Imperial (178 page)

Now here was the Motor Transport Museum, where Carl Calvert wanted to tell me stories. He said:

There was a guy named Haffner who came here in 1913, and he claimed he knew how to seed clouds to make rain. County made a compact to pay him ten thousand dollars. He built a tower. I have some of his formulas at home. I don’t know if he knew what he was doing, but it rained. Worst rain in a long time. He didn’t get paid; it was just a verbal contract.

He showed me feldspar that had been mined here in Campo and made into powder for glass; they used to add clay.

I like to say the secret of feldspar is in this rod, he said. It works like solder. The steel will not stick by itself. So feldspar is a flux.

He showed me a handcarved wooden mold for a gas pedal. You set it in sand and then poured molten brass into it at eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Carl Calvert had carved it himself. I could imagine Wilber Clark’s gas pedal being made like this.

See that thing? he said. That’s the first motor to pump water in Borrego.

Thump, thump, went the motor obligingly.

He caressed a huge flywheel and said: It does not drive.

To start the engine, he said, you need to take this plug out here and smoke a cigarette, then put the cigarette in there and the heat of the cigarette will start it.

And it all seemed very Imperial to me, this sweet turning back to the past.

In his back yard were red-tinted bushes, an omelette of rocks and brush, then Mexico herself . . .

Chapter 192

MEXICALI (2003)

That’s all it is, bad news: crooked politicians, bad pavements, bad treatment from
our neighbor.

—Lupe Vásquez, summing up the contents of a Mexicali newspaper, 2003

A
nd now Mexicali, founded in 1904, or maybe 1905, perhaps in 1899, becomes officially a hundred years old! They’ve decided that Mexicali’s
centenario
will be 2003, and why not? Within the leather repair shop, the glass case is crammed with rags, boxes, and what seems to be trash; on top are dusty old boots with holes in them; the leather man finds a scrap of leather, scissors out a patch from it, hammers the patch flat upon my ageing rucksack, and while watching the news sharpens his knife on a stele. Now he is already at the thinly humming sewing machine; his gruesome piñata sways in the air (it will soon be the Day of the Dead), and the long-braided, pointy-breasted, naked girl in the sombrero smiles at him over her shoulder on the Depósito Karmen calendar while a very small and canted Virgin of Guadalupe rests on the shelf against his
ABIERTO
sign; the lamp gilds his reddish skin as he rapidly, carefully, eagerly feeds leather and cloth to his sewing machine, and two bimbos on television act prettily stupid; he gazes at them round-eyed while his hands keep working; whenever the bimbos stop wriggling, he darts down a glance at his makings, showing neither resentment nor disinterest; this is not only his living but how he lives. On the wall opposite the Virgin and Señorita Karmen, a newspaper page, already sun-stained to the tan color of Imperial sand, cries: 

Felicidades,
Mexicali

What is it, this place on whose very birth no one can agree?

To me, hailing from the other side of the ditch, the “border feeling” of here consists to no inconsiderable extent of Mexican-ness, whereas to José López from Jalisco, Mexicali stands out first of all for the license plates to the cars.—So many American plates! he cries. Then the dress styles—You can tell right away they’re from
the other side.
The language also: lots of Mexicans speaking English. And all the American businesses, like (here he named a bunch of fast food franchises, which scarcely deserve to be advertised by me).—Even though they are all over Mexico now, he confessed, well, they’re
more
here.

And isn’t he correct? This Mexicali which I’d imagined to be truly herself, namely Centro, grows ever less important in proportion to the swelling sprawling glowings occurring in her name to the south, east and west; thanks to the grimy white walls and reddish-tan dust of her flatlands, and each Parque Industrial’s vast secrecies behind a vaster fence, and her graffiti’d walls of junkyards bulging with junk, she has now turned into one of the twenty largest cities in Mexico.
³⁴⁸
Shouldn’t we celebrate that? Mexicali is tawny, blonde, huge-breasted Gloria in the doorway of the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico: If there happens to be more of her, doesn’t that make her more perfectly Mexican? So what if her flesh consists to some extent of foreign-controlled industrial parks? And who could deny her plenitude of Mexican-ness? I see more rose vendors in the middle of the street than I ever would in the United States, infinitely more uniformed schoolgirls kissing uniformed schoolboys beneath the huge desert moon! All the same, the new outer Mexicali which keeps growing away from the decaying core I love feels surprisingly like Los Angeles.

In 2003, fifty thousand people worked in the
maquiladoras
of Mexico, and thirty-five thousand more worked in Imperial County. The old Mexican who’d worked from age twenty-seven to age sixty in the Chinese supermarket said to me: In a hundred years we’ll grow up against San Diego, since the population is from all over . . .

Zulema Rashid, the fifty-eight-year-old Calexico native, had had most of her important girlhood experiences in Mexicali, and she said: Most of my friends are from Mexicali, and it’s not the place that I’m interested in, but the people.

But
physically,
she continued, Mexicali is so dirty, except for the Colonia Nuevo. I think it’s ugly, it’s dirty, it’s just
sad.
I think when I was a girl I just didn’t notice. It used to be just dirty. And now it just stinks. A lot of people have moved in from other parts of Mexico. It is filthy like something being abused. That makes me very sad. My brother and sister have a very hard time keeping their business clean, even on this side of the border, because it is so close. The people that are coming there now are just waiting to cross the border, and they are using it as a trampoline.

And in bitter agreement-rebuttal to Zulema’s words I quote the lifelong Mexicali resident Yolanda Sánchez Ogás:
We’re the garbage can of the United States.
Right now they’ve put in their new geothermal plants, even though a judge told them not to. On the American side, they burn their crops only when the wind blows south . . .

One singer’s impression of Mexicali rhymes in Spanish, and probably sounds more elegant than a field worker’s English translation:
a lot of people, hot like a bitch, and a river full of shit.

The ancient Aztec divinity Tlazoltéotl, Goddess of Filth, could cleanse Her worshippers of coition’s sins, but only by means of such rigorous penances as passing a twig through a hole in the tongue twice a day. I worshipped a Tlazoltéotl Who was filth Herself, a Tlazoltéotl of acceptance, not penance, a living blend, as are all of us, of excrement, sunlight, blood and watermelons. That was one of the reasons that I have loved street prostitutes ever since I was young. And what was the border but another incarnation of Her? Now in the year 2007 as I finish this chapter, my dinghy-ride down the New River with the first Jose Lopez haunts me sweetly. I had expected nothing but filthiness and frightfulness; I’d wanted to “expose,” to “investigate,” to sound the alarm, in other words, to wallow self-righteously in the excrement of what was supposed to be the most polluted waterway in North America. And I had gotten my fill of that, the bad taste that would not leave my mouth; but I had also, as had this fine Jose Lopez, played at the game of Lewis-and-Clark; and I remember sunlight, tamarisks, spewing pipes, silence, and befouled but un-destroyed wildness. And when Zulema said of Mexicali, the city that I cannot stop loving, that
it is filthy like something being abused,
when Yolanda said,
we’re the garbage can of the United States,
when Calexicans who smelled the New River complained that they were the toilet of Mexico, I became all the more faithful to Mexicali, third-largest of the border cities, after Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, to Mexicali, home of
maquiladoras
and
ejidos
alike, Mexicali the hot, slow, sunny, spicy, stinking place, whose most precious jewel is her tranquillity.

Because Mexicali emblematizes the so-called “Black Legend” of Mexican sinfulness, I now reintroduce you to the street prostitute Liliana, who tried to sell me her seventeen-year-old Indian friend Capricorn instead (they weren’t lesbians, but they shared the same bed; they weren’t friends, but Liliana would rather have had me go with Capricorn than with her). In my room, her eyes got crazy and she kept talking about how she wanted to know serial killers in order to know life. Whatever I said, she kept demanding:
Is it true?
She wanted to be my friend but didn’t trust me. She knew for a fact that the Chinese had killed a Mexican woman; she thought Chinese were ugly and ridiculous; she hated them; they owned everything in Mexicali. She was scary, sad, exciting, smelly and beautiful. This book, like the Virgin of Guadalupe Herself, is syncretic; Liliana, like Mexicali, was still more so, for she possessed the supernatural power of spewing diarrhea at the very moment of singing me a beautiful song.

That was on a Saturday night. And on a Sunday afternoon in the cathedral on Reforma, a hot July Sunday afternoon, I should add, a handful of people glided slowly in silence, a young woman helping an older one to rise, gripping her by her bloated arm. Behind the altar Jesus on the cross gazed dreamily upward, as if He, too, had been left languorous by this heat. His dear mother the Virgin of Guadalupe had long since faded into something resembling a tintype, gazing downward at the floral still life.

In the hot breeze, there came a smell of grass.

In the lovely, cool and shady evening in the park at Altamirano and Zuazua (the electronic thermometer said ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit), a man was sweeping the sidewalk around the juice stand; a man in a black sombrero and a red shirt played the accordion; a grimy, weary, middle-aged man who looked to be a
pollo
or was maybe just homeless sat on the curb waiting for darkness, while sparrows snatched up crumbs; an old woman and a young woman passed by, wheeling a little girl in a stroller; a big girl whose black hair fell all the way down her back took her little brother’s hand and led him across the street; and then a mariachi band in white sombreros and black dress uniforms began to play beneath the trees. Two ladies chatted with a soldier. A man on a bench was lightly rolling his drumsticks across his drums, getting ready for the night. The accordionist had fallen silent once the mariachi band began, and once it likewise stopped, he stood there under the trees, not quite making music yet, just tuning up or announcing himself or getting ready or something I could not understand; whatever his purpose, he made the most delicate sounds, cool and strange, with the sparrows singing rapidly all around him and the sky getting pinkish-orange behind him at the end of the street. All this life was being lived because the darkness was coming.

Chapter 193

EJIDO NETZAHUALCÓYOTL (2004)

This is seepage water that Mexicali growers, industrial users and the
government have come to depend on over the years, and the prospect of
losing it is not a happy one south of the border . . . If the so-called era of
limits on the Colorado River applies to the Imperial Valley, and we have
frequently questioned whether it applies anywhere else, then it must also
apply to Mexico. Our friends and neighbors in Mexicali don’t have to like it.
But they’re undoubtedly going to learn to live with it.

—The Imperial Valley Press, 2005

T
hey met at a dance in Ejido Palaco. He was born in Mexicali, and his name was José Castro. She was from Sonora; she never told me her name. She came with two sisters looking for work and found a
maquiladora
job in 1970. Later she didn’t even remember which
maquiladora
it had been; she made collars and wrist-bands for a clothing company, an American company, she didn’t recollect which one.

His first job was also in a
maquiladora,
at Kenworth. It was a contract where he would work for a year and have a month off. He was seventeen or eighteen. He assembled entire trucks, he said with pride.

There were a lot of dances but he didn’t go very often because he didn’t like dancing. They both lived in Palaco at the time. It was her very first year there, 1970. His mother and brothers lived here in Ejido Netzahualcóyotl, so this is where they came. His brother gave them this land. They lived with his mother at first. He had one arm broken from pitching baseball, so he built the adobe house one-armed in a month. It is a good house which they are proud of; they told me that it sways in earthquakes. He confidently believed that it could withstand a big quake, although she was not so sure. In any event, now they had whitewashed it inside, and it possessed a stout concrete floor, a sink, a refrigerator, and a radio, which was playing when they invited me in. Electricity came in 1976 or 1977. By the way, the water in the sink came from a purification plant; one can drink it but they preferred not to.

She no longer worked except in the home. He was now a mechanic, working solo, for himself.

In 1970 there were about thirty families. And now, there are a lot! More than a hundred. It is a good place, they said. Not a lot of crime here. It’s quiet. No gangs. Only a few fights. Not any problems and we don’t want any. They’re putting in many factories nearby, agricultural factories for the onions and grapes, so that will change things. It will get a little better.