Imperial (243 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
It would be an overstatement to say that the Colorado River Land Company owned the entirety of the Mexicali Valley. Mexicali, for instance, remained a small autonomous island; so do a few
colonias.
In 1910, Mr. Jefferson Worth himself, which is to say W. F. Holt, “announced the improvement of 32,000 acres in Mexico” by an entity called the Inter-California Land Company. This Inter-California Land Company had bought thirty thousand acres from the California-Mexico Land and Cattle Company, “with Cocopah as the point of entry, and the plan is to colonize this land, which is particularly fine soil.”
Rather than calling them a customer, one Mexican source prefers to call the syndicate “the partners of IID. It cannot be denied that the Colorado River Land Company organized and rationalized, in some way, the exploitation of farmland in the Mexicali Valley.”
In 1971, César Chávez speaks at Riverside Church. Dow Chemical has obtained an anti-strike injunction against the United Farm Workers. Chávez says:
The fact is that Dow Chemical owns about 17,000 acres that are farmed by Bud Antle.
When he uttered those words, the average size of a California farm was 320 to 330 acres.
Slightly less than twenty-five acres.
Slightly less than fifteen acres.
In a draft from 1981, Taylor insists that, being a child of the Ministry of Capital, the Imperial Valley never even commenced as “a community of farmers with their families working their own land, in the tradition of the Homestead and Reclamation Acts. On the contrary, it was a divided, polarized society. One-third of the Valley population was of Mexican origin, largely of Mexican birth, and field wage laborers by occupation.”
In Mexican Imperial it is more commonly twenty. In other parts of the republic it is sometimes much less.
Reader, do you think I sentimentalize Southside, Wilber Clark, the reclamation laws, the self-sufficient American dream? If you do, please tell me whether this book would be better if I were more cynical.
There are ranchos in Mexicali also—private, family-owned farms. One treatise on the valley claims that there is a division, perhaps even antagonism, between the ranchers and the
ejidatarios.
Over the decades, however, the
ejidos
bear a fainter stamp of cooperative socialism than they did under Cárdenas. The differences between the two forms of farm property have lessened. If antagonism remains, I have not heard it expressed.
By 1910, Luther and his wife Alice were in Santa Barbara, living with their brother- and sister-in-law and two nephews. Their parents would also be living there in 1920. Luther had “blue eyes, full build, brown hair.” What else should the census taker have asked him? Now it is too late.
On 23 September 2004, the state of California finally banned most hand-weeding, “declaring the practice an immediate danger to the health of thousands of workers.” But there is little that lettuce-pickers can do about the fact that heads of lettuce lie on the ground. I suppose that humanitarians will soothe aching backs by inventing an automatic lettuce-picker which will throw people out of work.
It would have been twenty dollars.
I wish you could have heard the weariness in his voice as he said this.
Indeed, Imperial County’s unemployment rate tended to increase during the summer months.
Overdosed.
On another occasion he remarked: “The jobs around here, they don’t pay good. I don’t wanna bring my family over here and be struggling. The wage here, it’s fifty dollars a week. Over there”—and he pointed across the line, into America—“it’s fifty dollars a day.”—This reminded me that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cost of labor on the Riverside citrus plantations had been a dollar to a dollar-fifty per day. In south China, where so many of Riverside’s citrus workers originated, it was ten or fifteen cents. Do some gradients remain unalterable, or is it only the shorthand for expressing them that remains the same?
The bite.
A bribe.
This acreage fluctuated from year to year. For instance, in 1918, when the total crop area of the Imperial Irrigation District comprised 410,201 acres, “in addition to the above,” continued the Imperial County Development Agent, “it might be interesting to note that in the territory in Lower California immediately adjacent to Imperial County, there is an acreage of about 90,000, mostly planted to cotton and grain, grown by American farmers and marketed in Imperial County.”
Depicted in 8” x 10” negative IV-CS-ELC-03-03. It was late afternoon and coolish when I took this picture, and I still remember the long shadows and the green foliage around the house, so green that I decided to use the green filter; I was sure that this picture would be spectacular although the woman I was with couldn’t see the point; she was right and I was wrong, but “the aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”
An old lady who took up residence in the valley in 1933 told me: “We used to have bridge parties at the Women’s 10,000 Club. We had our own Calexico women’s club by the time I left. In Calipat I think the Methodist church was the social center. When I was in Calexico, I belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution. My aunt was very active in the Mayflower Association. The interesting thing was how many people belonged. I think we had thirty members. Somehow those kinds of people just congregated in a place like the Imperial Valley. Out here in Sacramento we couldn’t get thirty.”
Under “Holtville City Government,” the 1914 Imperial Valley directory lists L. Kendle as Water King.
I see a glaring white road through volunteer alfalfa as short as the stubble on a pubis that was shaved two weeks ago; then, just below the sharp edge of the field itself, there is a line all the way across the photo of brim-hatted ploughmen standing tall between the wheels just behind their animals.
An old-timer in Indio hinted at water-wars which all sides lost; I don’t know that this outcome wasn’t preferable to another, as demonstrated by what happened to the neighboring Indian village of Rincon: “A wealthy white man of Riverside” piped all the water away for the sake of a speculative venture entitled the Garden of Eden. “In a sheltered spot hidden by rocks and shrubs we found a stone mortar and three pottery ollas, placed there doubtless by some broken-hearted woman who hoped one day to return for them.”
The fresno scraper was a commonly used type of plough.
Meanwhile, a rival periodical depicts
A Rare and Handsome “Nigger-Head” Cactus from Central Mexico.
(Echinocactus Trollietti.)
Certainly not only by Americans. In 1683, French-led pirates raped almost every female in the place and tortured some people for dessert. But we did our share. During the Mexican-American War, thirteen thousand shells landed in the city, killing mostly women and children.
Back in 1836, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., had concluded that “revolutions are matters of frequent occurrence in California . . . The only object, of course, is the loaves and fishes; and instead of caucusing, para-graphing, libelling, feasting, promising, and lying, they take muskets and bayonets, and, seizing upon the presidio and custom-house, divide the spoils and declare a new dynasty.”
This may have been the doing not of Rockwood but of the telegraph operator or the person who made the official copy.
Meaning before the completion of the All-American Canal in 1942 caused the old Imperial Main Canal in Mexico to go dry.
In 1912, the first legal liquor establishment opened in Imperial County (in Imperial, as a matter of fact). Meanwhile, in the Imperial Valley directory for 1912-13, under the heading
BILLIARDS AND POOL
, we find an astonishing eleven establishments distributed throughout Calexico, Brawley, El Centro, Seeley, Holtville, Imperial. Two years later a wholesale liquor dealer took up residence in the Zimmer Building, Imperial, California. By then there were six listed bars in Imperial (although none in any other city in the county, I admit). In 2001 there were eleven, widely distributed throughout the county.
Some of the sincerest mourners were Mexicans. I have read that Prohibition’s end, followed by Cárdenas’s ban on gambling, compelled thirty-five thousand people to leave Baja in two years.
According to the owner of the Golden Dragon Restaurant, in 2003 this was still the case although a number of Mexicali’s Chinese also came from Shanghai.
The way one county history tells it, two rival Chinese mobs fighting over a woman “on either side of Negro alley” began shooting at each other on 23 October 1871. On the following day, a policeman and two citizens who were doing what they could to bring peace got wounded in the crossfire; one citizen died. “The news of his death spread like wild-fire, and brought together a large crowd, composed principally of the lower class of Mexicans and the scum of the foreigners.” The predictable result: lynchings, shootings, arson, pillaging. Eighteen Chinese were murdered. (Another source gives the casualty figure of a probably inflated seventy-two.) The United States later paid reparations to China.
Thus the most common Mexican version of the tale which I have heard over the years. In
El Dragón en el Desierto,
whose half-Chinese author will come up from time to time in this chapter, the story is slightly different but no less sad: A certain band of Chinese from Sonora were ferried by a Japanese to San Felipe. Perhaps it was this Japanese who became the Mexican sea-captain in the local variant. At any rate,
El Dragón en el Desierto
claims that the Chinese were shown the proper road to Mexicali, but that they got lost and “began to wander directionless; starving and thirsty with temperatures of 125 degrees F., they began to die one by one as their bodies fell upon the sand . . . The Cucapa Sierra is where the Chinese braceros died and is actually known as ‘Sierra of the Chinese’ or ‘the Chinero.’ ”
This figure was quoted to me by Mr. Leung, who ought to know. He claimed that Chinese restaurants accounted for 70 or 80% of the total business.
Mr. Clark of Missouri to his fellow Congressmen, 1902: “The Chinese problem is to the Pacific coast what the negro problem is to the Southern States, except that the race question of the South is entirely a domestic question . . . Upon these race questions I unhesitatingly take my position with the white people of the South and the white people of the Pacific coast.”
The famous burglar, robber and addict Jack Black disappointed those expectations in his memoir, first published in 1926: “The hypos I spent the night with in the city prison had aroused my curiosity about Chinatown. I put in many nights prowling through the alleys watching these mysterious people gambling, smoking opium, and trafficking in their women slaves. There were rumors of strange, mysterious underground passages below the streets and under the buildings, but I never saw them and I have since come to doubt whether they ever existed.”
This is far, far higher than it ever got immediately across the line. In 2000, the population of Imperial County was 142,361, its proportions being as follows: forty-nine and a half percent white, four percent black, slightly under two percent American Indian, two percent Asian, a tenth of a percent Hawaiian, and thirty-nine percent “other.” What were they, I wonder? Seventy-two percent of all whites were “persons of Hispanic origin.” Perhaps the others might have been persons of Hispanic origin, too.
In 1910, Imperial County officially held 13,591 human beings, including 682 Indians, 217 Japanese and 32 Chinese. What were the other ninety-five percent, do you think? A hint: California was ninety-five percent white. (How many Hispanics were white, how many were “Mexican” we don’t know.)
Interview in Calexico, 2002.
It should be remembered that Lupe was interpreting, and that her words might have actually been more mellifluous than this.
Lupe Vásquez, 2002: “A lot of Chinese have Mexican concubines. My compadre is one-half Chinese and one-half Mexican.”
Name removed on request.
Two years later, this same lovely, chubby brunette was still working at the Olé-Olé; she was bending over a table, whispering into the ear of a man whose hand reclined so joyously on her breast. She recognized me at once. Her first look was wary; what if I was jealous? When she saw that I wasn’t, never had been and never would be, all of which I am positive that she did see—moreover, I was with another woman—she smilingly returned to her business, which must have been unsuccessful, since when the woman and I left, my fine brunette was still on the scene. I waved to her then, and she to me, each of us gazing at the other in a happy sad moment of renewed friendship: she liked me, and I her. I perhaps was still more happy than she, happy to know that she was still alive and here; she’d given me so much pleasure, and I’d paid her so well; but even if that was the only reason she liked me, and perhaps it was not, wouldn’t that have been good enough? When I remember our first encounter, I feel gratitude. When I think about the second, my heart goes out to her; why not say I feel love? Her name was and is Michel.
