Imperial (247 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
Evidently she had a miscarriage.
This sentence actually occurs later on in Señor Cedeño’s story, but I reproduced it here for narrative purposes. For his capsule border autobiography, see below, “Between the Lines,” p. 1045.
Or bigger balls.
I had expected the prohibited ballads to express more animus against American authority, but once I realized how they were admired in inverse proportion to income it made sense: These poor people went to the United States only illegally, to earn money in discreet snatches of menial work; their encounters with the apparatus of our great nation were apt to be final and brief; whereas back home in Mexico, bereft of gringo toilets to clean, they haunted the streets, so that their unhappy encounters with uniformed officers were quotidian. So it was the Federales more than the Border Patrol, U.S. Immigration or the Drug Enforcement Administration whom the
narcocorridos
delighted to abuse.
Or at least this is what they told me it meant. The dictionary definitions are “perìco,” parrot, and “Perìco,” ladies’ man.
Here she slurred her words so that the interpreter could not understand.
It was a parakeet.
Corridos,
he said, can be either
banda
or
norteño
style. Very rarely, they can be mariachi style.
Norteño
uses drums, stand-up bass, guitar, and accordion—no horns.
Banda
employs cymbals, tuba, horn, eschewing guitar or stand-up bass.
Tecnobanda
plays keyboard instead of horns. Mariachi involves guitar, trumpet and violin. (Traditionally, harp was also played.) The
narcocorridos
are almost always composed in
norteño
or
banda
style.
My copy editor suggests: “or Bondage (the French version).”
Names spelled for me by residents.
He thought that Mexicali was growing by about forty thousand a year.
José López, who was then thirty-eight, said: “I’ve heard that in the
maquiladoras
they don’t like you older than thirty or thirty-five.”
Lacking the financial resources to investigate it, I have changed the company’s name.
I can find no establishment with this spelling in the Mexicali yellow pages.
I telephoned the AFL-CIO in hopes of verifying this, but they never returned my phone calls.
What might they be? A certain court document entitled “Óptica Sola Labor Demand” records the following complaint:
Regularly, without adequate protection (rubber gloves, safety glasses, protective clothing, eyewash stations, showers, masks, etc), work processes require the use of NOURYSET 200, which causes severe eye, skin and nose irritation; NON-TINTABLE RESIN PG2, which causes eye irritation and can cause blood disorders; RESIN HB 101, which causes eye irritation; HI-GARD RESIN 1080, which causes eye irritation and redness, the skin absorbs it completely and it causes headache, dizziness and other signs of narcosis, its ingestion can cause death; HYDROXIDE OF SODIUM
[
sic
]
(KOH), which is corrosive to all body tissues it comes into contact with, causing perforations, it can damage respiratory alveoli and pulmonary tissue, it can cause severe burns on the skin and eyes, it can even cause blindness, and chronic exposure provokes dermatitis; ACETONE, which is carcinogenic, can cause headache, dizziness, nausea and loss of consciousness, irritation of the nose and bronchi, severe eye irritation, pain, tearing and inflammation; TINTABLE RESIN, which causes headaches, nausea, weakness, eye and skin irritation, can damage bone marrow, blood, kidneys, liver and testicles; MONÓMERO CR-39, which can cause irritation, burning and pain in the eyes, irritation, cracking and burning in the skin, and if ingested, death; METHANOL, whose fumes can cause dizziness, fatigue, headaches, eye and skin irritation, chronic exposure can cause poisoning, brain disorders, and blindness; ZONIL FLOUROSURFACTANT
[
sic
],
which can damage the liver, cause dizziness and loss of consciousness, nausea, headaches, severe eye and skin irritation; ZELEC UN LUBRICANT, which can cause dizziness and headaches, skin burns and conjunctivitis; CELLOSOLVE, which can cause cause headaches, nausea, weakness, tearing and eye irritation, chronic exposure can harm the bone marrow, blood, kidneys, liver and testicles; GLACIAL ACETIC ACID, which can damage lungs, irritate the skin and cause dermatitis; EKTASOLVE EP SOLVENT, which can cause blood disorders and eye irritation. Also, we work in poorly ventilated space.
The company responds:
It is denied that the workers have worked without adequate protection. In fact, the company permanently trains workers in the use of work equipment and the handling of dangerous substances, it also provides adequate protective gear; independently, it is denied that the workers have participated in work processes that could have caused any of their symptoms or other consequences they mention. They failed to mention when, in what area, and in what manner they had contact with such substances, or how their health was affected or any work accident caused by the handling of them.
Following this attempt at rebuttal, the court document presents “Safety Data Sheets for Chemicals Used at Óptica Sola.” These list all the chemicals mentioned above and the same health risks as mentioned above, plus a few more in some cases. They are signed by Jésus Chávez, Environmental Engineer of Óptica Sola. Since the court documents are dated 1989 through 1996, the
maquiladora
’s facilities and procedures may for all I know be much safer nowadays. However, it does seem likely that the processes of plastic lens manufacture still require at least some of the same chemicals.
Amelia Simpson of the Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego remarked to me: “Their excuse is always that they want to protect the unborn child. If they really cared about protecting fetuses, they’d have a clean shop floor.”
Señor A. did locate a factory called Sam Chee in Industrial Park Pacífico. His final report also notes that the
maquiladora
called “Sanchin is owned by Chinese, not by Taiwanese but has no Chinese employees.”
I have altered this company’s name. The private investigators I hired during the editorial process were not able to discover much about it, except for the following: In 1992 the U.S. EPA initiated a federal civil action against it for illegal export of hazardous waste from California to Mexico. No information about the lunch hour was found.
Since I was unable to gather much data on this company, I have altered its name. How much contamination, if any, it produces is anyone’s guess. It does, however, receive half a dozen mentions in the report of a human rights organization, all related to mandatory pregnancy tests, mistreatment of pregnant women in order to make them quit. One woman claimed to have lost her fetus as a result of being denied permission to go to the hospital; when she went to the bathroom she was told that there was neither aspirin nor even toilet paper.
“There are Mr. Maquiladoras also,” he continued. “I once worked for one female client who owned a
maquiladora;
it was a theft case. She had three private secretaries; they were all big muscles. They were too dumb to do anything but one thing.”
Although this document is a semipublic record of sorts, it seemed most ethical to black out the names of the two parties, in order to avoid exposing either one to potential retaliation.
Listed in the Mexicali yellow pages as “Terminados Roger’s,” Adolfo L. Mateos, km. 5.
It sounded as if she said Industrial Ichiwa or Nishiba. She did not say the name very clearly. In a guide to
maquiladoras
I find an Ichia Rubber de México, in Industrial park Valle Sur I.
Word interpolated by WTV.
This must be an error for Óptica Sola, since a Web search found no company named Solare, and since Sola is also on Boulevard Insurgentes.
“So they had her sign something?” I later asked Perla, who replied: “Lourdes told them that she quit because she was sick, so they offered her the two hundred and fifty dollars, and when they saw that she wasn’t going to make any trouble, they didn’t make her sign anything. Sometimes they do sue and get up to three thousand dollars, when they’ve complained a lot.”
Magdalena spelled his name “Kamu.” However, a UABC article about this incident gives the above spelling, which seems more plausible to me. I have not verified the spelling or even the man’s existence.
This word interpolated by WTV.
The UABC article merely reports that the workers were locked in. A posting by the Centro de Información para Trabajadoras y Trabajadors repeats the detail that they were locked into the refrigerator. I read that the workers later asked the Governor of Baja California to intervene and demonstrated in front of his office in Mexicali for over a month. When they went to the Labor Department and asked for a copy of their contract, their supposed attorney, Nahum Rodríguez Lara, allegedly said:
What for? Are you going to frame it and hang it in your living room?
As you can imagine, they achieved great success. Magdalena and her daughter were demonstrating and collecting money for this campaign when I met them.
Misioneros y Frailes, Parque Industrial.
In fact their guacamole might have contained a secret ingredient, for the year before the Brown Corporation made this declaration, the newspaper
El Mexicano
reported the following:
A total of 19 gravely poisoned women was the result . . . at an avocado treatment plant at kilometer 10.5 on the road to San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, the plant called Flor de Baja California, also with a location at the back of The Californias Industrial Park . . . Captain César Martínez Salomón and Lieutenant Santos Moreno Cota . . . led a large police operation to protect the female workers at the plant who were suffering from terrible poisoning. According to the Fire Captain, it was all due to an involuntary error . . . The workers, at least 50 in all, wear rubber gloves which must be disinfected at the end of each day in 3 ounces of calcium hypochloride. But on this day, by error, one of the employees used more than 3 ounces, resulting in a spill that led to the 19 young women being poisoned. Ambulances came and took the women to the Social Security Clinic on Avenida Lerdo.
Although I personally believe Magdalena’s story, I have not been able to cross-check its details with other former workers or managers.
The Tijuana private detective Señor A. independently told me that “in Tijuana when an employee sues her
maquiladora
for her rights, then her name is put on a list and circulated so that she can’t find work.”
In 2002 it was eight hundred and twenty-four, a rise no longer meteoric; all the same, Imperial could continue to cry:
Ever upward!
“I haven’t talked to the folks in the Mexicali Valley,” said Stella Mendoza. “All I know is that when the water gets to Mexico from Algodones, it’s not so good.”
In the district there were 236 of them.
The interviews through which I obtained this information appear in the references to this chapter.
In fact. although cotton does need a lot of water, and this might be the factor that he had in mind, it remains an extremely salt-tolerant crop.
At the beginning of this book I remarked on the necessary secrecy of life itself in sunstruck Imperial, and that hiddenness extended itself to the water transfer. One of my favorite memories from 2002 was awarded me by the local reporter on whom I dropped in to ask in all innocence for pointers as I wrote my book about his valley; he said that he didn’t know anything, and would I please not put him in my book? I asked whether he had any opinions about the water transfer to San Diego and he didn’t, although twenty steps away, in the hot brightness just outside that office cube, was a vending machine through whose window the upper front page of the newspaper revealed itself, and precisely there shone an article about the water transfer; the article bore his byline. He explained, and I pitied him for his cowardice, that he strove simply to report the facts, so as not to offend anybody, and maybe that would have impressed me had he not (in that hot slow world where most people dismissed unwanted callers by means of phased withdrawal or wearily shrugging indifference; they rarely scuttle away with outright precipitation; for Imperial is the dirty man in Mexicali who carefully carries both his broom and his filth-encrusted dustpan for an entire block in order to empty the latter in the one receptacle; this operation has been known to take as long as ten minutes) had he not, I said, been so desperate to get rid of me; he might simply have felt overwhelmed by some deadline, but he seemed to me
afraid.
