Imperial (242 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
Ordóñez de Montalvo’s
Sergas of Espandian,
first printed in either 1510 or 1519.
In 1843 or 1844, James Hunter Bull, the first American to travel much of the Baja by foot, heard revolting tales, told by the Indians, of being lassoed to the missions and whipped for nine sunrises “to learn the delightful and mild doctrines of the Gospel of Christ,” after which they were worked to death. One old Indian showed Bull how half of his thigh had been flogged away. Bull was no Catholic, and his story might be discounted, were it not for the fact that there are others.
Ten years later, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., concurred that the mission priests were strict, but concluded: “Of the poor Indians very little care is taken,” and cited the case of an Indian couple who had been married in church; the husband prostituted his wife to sailors and shared her earnings.
Imperial was not yet Mexico by any means. In 1776 we find Fray Junípero Serra, founder of San Francisco, worrying about how to safely get some letters down to Mexico.
The soldiers themselves, by the way, were married ten-year volunteers.
My 1910
Britannica
lists the following seven castes of New Spain: the Gachupines, or spurred ones, who were European-born and therefore at the apex, the creoles or native-born, then “mestizos (Indian and white), mulattoes (negro and white), Zambos (negro and Indian, who were regarded as specially vicious and dangerous), native Indians and negroes. But there were about a dozen intermediate ‘named varieties . . .’ ”
I wonder if they paid in gold. A doubloon, or
Mexican ounce,
was sixteen dollars.
James O. Pattie sends us this dispatch from the Mexican American village of Perdido, New Year’s Eve, 1827: “When the ball broke up, it seemed to be expected of us, that we should each escort a lady home, in whose company we passed the night, and we none of us brought charges of severity against our fair companions.”
Which is to say by 1853, when the Gadsden Purchase gnawed away the final acres of New Mexico and Arizona.
“And yet,” writes Malcolm Lowry, “how they must have loved this land, those two lonely empurpled exiles . . . lovers out of their element—their Eden . . . beginning to turn under their noses into a prison . . .”
Historians commonly believe that “villagers and small landholders held the balance of power” in much of Mexico during the middle six decades of the nineteenth century. During the second and third decades, Mexico’s economic troubles destabilized many haciendas, and we read of villagers who pooled their pesos and succeeded in buying hacienda plots which they had previously rented. In the mid-1830s, it is true, centralists raised voting requirements, replaced local councils with officials answerable to the government, and took other such measures to exclude country people. But the officials were poorly trained and the central budget remained small; therefore, so did the government’s powers of oppression. Arbitrary power was and is another matter.
It was also San Francisco, whose Vigilance Committee occupied a fortified office on Clay Street around 1855, conducting midnight trials and armed forays on the streets.
This San Diegan looks upon the Mexicans of his zone, or Californians as they were then quite accurately called, as follows: “Their chief faults they had brought with them in their blood from Mexico, but these faults have been more or less mellowed and softened by the equable sun and temperate breezes of the country”—not to mention that best cure for hereditary blood disorders, race-mixing.
When they themselves had been parvenus, the Aztecs followed the same syncretic prescription, but in their own kindly fashion. They requested that their host, Achitometl, King of Culhuacán, grant them his daughter to be queen among them, to which he acceded. That alliance proved especially intimate: When her father attended the wedding banquet, he found an Aztec priest dancing in her skin.
The exceptions were the two Yuma missions, which as you remember were wiped out by the Indians in 1781, and Mission San Diego, which will get mentioned from time to time, as will Imperial’s future arch-rival, Los Angeles.
These last two rivers will later be called the San Luis Rey and the Santa Margarita, respectively.
I am informed that only about 15% of Mexico is arable
even with man-made improvements.
The riparian doctrine endured, at least in name, for many more decades. The year 1928 marked the collapse not only of the Saint Francis Dam but also, according to
The California Water Atlas,
which favors appropriative rights, of “an era which depended on individualism, local control, and private enterprise for the development of California’s water resources. The new era, characterized by cooperation, centralized supervision, and the use of public funds and authority, was already well advanced by this time . . . thanks in part to the pressing needs of California’s cities, which by 1900 had become critical.” The crucial legislative event of that year was
Herminghaus v. Southern California Edison.
Against the utility’s determination to store water for hydroelectricity, Herminghaus clung to his riparian right to natural irrigation, which occurred only during the spring snow melt. In 1928, a constitutional amendment was passed which undid a prior California Supreme Court decision in Herminghaus’s favor. To be sure, as late as 1950, an editorial in the 1950
California Farmer
crowed that vested water rights still existed in California, because when the Bureau of Reclamation sought to “grab” some streams in the San Joaquin Valley on the grounds that they were navigable; the Supreme Court ruled in favor of local irrigators. The
Farmer
’s stance was, of course, wishful thinking.
How much less was this than the prevailing wage for white labor? A man with the not very Chinese name of Leo Klotz remembers working in the packinghouse of the Cucamonga Lemon Association in 1910-14; among many other jobs, most of which sound miserable, he made wooden lemon-packing boxes by hand at two dollars a day; sometimes he packed lemons at eight cents per box; on a very good day he could pack sixty-five boxes in a nine hour day, making close to five dollars.
Specifically, if I could only be sufficiently impartial to admit that the rival entities which ring Imperial round have their own justification for life, I’d devote this chapter to the doings of that now very energetic and self-willed young child, the Inland Empire, instead of to the second line’s effects on Imperial.—Statement of Mr. Warren, missionary,
circa
1883: “When I first came to Riverside, it had only a ditch and a future, and the future was in the ditch.” But I’ve no time for Mr. Warren. Imperial’s own ditch and future are on their way.
A photograph of Amos Cemetery in 1878 already shows a few wooden crosses. And where was Amos Cemetery? Somewhere in the Imperial Valley.
Platted in October, opened for sale in November. A hundred and thirty-seven lots were sold on the first day.
Tía Juana means Aunt Jane. I have also read that “Tijuan” is an Indian word signifying “by the sea.”
See below, “The Days of Lupe Vásquez,” p. 358.
Or hypocrisies, if you will. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the exploitation of Mexican field labor, the observances-in-the-breach of the American idea are so ubiquitous as to find their way even into this very pro-American book. In 1923 a Los Angeles booster proudly informs us that “the several neighborhood schools in our city are exactly what their name implies. Each school is a social center, a community house, and a place from which the American idea must radiate.” Then again: “Our schools are carrying the burden of Americanization of the country.” Here Americanization might simply mean de-Mexicanization. But why not give him the benefit of the doubt? Why not assume a well-meaning earnestness and desire to improve us all?
Another version: A printer’s error for “Conchella,” or place of shells.
It is not insignificant that (so the dateline reveals) the
Times
saw fit to list a “resident correspondent” as the author. Imperial was not yet large enough to require a bureau, but it was already newsworthy, since I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
Indeed, by 1904 a Coachella company “proposes to furnish the people of that valley with liquid air, ice, etc. It will also carry on a cold storage plant, handle milk and eggs, manufacture butter, and furnish electric power”
—
how luxurious and convenient!
In 1998 I was interviewing a mother and son in Slab City, about which they said: “Once you get here, it’s hard to get back out. It’s like a hole.” The son then said: I hope we get out of here before it gets too hot. I’m afraid this heat will kill me. Put a wet towel on me; it’s the only thing that keeps me cool. And then this happened, he said, telling me a sad story of violence and the law.—My plan was to be out of here before the summer hit, he said. But his plan did not work, and
the submarine
was still alive and well among some of the poor of Imperial.
My dear friend Mr. Paul Foster, who grew up on a farm in the great dairying state of Minnesota, and who is equally adept at running spreadsheets and peafield combines, concludes that “the growth, peak, and total collapse of the Imperial Valley dairy industry follows closely the national experience for dairy farming . . . In particular, the decline from over 3000 dairies in 1920 to 2 dairies today” in Imperial County. . . “can be traced to the transition to the sanitary ‘Grade A’ dairy system . . . which required a substantial investment in milking parlors, hot water for cleaning, and cold storage stainless steel tanks. This wiped out lots of small dairy farmers who had previously eked out a supplemental income by keeping a few cows and moving them from one leased pasture to another. It also wiped out milk as the source of a variety of unpleasant diseases . . . The resulting move by small farmers into marginal dairy production led to the glut which resulted in price controls and the rise of the single most powerful agricultural lobby in America . . . Interestingly enough, the Imperial website has a promotion inviting dairy farmers to check out Imperial as a place to set up operations, thanks to the new ‘misting barns’ which keep cows cool during the summer . . . Since Imperial has always suffered a dramatic fall-off in summer milk production due to the heat . . . it’s hard to believe that the increased cost of air-conditioned cows is offset by the supply of large amounts of relatively cheap water. Even if true, it seems like a near-criminal misdirection of resources. Whether I like it or not, they seem to have succeeded in at least one case: there are now 3 dairies in Imperial County, including the only Swiss cheese maker in California.”
This novel, Zane Grey’s
Desert Gold,
actually looks into Imperial, when the fleeing cowboys with the aristocratic Mexican bride they seek to save from rape gaze westwards from the Sonoran lava-fields and see “a seemingly endless arm of the blue sea. This was the Gulf of California. Beyond the Gulf rose dim, bold mountains, and above them hung the setting sun, dusky red, flooding all that barren empire with a sinister light.”
The population was 150 in 1910, and 1,228 in 1990.
The next letter in the file reveals that the confederate who accused Steffano has shot him dead in Mexicali.
According to one mayoral candidate whom I met in the spring of 2001, the population of Mexicali is 800,000, of which 40% have crossed the border at some point and 30% possess green cards.
It could be that I exaggerate them. In Rothko County you can still find, for instance, the waist-high counter of orange tiles in the chicken-and-beans restaurant in Mexicali. If Rothko paints it, you may not know that there are tiles in that smeary band of orange, but that gives one’s imagination something to do.
Berry approvingly quotes, and seemingly derives his dichotomy from, a 1930 compilation entitled
I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.
One history of the Great Depression refers to this volume as “a nativistic reaction to a changing world”; in the historian’s opinion, its essays uniformly ignore “the failures of an economic system that had created a culture of dependency and subjection”: the exploitation of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the rape of the soil for the sake of King Cotton—in short, the evils which Berry lays at the door of industrialism.
Some historians have implied that the Chandler Syndicate was the William Walker of capital. Harry Chandler was actually indicted for attempting a revolution against Mexico to seize Baja California, but got acquitted, and probably rightfully so.
