrow, I suppose, she will more accurately feel and see the damage. Meanwhile at the corner, grey-clad boy soldiers with machine guns send them one disinterested glance. In my country, the soldiers, or rather their police proxies, would come to help that woman, in which process they would arrest her. That’s Northside for you! But here we’re on the other side of the ditch.

LUPE’S SMILE

Needless to state, it was the great Lupe Vásquez who first informed me of the existence of the
baladas prohibidas.
We were at the Thirteen Negro drinking early in the evening, which is to say that it was not yet midnight and Lupe had not yet blacked out. He had just finished explaining how he determined which of the dancing girls were available, and although I have already quoted this maxim, it deserves to be better remembered,—yea, engraved beneath the first Ten Commandments:
So I just say: Do you want to fuck? If no, that’s it. She’s fired. They
APPRECIATE
that, because it saves their time.
Just then the jukebox exploded into another happy song, indistinguishable to my ignorance from the others, and the grim field workers at other tables nearly smiled, while the dancing couples on the metal floor grew livelier, and several men shouted along with the singer. Even Lupe, who trudged bitterly through life and although he called me his friend sometimes walked away from me and at other times, drunken times, shot me glances of the blackest resentment, cheered up when he heard this
corrido,
which was naturally so loud that he had to shout into my ear for me to apprehend that it dealt with the demure ladyfriend of a wanted drug lord who happened to be absent when two Federales visited their residence, promising her that they wouldn’t hurt him, so she told them to sit down and wait if so it pleased them; but while fixing refreshments she overheard their plan to liquidate her lover, so she sweetly invited them to rest just a moment longer, then strode out and blew them away! Lupe’s hatred of authority exceeded even mine, and for good reason; most days he had to deal with the lordly ways of United States Immigration inspectors, of foremen who might or might not offer him a job and who if they did cared about their production quotas, not about his back; of companies who didn’t pay him for the hours he had to sit in buses waiting for the frost to melt off the broccoli; and whenever he got a vacation from these entities, he got to visit the know-it-alls at the employment office in Calexico. Now and then he had also enjoyed the hospitality of Northside’s police and judges. His days were not exceptional. No wonder that so many field workers sat drinking or doing heroin in those buses at five in the morning; no wonder that Lupe himself liked to drink—nowadays more often at cantinas such as El Cordobés or intermediate establishments, for instance the Dollar Bar, than the Thirteen Negro, because it practically killed him every time the price of anything went up, and dances were more expensive than when he was young. How bitterly he raged! But wasn’t that the way of the world? Throughout Mexicali the
putas
were more expensive, and they charged double to take their tops off so that a man could suck their titties. That was why a few beers at the Thirteen Negro soothed the pain of the Thirteen Negro’s prices, and when a certain sort of
corrido
came on the jukebox, Lupe even smiled.

He always had stories about drugs. Once he said: There’s an asparagus field near Centinela, and when we’re working there we see a lot of burned vehicles from
pollos
and traffickers. Last year the asparagus crew found a lot of weed that somebody left. At first they were scared to get it, in case someone was watching, but they did it; they got it and said fuck it! And they took the marijuana. One guy sold his share for four hundred dollars.

To Lupe this outcome represented not only a significant score (he was always hoping to strike it rich, and one New Year’s Day when some of us hiked up the Mexican side of that same Mount Centinela, Lupe vanished for an hour, prowling high in the scree for the legendary gold which Pancho Villa or some ghost had hidden there; I asked what he had found, and he frowningly replied: If I’d found something, I wouldn’t tell anybody, not even you!); but also, and I think more fundamentally in his mind, a victory over the official bullies who imprison people for drug possession.

And so that happy ballad about one loving lady’s murder of two Federales was ambrosia to Lupe. I asked him how many of those songs there were, and he said: Many. So many that the assholes here have made it illegal to play them on the radio. They’re called the
baladas prohibidas.
Some also call them the
narcocorridos.
Of course, the more they try to stamp them out, the more popular they get. Those assholes who try to control us, we just make fun of them.

“A GOOD THING FROM A MARKETING STANDPOINT”