Imperial (157 page)

MWD has its own argument. San Diego possesses an argument. Who cares
what
they all argue? I’ll tell you
how
they argue: My friend Lupe Vásquez always kept his broccoli knife in his backpack, not on his belt, because he knew his own temper when he got provoked. The last time he’d fought was thirteen years ago when a kid kept throwing lettuce on his table when it was already full because the woman packer was getting behind. Lupe told him to stop, but he didn’t, so Lupe called the foreman, who made the kid stop. Then, when it might have been over, Lupe threw some lettuce on the kid’s table,
just to show him what it was like.
The kid wanted to fight him right there on the field. Lupe told him to wait. So he followed Lupe down the street after they had finished in the broccoli field. Lupe told him it was over, but the kid wouldn’t listen; Lupe accordingly swung at him and kept swinging until a bystander pulled him off; and when he got to this part, Lupe remarked that he had been lucky that nobody called the police. I wonder whether anybody at least dragged the kid into the shade or whether they left him lying in the street. At any rate, here comes the punchline: Next day the kid didn’t show up for work.—I’ll never forget the vengeful sparkling of Lupe’s eyes as he told me this.—Los Angeles, San Diego and Imperial argue about water in that spirit.

Those birds squeaking and chuckling in a plantation of date palms in Coachella, they must be drinking something somewhere; doesn’t that imply on-farm inefficiency?

In beleaguered Imperial County, near the border and east of the Highline Canal, on the white soft dirt the grass is as lush as a collie-dog’s hair. More inefficiency! The silhouette of a dragonfly occludes one after another in a series of parallel power wires, and then a bird calls. The cool fragrant shadows begin to outstretch from the bushes beneath which they slept. I can smell water—that means water’s a-wasting!

On a Mexicali morning, men on the arch-roofed sidewalks are chatting with the vendors with their multicolored juices in huge transparent jug-shaped jars; now it’s hot; people sweat and lick their lips; in the jars the juices are beautiful; water is as precious as this.

Chapter 158

ONE ACRE-FOOT (1903-2003)

Those politicians, they’re just promising and promising, very eloquently as my father always used to say, but when they’re by themselves, they’re thinking, how can I make dough?

—Lupe Vásquez, 2002

I
n 1975, the
California Water Atlas
defines an acre-foot as the amount needed by a family of five for a year,
including lawn and garden irrigation.
In 2003, the San Diego County Water Authority explains that an acre-foot is
the amount of water used by two typical households in a year.
So we’re getting more efficient, aren’t we?

We have already noted that in 1950, the average per capita water usage in San Diego County was not quite eighty-one gallons per day. In 2000, that figure is a hundred and twenty-five gallons per day. Well, why not?
WATER IS HERE
.

The Mexicali Valley contains as many irrigated acres as the Imperial, but gets only half as much water, thanks to the All-American Canal. But in 2000, Mexicali uses a San Diego-like hundred and seventeen gallons per day per capita. So there must be poor people who use less, quite a bit less—for instance José López from Jalisco. On a hot March midmorning the sunlight probes inside the doorway of the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico to reveal a whore whose electric-blue miniskirt clashes perfectly with her huge red slabs of crossed thigh-flesh; José, who would certainly be more of a ladies’ man had his circumstances permitted, refrains from peeking; he is especially embarrassed about his two black front teeth, which continue to decay because he so often lacks good water to brush them with; moreover, his clothes smell in the heat; we must thank him for saving water for Northside.

Tijuana’s “normal requirement”
³⁰²
is between two hundred fifty and three hundred fifty liters per capita per day—call it eighty gallons. Tijuana actually gets a hundred and eighty-nine liters per day, or five-eighths of the desired amount.

In 1920, water availability in Baja California was more than twenty-five cubic meters per capita per year; in 1984, it was four point five cubic meters.

An essay called “U.S.-Mexico Border Environment by the Numbers” estimates that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, average per capita water consumption in Mexico border communities is a hundred gallons per day. In Albuquerque, it is two hundred gallons per day. I can’t help believing in people.

In 1998, farmers in Imperial County pay thirteen dollars and fifty cents per acre-foot. San Diego is prepared to pay two hundred and forty-nine dollars.

One acre of alfalfa in the Imperial Valley needs six acre-feet of water. That will cost the farmer eighty-one dollars. On the other hand, if he fallows his field and becomes a water farmer, he could sell those six acre-feet to San Diego for fourteen hundred and ninety-four dollars. How much can he get for an acre of alfalfa? I see that the county’s yield per acre in 1998 was seven point six five tons, each ton of which sold for ninety-three dollars and sixty-four cents. Call his income seven hundred and sixteen dollars—half of what San Diego would pay him to fallow. If we factor in his labor and expenses, water farming looks even nicer. And, remember, alfalfa is one of the most cost-effective crops an Imperialite can raise.
³⁰³

One acre-foot—what is it but a unit of power?—Richard Brogan once said of a certain farming family in the Imperial Valley, and I have changed the name: His wife is extremely involved in Farm Bureau politics. He and she, they are extremely huge.
³⁰⁴
I understand that they can order a thousand acre-feet of water every twenty-four hours,
he said, folding his arms.—In Smith Farms, when everything is done, it’s all planted right now, they want that first cutting before June.
Smith Farms alone can draw down the level of the All-American Canal.

One acre-foot: How should it be used—to maintain a family farm that no one quite believes in, or for profit? Judge Farr again, 1918:
As has already been learned by the reader of this volume, the financial end of the great project in this Valley has overshadowed every other feature from its inception.

Chapter 159

OPERATION GATEKEEPER (1994)

“Criminals” is what they are even if you try to sugarcoat it by saying they are dreamers. How would you feel if you lost a loved one because an alien slammed into your family’s car? I bet you would sue the Border Patrol for negligence. Heck, that is where the money is . . .

To finalize this letter, I ask you, what is enough, 1 million illegals, 10 million or until the other countries are empty. Use your college education to figure it out.

—Juan Arvizu, letter to the editor, 2003

I
n 1962, the journalist Ruben Salazar assured us that from one end to the other of that eighteen-hundred-mile border, not a single soldier stood on either side.
A chain link fence is all that separates the two nations for about half that distance; the waters of the Rio Grande do the job for the rest of the way.

A quarter century went by; and in 1986, the year that Leonard Knight buckled down to his true life’s work and began painting Salvation Mountain, the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act solved a certain problem for eternity by punishing employers of illegal workers and amnestying four-year permanent residents. The very same page of the history book I got this fact out of informs me that in 1989, earnings posted to Mexico by illegal workers were
the country’s third largest source of foreign exchange.
Perhaps the prospects for denying illegals access into American Imperial were approximately as flat as the desert on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea.

In 1949, there had been a hundred and seven thousand braceros, but more than two hundred and thirty-three thousand illegals got caught by the Border Patrol.

In 1974, they nabbed almost seven hundred and ten thousand illegals. In the early 1990s, they bagged forty thousand
bodies
per year in Sector El Centro alone.

Once upon a time, Southside was our frontier. We raped away half of Mexico and convinced ourselves that it was for
their
good, too. We extended the Imperial Irrigation District right into the Mexicali Valley. We passed the Volstead Act, then roared into Southside whenever we wanted to get drunk.

But
they
started coming over here.

This is the biggest drug corridor in California, said the woman from Jacumba. If they’re bringing
bodies,
the
bodies
have drugs, because that’s their ticket. I’m sick of it. People from China ending up on my doorstep! Chinese! I live one mile from the border and I’m sick of it. They’re all convicted felons. No one can do a thing because they can just run twenty feet and they’re across the border. Out here, you can’t be out here by yourself. You need a dog. Too many weirdos. Close the god-damn borders! They have to build some kind of infrastructure and maintain it. All this traffic coming across, it’s gotta stop. But by the time we’re dead it’ll have already changed because of all the foreigners comin’ in. You go from here to Kearny Mesa, it’s all in Chinese and Japanese. The whole frigging town! That’s bullshit. We gotta limit immigration, really limit it. First thing we gotta do is clean house and get rid of all the illegals.

What would it take to stop them? Why, first a fence, and then a better fence!

It was time for Operation Gatekeeper, to which
pollos
and coyotes responded with the hollowed-out gas tank, the child in the piñata, the plank beneath the car. In 1995, eighty percent of the people apprehended along the California-Mexico border were pedestrians. By 2004, eighty percent of them were in vehicles.

The line kept straining to hold, especially at the Pacific, because in the 1980s, half of all illegal border-crossers along the entire stretch between Northside and Southside went through Tijuana. That was why Operation Gatekeeper would set out to harden that sector. I remember when they caught eight El Sal juveniles at ten-thirty at night when it was time to take off the uniforms and go home. A Border Patrolman told me, not without pride: Our shift isn’t over until everybody we caught is processed.

In 1989, Northside officially launched the War on Drugs. Guess which industry would now enjoy a great future down in Southside?

In 1994, Northside began Operation Gatekeeper. Guess which growing business got to raise its prices in Southside?

In the ringing words of Adele Fasano, Southern California Director of Field Operations, United States Customs and Border Patrol,
it all comes down to desperation, and the smugglers—being as depraved as they are—they prey on people’s desperation and human misery,
³⁰⁵
unlike Adele Fasano herself, who gets paid to try to repress that human misery by keeping it in Southside. Meanwhile, American produce remains cheap, and wages to field workers accordingly low.
The constant threat of heavy shipments . . . seemed to be the depressing factor.
We read that sentence years ago; it applied to Imperial Valley lettuce prices. It seems no less apposite in relation to the incomes
pollos
can command.

Read on if you dare; the very next paragraph retails and details the true story of a depraved smuggler!

Once I asked a man named José López—not the Jose Lopez with whom I rafted on the New River but the one you and I now know better, the person from Jalisco who became my long-term friend, the unwashed middle-aged man of thirty-eight who frequently slept on one of the shaded sidewalk benches just a few steps Mexico-ward of the line—which had been the smoothest of his sixteen illicit crossings, and he replied: They cut a hole in the fence about three years ago;
³⁰⁶
they cut out a bar, actually. There was a parked car right next to the old Immigration office. The guy who owned that car was a friend of mine. Well, I went through; I crossed the line. I was sure that the Border Patrol had seen me but they hadn’t. And I hid in the car. My friend came in about five minutes and he took me to San Diego. That was an easy one, real easy! He’s from Mexico, but he has a green card. The relationship we had, as friends, it means that we’ve done favors for each other without expecting money or anything like that. Yeah, that was an easy one. I stayed four months in San Diego. Then I went to Bakersfield to pick lettuce for a month. I was supposed to go to Salinas, but I got caught . . .

He claimed that seventy-five percent of the time he came back voluntarily. He sent his dollars home to Mexico by Western Union.

I requested his opinion of the border. He said: Sometimes when I get to thinking about it, I’ve had bad feelings toward them, their American system. They play it off to being just and equal, but they’re just as corrupt as anybody. I still think that California and all those states that were robbed from Mexico, I don’t know, I don’t know; I don’t have the words. Like when I get caught by Immigration and thrown out of a place that used to be Mexico, I get pissed off.

I am proud to report that in 1996, in Sector El Centro alone, the Border Patrol saved Northside from sixty-six thousand, six hundred and eighty people like him.

In 1997 they caught a hundred and forty-six thousand, two hundred and ten.