Imperial (177 page)

Chapter 190

TECATE (2003-2006)

W
hen the heat takes one’s breath away in the Imperial Valley, it is windy-warmish at the Desert Viewing Tower and cool in Tecate, over which the great mountain to the west spreads its grey-blue translucent wings. Juan Bandini’s old tract has come along considerably: A truck blares canned exultant slogans from the speakers which burden its back; the breeze carries them thankfully away. Bird-songs and snarling cars, men leaning on stick-fences beneath immense trees, a Chinese restaurant, a Mexican flag, these “typical” entities could be found anywhere in Imperial, and in a number of sites and zones outside it.

To be sure, Tecate, cool in July as in October, resembles Imperial Beach in that it would not be Imperial at all without the international line. The Tecate wallscape consists of painted advertisements as long as the road remains paved; then, when it becomes sandy and commences to hump upward to the west, the wall goes bare, wraps around an old tree or two, upstages the official white stele on its mound of bare dirt, and allows itself to express the following extremely original sentiment: VIVAMEXICO.—Coincidentally, the name of the road is Avenida México.—On its south side are little houses. On its north side one can see nothing but the wall, excepting only two crosses.—I have been told that these memorialize not fallen
pollos
but accident victims.

Sometimes the wall is painted white, with blue, red or black advertisements overpainted on it. Then it becomes just army green or black or the usual rust-brown. A white rock has been handpainted to read
GARITA

Looking down east along that wall with its tall sunflowers, I imagine infinity, which lies somewhere between my horizon and Mexicali; looking west, my impulsions outward into universal ease are barred not by the wall itself, which runs parallel to my striving, but by a certain mound of graffiti’d rocks, in one hollow of which lie a heap of
pollos’
clothes: I think then of the scraps of cloth ground into the killing fields of Choeung Ek, Cambodia.

For us it used to be very pretty, said an old half-Yaqui woman whose father had emigrated here four decades ago; it was he, the Yaqui, who’d made the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe which presided over the dirt behind the fence.

There wasn’t any wall and we could see the mountains, she continued; it was really very pretty. People could pass back and forth. We were friends with the people from the United States. There was a path over there, and on that side I remember a few ranches. We were very friendly with them. The Hyde family used to live over there on the hill. Very generous people—Americanos. But once they put up that wall, it got different. They put it up in 1995.

How do you feel when you look at it now?

We don’t want it to be there. We wish it wasn’t there. We can’t see the pretty vistas anymore.

Why is there a city over here and not over there?

Fiercely she replied: Because Americans think that if they put a bunch of stores over there, Mexicans will come to work.

There was no city
over there,
so her answer was senseless, and the anger of its senselessness was itself information.

Tecate used to resemble a very beautiful ranch, she presently went on. People used to sleep indoors, leaving the doors and windows open. But lately many people from other parts of Mexico have been coming here—
pollos
and work seekers. There are many robberies.

How often do you see the
pollos
?

Lately, none have come by. About eight years ago, there were a lot of jumpers, even women and children.

Her little boy tried to say that they saw many every day, but she shushed him.

Two old ladies who were her neighbors told me: We see them every day, walking toward the mountains.

Once they put up that wall, it got different.
In the supermarket, a poster against cigarettes depicted the Trojan Horse of Northside leering over the border wall.

THE CENTER OF THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

The Aztec word for city or town is
altepetl,
which contains the words for hill and for water. Tecate is the only Imperial city that truly qualifies, with the exception of some Tijuana shantytowns, and those only in the spring.

So hail Tecate, center of the universe! The center of the center was, of course, the zócalo: benches oriented around the disk of cracked squares of white and greystone shards joined together; sometimes in late afternoon the children swam upon its coolness, while their parents sat in the cool shadows and on the next bench a teenaged boy was bending his teenaged sweetheart backward, kissing and kissing her, his hands up her striped miniskirt, and yes, she parted her knees for him and her snow-white calf-length socks shone like the gypsum of Plaster City and her black buckled shoes were as glossy as the All-American Canal when it carries away the last of the evening light.

AND ITS EDGE

And so the last of the evening light gets carried away to the music of barking dogs, the air cooling, carrying children’s voices to the wall, acrosss which four Nightbusters already glow; and above them, over an American mountain, a helicopter blinks.

Steam and hissing issue from the Tecate brewery at Avenida Hidalgo.

Suddenly at nine P.M. the street fills with traffic; the shoe store windows gleam and shine. The Diana Bar grows crowded. On the sidewalk, two little girls stand hip to hip. A man stands beside sweating gratings. A boy on the corner sells roses wrapped in plastic. A boy with his red cap on backward skates down the busy street, followed by four more boys, each with a different colored cap.

In summer there are sharp green evening shadows in contradistinction to the gold zone in La Rumorosa; in winter there are the glowing industrial suburbs.

Ten-o’-clock slides up the steep dirt streets of Tecate, the lateness partially overcome by Christmas tree lights within some rich walled houses and on the walls of shacks. Three boys walk down a hilly
avenida,
all the while lounging and gesturing in that graceful Mexican way. Two girls hold hands as they stride up another street, which is pallid with sand like so many others this close to the line. Turning north at a graffiti’d stop sign, I find myself face to face with that rusty metal reification of delineation which clings grimly to the undulating ridgetop farther in both directions than I will ever be able to comprehend. Nightbusters glow at me from Northside. In the interpreter’s car I ride along to the west as I have done so many times before over the years, passing my old graffiti’d acquaintance, Border Stele 245, across the street from which snakes of Christmas lights entwine themselves around the houses, cousins to the pale white graffiti that scrolls and spiders on the dark steel wall.

The street ends in a man-high concrete wall, but on the right, near the border fence, there are two angled concrete baffles not unlike those in the passages down through which rolls the precious sphere in a pinball machine. Cautiously introducing myself to this environment, I discover a plastic bag with a man’s T-shirt in it, which shines new and red in the headlights of the interpreter’s car; then there is a darkness, and I think the darkness goes deep.

We go south. The concrete wall follows us. Clambering up a bulbous protuberance at its base, I peer down into a deep arroyo and, defeated by the lack of scale, cannot decide whether that pale rectangle I see down below is a shanty or a piece of cardboard.

To our right somebody whistles twice, very close. To our left another whistle comes. I urge the interpreter back into the car, and we drive away, crawling back into the town. After half a dozen turns, where dirt gives way to pavement our headlights catch a lovely plump schoolgirl in a plaid miniskirt, who stares unsmilingly at us from between two low houses. Three young men lounge by a wall. I wave at them and they do not wave back. We roll slowly down a dark dirt alley in the shadow of a black wall, and a hooded man quickly turns his face away from our headlights. Soon we are back on Avenida Juárez, and we go westward into the fog.

My topographic map indicates a fairly short and easy hike northward through or over the border hills just west of Tecate Road on the American side, after which one quickly strikes Highway 94, which squiggles down to San Diego. Not much farther westward, at about the extremity of Tecate as of this writing, two narrow arroyos twist north between Tecate Peak and Little Tecate Peak. One of these must even contain occasional water, for the map shows a blue line called Cottonwood Creek. If I were a
pollo,
I would consider gambling here, for the Border Patrol would need to get out of their vehicles,
in the dark,
to patrol here. Of course they have their Nightbusters now. But given that Tecate remains the most penetrable part of the entire line between American and Mexican Imperial, the
pollos
must cross somewhere around here; and to the east of the official crossing the land smooths out sufficiently to be crisscrossed by jeep trails.

The next morning, crossing legally into Northside after a mere two-hour wait, I will learn that Cottonwood Creek does sport a dirt road along its eastern bank, and here are all-terrain vehicles with Border Patrol officers in them. For now I merely wonder where the
pollos
are.

So we drive as far as Rancho la Puerta, turning back just before committing ourselves to the Tijuana toll road. The foggy glow of that metropolis seethes down on the western horizon.

Tecate possesses a much more desert character in the night: fog, rock, dust and trees.

The eastern side of town seems somewhat affluent. The houses are more stoutly built and fewer of them are graffiti’d. Hugging the wall in the vicinity of stele 244, we roll as far east as we can, until concrete blocks stop us. We park. Strolling through the foggy night along a dirt road, we find ourselves between
la línea
and a long graveyard whose tall pale arches, crosses, blocks and statues are particularly eerie in the foggy night. A square open pit of blackness in a white slab suggests an open tomb. But then we see another of these, and several more. It must be that these crypts, purchased in advance, still await their occupants.

From the cemetery, a figure gazes at us. Is it a man or a statue? If I were a
pollo,
this place would be adequate to wait in, although how I would expect to escape the gaze of the Nightbusters is beyond me. From the cemetery comes the sound of a fountain.

There are as many open graves as gaps in the fence.

Now the pale sand road rises as we begin to ascend the shoulder of the volcanic mountain just outside of town, our footsteps shockingly loud in the sand; and here the Nightbuster glares right over the wall and into the cemetery, bleaching the tombs like a satanically hideous simulacrum of a desert sun.

The dark wall is pitted here and there with holes about the size of a gap that a child could make if he looped his thumb against his forefinger. Placing my eye to one of these, I discover that all I can see at first is blindingly bright fog. Then in time I make out the immense emptiness of the controlled American securityscape. The Nightbusters hurt my eyes.

A few paces farther up the road there is a long gap at the base of the fence, more than a foot wide. I could wriggle under if I had to. Of course, where would I find myself then?

I place my eye to another hole and see something like a giant caltrop over on Northside; actually, what it resembles more than anything is one of the Nazi obstacles that we had to contend with in the Normandie landing on D-day; the GIs called those
Rommel’s asparagus.
Beyond that, the vista dips down into the glaring sand of America. Before the wall there must have been a pretty view, as the old half-Yaqui woman had suggested. I think I can see a long meadow of glaring white grass, and then, farther down the hill, just where the light ends, a small shack; but my interpreter, whose eyes are better, points out to me that this is just the base of a Nightbuster.

By day it is all blonde chaparral, olive-hued shrubs and leaden dirt in the rain; and one can easily see over the border fence to the dirt access roads in Northside. By night it is a mirthless alien carnival of surveillance.

Just then somebody whistles from the cemetery, and his whistle gets rapidly answered by someone very close to us, so we return to the car—

Chapter 191

CAMPO (2005)

They slacked away again when the price of silver went down . . .

—Mary Austin, 1903

S
agebrush crushed in my hands, I rode east toward Jacumba, the tan rocks piled into caches of eggs and topped with green-grey bushes, a rounded pyramid ahead, greenish-brown mounds which got less green the closer I came. Riding west toward Jacumba on Highway 94, I passed the Feed Supply; the old road wound almost empty between boulders, manzanitas, conveying a high oak feeling. It was lush for Imperial, with many green trees. Here came a graceful trestle bridge dark between two ridges by the Golden Acorn Casino (established in 2001), which I hoped was enriching the Campo band of Kumeyaay Indians as well as the entity which had built it. Through the trestle bridge I could see blue mountains to the west, the ground frothy with olive-green shrubs, the road still empty, the land nearly uninhabited. Once upon a time, the people who lived in that valley called it Meelqsh G’tay, Big Open Meadow.
Campo
was not such a bad translation.

After the bend with a white picket fence, there stood a picturebook little red house with a satellite dish, clusters of prickly pear growing right out of the rock, a sign offering fresh eggs, and another sign:

CAMPO MILLING CORPORATION
INDUSTRIAL AND AGRICULTURAL MINERALS