Imperial (248 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
In one of the IID’s legal briefs from this same period, the figure, and the way that it is stated, varies slightly: “. . . of the total 9.6 MAF [million acre-feet] of water use in Southern California in 1995,
about 1.893 MAF (28%) was used to irrigate urban landscapes”
(italics in original).
Mid-1980 figures, the most recent available.
Report ftom Paul Foster, farmboy turned programmer: “Alfalfa is an ag economist’s dream of the benefits of comparative advantage. Heat-tolerant, highly responsive to irrigation, and a major beneficiary of a long growing season (this results in more cuttings and higher yields for the later cuttings), alfalfa is the shining exception to the general rule of declining field crops over the decades” in Imperial County. “Despite dramatic swings in market prices, alfalfa has been a reliable performer, especially when measured by the $/acre yardstick . . . I suspect that only cantaloupes and melons would rival it for consistency in its contribution to the Imperial economy. It has also benefited from improvements in harvest technology, dramatically lowering the labor component required.”
“The Smith family haven’t been wealthy very long. You hear a lot of stuff. Especially that second wife. She’s an heir to”—and Mr. Brogan named a very big company.
Salvation Mountain’s Leonard Knight, whom I had never before heard speak ill of anybody, said of certain coyotes: “I think it’s disgusting. I heard they hung some people up in a tree last year and leave ’em to die. But I guess we’re all doin’ the best we can . . .”—I asked what he thought about illegal labor, and he said: “I don’t think those rich orchard owners should give ’em a job.”
Which would have been in 2000.
Along the entire border, someone now meets death each day attempting to come into Northside. Fortunately for this book, only a small proportion of the line runs through the entity that I call Imperial.
The Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which remained in power for many years.
Stella Mendoza, the past President of the Imperial Irrigation District, once remarked to me that the farmers in Imperial County were complaining about the global economy, “but meanwhile they do it to themselves; they go to Mexicali.”
Their names were Alma Rosa Hernández and Hugo Heriberto Herrera.
I asked her what was best and worst about the
ejidos,
and she began by replying, as they always did: “Here, life is more tranquil than in Mexicali.” She then continued: “But if you want to buy things, such as clothes, it takes forty minutes by bus to get there, and you have to catch the bus from another
ejido,
so it takes fifty-five minutes total.”
Quantification Settlement Agreement. Legalese for the water-transfer plan.
San Diego County Water Authority.
Kay Brockman Bishop was less diplomatic: “It would tickle me no end if the Salton Sea dried up. All this hullabaloo, it’s just exactly that. I don’t think we should be spending a gazillion dollars on it. I don’t mind it being there; I don’t mind it being gone. They’ll figure out something.”
For reasons which I am not permitted to go into, I have made this sentence slightly less specific than it actually was.
Speaking of enabling low-wage industrialism, an IID brochure from this period boasts of “powering Mexican maquiladoras through first international agreement.”
In their losing struggle against the water transfer, Stella Mendoza’s faction of Imperial County insists against Los Angeles that they have exercised reasonable and beneficial use with All-American Canal water. Meanwhile, Mexico insists against Imperial County and San Diego that she has exercised reasonable and beneficial use with All-American Canal seepage over the past sixty-five years. But this is the merest footnote; who cares about the losers?
In 2003, San Diego would receive 15,000 acre-feet, one-third of it to actually go to the Salton Sea. “For 2004, IID is expected to pay back overruns from 2002.”
A week later, the
New York Times
echoed: “The recent announcement of an armistice in that epic battle could provide a template for compromise elsewhere.” In case I haven’t told you, “the key to this historic deal is an agreement by the Imperial Valley farmers in California to make do with less water . . . Credit is due to Gale Norton,” the Interior Secretary, “for insisting that it go forward despite huge political obstacles . . . The agreement has taught a state that always had trouble controlling its appetites some valuable lessons for living with scarcity.”
Las Vegas possesses rights to 300 acre-feet per year of Colorado, and the
Imperial Valley Press
opines: “The only place where the progress of the QSA is followed more closely than in the Imperial Valley is in Las Vegas, probably because the people there have as much to gain from its implementation as those of us here have to lose.”
As Richard Brogan reminds us all, that position “is a big deal, in an agricultural county like this. See, all the enforcement, the environmental issues, they’re yours. You can literally tell someone you can start a fire or you can’t start a fire. They are not going to have a controversial person. They need a chameleon, a political person. Claude Finnell stayed in there for twenty or thirty years, anointed somebody to be his successor. This guy had unbelievable connections. The cement counties up north, they might change the commissioner periodically. Boy, when you get in this county, it’s a huge thing being Ag Commissioner. He has the power to enforce quarantine.”
Here the reader may remember that as early as 1930, three-fifths of Imperial County’s farms were operated by tenants, not owners.
He must have been referring to the bracero program.
Speaking of this crop, in 2001 Mr. Finnell was mentioned as the co-founder of the Imperial Valley Sugarcane Growers Association. In 2003 he was listed as a partner in a sugar and sorghum cane ethanol project. The company was registered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The question of how well we ever truly
see
the other remains better unanswered. I remember an engraving of Malinche and her nineteen companions who were given to the conquistadors. The artist, who appears never to have seen Mexico, makes the naked nubile females resemble Italians as they cluster shyly together beneath an oaklike forest at the ocean’s edge. And if I, Cortés, took Malinche to me, would I be as likely to find her out as she in her cunning desperation would be to tell me what I wished to hear? This thought-experiment leads to the following axiom: “When power relations are unequal, the weaker will know the stronger better than vice versa.” Hence Mexicans know Americans better than the other way around.
In respect to this inherited characteristic of mine, it is strange to think that
Aztlán,
the unknown sacred place where the Aztecs originated, means
whiteness.
Aztlán was not entirely unlike the Colorado River Delta before they dammed the river, for there were many water-birds and fishes. A tall hill rose from the water like Pilot Knob. However, Pilot Knob has no caves that I know of, and the hill Colhuacan, Place of Ancestors, was riddled with grottoes where the ancestors lived.
Since the entity I define as Imperial is larger than Imperial County, the latter’s newspaper frequently excludes from publication such items as the following, since it occurred four miles north of the county line: “Sweeney Pass crash kills woman, injures 7”: “A 26-year-old woman from Mexico died and seven people, including a 3-year-old boy, were injured when the Mazda Protege they were riding in flipped over on county road S2 ... Six people fled the vehicle . . . Claudia Salinas Morales, 26, was declared dead at the scene . . . [Patrolman Ryan] Haley said federal smuggling charges would be filed against 23-year-old Maria Othon of San Diego, who was identified as the driver following an investigation. All seven of her passengers were suspected illegal immigrants.”
His death certificate is reproduced at the beginning of this book, just opposite the dedication.
This spot is portrayed from the American side of the canal in my 8” x 10” negative BR-CN-USA-99-05, and from the Mexican side, where José would have tried it, in negatives BR-CN-MEX-99-06 and -04.
In “The Line Itself,” p. 563.
This reminds me that far down into the Baja Peninsula, once upon a time there was, and perhaps still is for all I know, a hill called “The Grave,” and another called “Hell.”
Here is a thought on another wall in another country: “The damage inflicted by the barrier on the idea of a Jewish homeland built by Jews fleeing the walled ghettos of Europe seems enormous. In the Jerusalem area, where the wall is really a wall of concrete, higher than the Berlin wall, the offense to the ideal that was Israel appears incalculable.” Could there be any truth to this? If so, might it offer any analogy to the wall now thickening and growing along the southern edge of the Land of the Free?
José Joaquin Arrillaga, 1796: “From the heights one spies only flat country, of clay, without trees, this being the Laguna Salada, and beyond, the Sierra next to the Colorado.” The Mexicali Valley is now dusty, smoggy and hazy with geothermal plumes. It is much harder to see the Sierra de Los Cocopas from far away; as for the Colorado, we know what happened to
that.
Rancho Roa was known even in the capital of the world, Mexicali. Javier Lupercio for instance said: “There’s a slaughterhouse next to that place, round about kilometer eight or nine. It started out as a cattle ranch, lots of heads of cattle they had. It was one of the biggest ranches at that time. They also used to plant alfalfa. Up to date, that ranch still has cattle. But it’s not as productive as before.”
Once while detaining me, the guardians of Northside, having inspected my every pill, film canister and dollar, finally discovered my one item of contraband: a single Rancho Roa orange forgotten in the trunk of the car. They seized it triumphantly and paid me a monitory pamphlet in exchange.
I may have misunderstood this. In 2004, asparagus occupied 1,812 Imperial County acres. The yield was 240 thirty-pound cartons per acre, $32.11 per carton. Asparagus was number twenty-four of the top forty crops. In 1994, there had been nearly 6,000 acres of asparagus planted; although the yield was only 147 cartons, the market price had been $35.67 per carton. Asparagus accordingly made number eight on the top forty list.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Agricultural Labor Relations Board. See “Chávez’s Grapes,” p. 748.
In fact, Deane Haughtelin’s family lived in a caboose in a siding in Niland in about 1902; her father was a Southern Pacific conductor.
Signal Mountain is much less impressive from the Mexicali side, more sprawling, and appears no higher than the surrounding mountains, whereas on the U.S. side it stands alone.
But you will find it in my negative BR-BS-SIG-01-02.
In short, I concur with George Wharton James, who writes
ca.
1906 in his
Wonders of the Colorado Desert:
“There is a peculiar charm and surprise about the odors of the desert that needs comment.”
I wish I had permission to show you my snapshot of one of these monsters: white tanklike light-cannons blasting our enlightened radiance at Southside! After I clicked the shutter, a Border Patrolman rolled slowly up, whizzed down his window, and advised me that I was in a closed area.
José López said: “Oh, the first thing you notice is the money when you’re working. Everything is different, even the houses, the cities. Even in Calexico it’s a whole different culture even though we’re all Mexicans. Mexicali is better money, and Calexico is even better money, so you get to eat a little better, you dress better, you have a little money to send back, and you can even get a used car. When it gets time to go home I just sell it. Sometimes I sleep in it. Once I got me a used pickup with a camper shell, and a used mattress from a secondhand store, and I slept there. I used to just go to a work camp and pay two dollars for a shower. Just a little bit uncomfortable, but it was worth it.”
Another example of knowing one’s subgradients: An old man I met in the park in Tecate bought coffee and light sugar in El Cajon when he went to visit his two children; those commodities were cheaper in the United States. Sugar for diabetics was also cheaper, likewise potatoes and canned food. But coffee and meat were more expensive; he tried not to buy them on the other side.
