Imperial (28 page)

Back after the war, though, we had a whole lot of wetbacks, said Eugene Dahm, trying to be helpful. Had a whole lot of guys, just give ’em a sack and let ’em pick cotton or sugar beets. Nowadays, if they come into the field and find a wet, they can fine you a thousand dollars. But they still hide out.

When he says “wet,” I don’t want you to write that down, warned the pioneer from Heber. “Wet” or “wetback” used to be a very common figure of speech. It’s not racist. This is all just background.

I asked Eugene Dahm what he remembered about the other side of the ditch and he said: They had the best restaurants in the valley, both Mexican and Chinese. Alley Nineteen was a great one. Everybody had a filet mignon. They took about any part of the cow, wrapped it in bacon and called it filet mignon for two dollars. What’s the name of the place down there where you can still bet on the horses? They had some real nice nightclubs until, oh, about 1955. They had good floor shows and then after 1955 they didn’t seem to care if we came there.

But the old pioneer from Heber disgustedly interjected: The whole place was loose, shot through with
mordida.
Say you were eighteen, and you got served beer.

That does sound different, all right, I said.

Grimly he explained: When the King of Spain sent his conquistadors over here, every man expected to live like a king and skim off the top. Down there it’s accepted. But this is just background information. Don’t quote me on any of this.

Ignoring him, Eugene Dahm sighed dreamily: The night we graduated from Brawley High we went down to Mexicali . . .

“A TOTALLY NEEDLESS AND SENSELESS ACT”

A high-wheeled white carriage waits in front of a long house’s white fence, suspended between white street and white sky. Every white spot, every place leached out by time and light, can be construed, if we want it to, as a zone of potential, not for the future, since that’s come and gone, but for vision itself, without which the dead past has no value anyway. Crossing the line on a hundred-degree afternoon in June 2002, the pair of international turnstiles clinking musically overhead as they always do, I drain my lemonade, which is, like Mexico, so sweet, tart, dirty and vibrantly fresh. An old man waits patiently until I have finished; then he takes my paper cup from the trash. He goes to the lemonade vendor, negotiates a lower price, and the last I see of him he is drinking slowly and happily out of my cup. From here it’s not far to the Archivo Histórico, where I find myself at ditch’s edge again, gazing across the line at a faded photograph of a partially shadow-faced woman in white who is white-kneed, with dark-haired bangs above her white Mexican face; beautiful, now eaten by time, she holds a parasol which blurs itself like a wheel-spoke, while two men in white suits and white hats stand beside her, the closest with his hand on his hip. Behind them looms their half-built house, and a peon bends over a wheelbarrow. If that lady is still alive, she must be a hundred. When she was twenty-five, that border between us was just a ditch. Now it has become a wall; and I’m separated from her not only by sunburned metal panels but also by time.

When anyone could jump across that ditch in either direction, was the estrangement between American and Mexican Imperial any less? In the beginning, of course, there was only the desert; then came human beings, and once they’d drawn that border between them, first administratively, subdividing that region of Mexico into Upper and Lower California, then violently, scoring Upper California away from Mexico to aggrandize the United States according to the desires of Texas slaveholders and their kin, each side became progressively more articulated into opposition toward the other. One sees that so evidently from Signal Mountain: It’s green on the American side, greyish-tan on the Mexican. And yet the waves of transnational capital don’t care about that; they only want to buy low and sell high, so like rivers they inevitably undercut their own sandy banks, buying low and then lower in Mexico, until their nourishing outwash of money stimulates local development, which gradually raises prices. That’s the theory, anyhow.

From the very beginning, Northside has always pretended that it extends forever, to the very end of Imperial. In the seaside resorts of San Felipe and Santa Clara, many of the signs are in English, the prices in dollars. In a 1906 number of
Out West
magazine (
The Nation Back of Us, the World in Front
), I find an advertisement for
desirable tracts of from 100 to 100,000 acres
as far south as Sinaloa; their exclusive concessionaires operate out of not Mexico City, as a naive believer in national sovereignty might have expected, but Los Angeles.

Capitalist theory might be correct. Mexicali is cleaner and more prosperous than any Congolese or Malagasy city. Since I began going there it’s won more parking lots now full of shiny cars. Let’s all reserve million-dollar hopes for the Mexicans. Someday they’ll be just as rich as us; they’ll be us. Then we won’t need the ditch.

Outside, right along Southside, says the radio. Yeah, we got a group that just ran across. Twelve bodies. We don’t have ’em in sight . . .—And the white Bronco speeds down an alley of walls and fences, palms and streetlights. A man paces in his driveway, watching the officers.

We still don’t have ’em in sight . . .

There was always a crossing, said the old pioneer from Heber, and there was free egress and entry for us, for U.S. citizens. We could just walk in and out of Mexico.

And Eugene Dahm added, with just the slightest wink (I liked him better and better): In the thirties, Mexico was open for gambling and you could play roulette and blackjack. But I remember during the war you had to use two-dollar bills because of counterfeits . . .

There was always a crossing; there was free egress and entry for
us
but there was always a crossing; there was a crossing when a van literally packed with
pollos,
people lying on people, twenty-seven of them, drove westward and without lights in the eastbound lane of Interstate 8 until it hit a Ford Explorer head-on, ending the life of that vehicle’s driver, a legal U.S. citizen, while simultaneously killing its own driver and four of its passengers.
This was a totally needless and senseless act,
announces Border Patrol Agent Raleigh Leonard for the record. No doubt it would have been needless except for the fact that the Border Patrol had established a checkpoint on the westbound lane. There was always a crossing, but Agent Leonard knew that wasn’t and shouldn’t be lawful; he had no interest in the other side of the ditch.

“WAVES OF PEOPLE COMING ACROSS”

Near midnight and southeast of Mexicali, children are throwing a balloon back and forth until it finally ghosts over a whitewashed fence and ascends into the full moon beneath which a girl and her boyfriend are sitting on the trunk of a car, their fingers intertwined as they gaze together at the bright canopy of HAMBURGUESAS. Around the corner, in a brightly lit courtyard, a mat imprinted with the likeness of the Virgin of Guadalupe hangs on the wall. And that moon, that orange moon ascends higher and higher into the purple sky; now it’s white. Herewith, the other side of the ditch!
⁴⁰
Here each store, house or bar feels different; one never knows what the building material will be. In a restaurant, not all tables are finished with the same type of veneer; indeed, not all are even the same shape. (Steinbeck repeats:
“They don’t want anything.” This is not a description of the happiness of Mexicans, but of the unhappiness of the person who says it.
So if I for my part opine that in Mexico each house “feels different,” my God, what does that say about American houses?) The journey from Northside to Southside is a voyage from a grid to a place where streets do not announce their destination. What does that say about American streets? Northside fields are wide, low and emerald; they’re vast, rectangular, uniformly colored; some are palm-avenues with mountains or Salton Sea blue between them. Southside fields are pale green with yellow-brown islands and sometimes with dikes in the middle. Mexicali’s hay bales may be an almost garish yellow, like the signs in the new strip malls. A reddish-brown cornfield, a house walled round by dying plants in flowerpots, the merest dozen cows or so per feedlot, this is Southside agriculture. Sometimes Northside is long green ranches and Southside is sand-duned blankness; sometimes Northside’s just a waste studded with boulders, sensors and lights (a white Bronco waits watchfully upon its private dirt road); then comes the wall, with Southside’s houses crowding up against it all the way to the hill-horizon. In either case the wall comes slicing through everything, transforming continuum into opposition. Northside and Southside are antipodes; we all agree on that. But the line of workers in those fields, brightly clothed and stooping, oh yes, they could be anywhere in Imperial or out of it; I’ve seen them picking lettuce way up north in Salinas. People come from Southside to commit what Agent Leonard would call totally needless and senseless acts. They return to Southside to come home.

No habeas corpus in Mexico! cries the angry old pioneer from Heber. But, see, attitudes were different then. People were traditional. They were born in the village and they stayed in the village. They didn’t have TVs. We didn’t have those waves of people coming across.—Sitting opposite from him in that air-conditioned room of the Pioneers Museum, listening to him deplore the vanishing of traditional people, I remember from an album in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali, where he has never been and never will go, a certain photograph of blackhaired little girls in frilly white dresses and white tights and (in most cases) white shoes; there are seven or eight per row, nineteen girls in all, many with long black braids spilling down their chests, one with a necklace; I see black eyes in white faces, a white wall, a window and doorway behind them. Are they the ones he means when he speaks of traditional people? How many of them crossed the ditch in their nineteen lifetimes? I assume they’re all dead now.

As for those
waves of people coming across,
they too have burned an image in the photo-emulsion of my memory: Carlos, Mario, Roberto and the other brothers in that “family” in Niños Héroes Park. Carlos crams his knuckles hard against the side of his chin, leaning forward a little, while beside him the brother in the skull-cap gazes at me with his head up and back like a lord’s, his eyes cool; when he smiles, raising a clenched fist with the two outermost fingers extended like insect antenna, a boyish joyousness rushes out of him like light, whereas Carlos’s best smile is a grimly nervous show of teeth. Neither one of them smiles now. Tonight they’re going to try for the other side of the ditch! Beside him, a brother nods out; his hairy arms don’t show off their needletracks; in the back row stand Mario and Roberto, and between them a man in a sweat-stained striped shirt; his pallid face and glazed eyes resemble a corpse’s. He looks so sad, so ghastly; what’s his story? And how will his story end? He cannot speak English, but through Carlos he tells me that he hopes to enter the service of some American fast food restaurant where his life will be air-conditioned and well-greased with fried sustenance. But he really doesn’t look good. If he makes it over the wall tonight, perhaps tomorrow’s sun will give him a passport to that stretch of sand in Holtville where forgotten
pollos
lie beneath crosses emblazoned
NOT FORGOTTEN.
Can’t he see that? Or does he hate this side of the ditch more than he fears that side? (I have already quoted the migrant worker in Mecca who’d said:
I tell you, Mexico is beautiful but Mexico is tough.
) This restless coming and going of human beings, this hurrying of life into dry desert where it finally sinks without a sign, and this border walled off for the express purpose of denying the undeniable oneness of Imperial, there’s many a parable in it all! Perhaps you’ve heard the tale of the man who got wind of the fact that Death was coming for him, so he set out for faraway Samarkand, where Death would never find him; and if you want to imagine Samarkand, just let yourself see Coachella’s ranked lines of date palms with mountains beyond, the sign
SAY IT WITH DAT ES
, smoke trees squatting on the off-white sand. The journey was wretched and treacherous; the Border Patrol hunted him, but by sunup he was well beyond the wall and in due course he reached Samarkand, where with a clap of a skeleton-hand on his shoulder Death greeted him, saying: How kind of you to remember our appointment in Samarkand!—And here’s another parable for you: An old man from Heber, so old that the skeleton must soon take
him
by the shoulder, fears getting drowned by a human wave! What does his inner eye see? Possibly he remembers the Pacific War, where the Japanese launched no-surrender “banzai attacks.” He would have been old enough to fight in the Korean War, and maybe he did; maybe he encountered waves of Chinese suicide-volunteers. (Not long ago I visited the Korean War Museum in Dandong, China, just west of the North Korean border. It displayed a photograph of American GI’s posing with decapitated Asian heads. I believe it. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t suicide-volunteers who played against them with equal mercilessness.) Human waves! Many’s the time I’ve observed those encroachments upon my nation’s sovereignty. First comes the desert dirt with its few cat-whiskers of grass, then the border wall, graffiti’d and almost too hot to touch, but someone is touching it; a teenaged boy’s bare arms lie across the top of it (what’s he standing on over there in Southside?) and his head peeps over; he’s steady; the heat can hardly touch him; he’ll wait and look and wait. As soon as that white Bronco drives away, if it ever does, he’ll signal to his friends and then they’ll make the snake; with luck they’ll slither all the way to Samarkand.
Banzai, banzai!

Now, do you want to hear about their weapons? At my request, one of the brothers in Carlos’s “family” of
pollos
(he’s a trifle embarrassed about this; he doesn’t wish me to write which one of them he is) strips off his shirt. In the darkness, his muscular block of a body takes on the pallor of a tombstone. I can see the whiteness of his skull-skin beneath the hair he’s cropped as close as a soldier’s. Then comes neck and gleaming-beaded necklace, each bead as fat as a beetle, and his shoulders as wide as a billboard, the braces of that signboard being of course the arms, which are as hard and swollen with power as any champion’s; let’s consider the left arm first, for it bears a long shiny scar from the armpit halfway to the elbow; if it were smaller I’d say bullet, but I think I’ll say knife; now for the right arm, on which a longhaired woman seductively nestles, and there’s another tattoo as well, on the inside of the elbow, but I can see only the perimeter of it so I don’t know what it is. Enough; what image does the signboard bear? Comfortably lodged upon that broad back, longhaired, bearded haloed Jesus looks lovingly at me. He wears a heart upon a necklace. His right hand is folded inward upon His breast, like a dead man’s, and His closed fingers touch that heart. His left hand is also folded in, but at the wrist it upraises to form a gesture: the thumb vertical, the little finger and its fellow folded against the palm, the two fingers in the middle crossed and jutting high. Jesus wants me to pay attention to Him. Look at Me, he says; look at My heart. Look at My left hand. (Under this sign thou shalt conquer.) Don’t you know what it means? Guess what,
amigo
? It’s a secret. Maybe I’d be in on it, if I lived on his side of the ditch. (What do you want to go to some nigger place for?) The other side is by definition the secret side, the dark side of the moon. First there was only Imperial. But then we bifurcated it, so that it now contains mysteries without end. Here’s another secret, another story whose end only Jesus knows: In the footprinted sand on the Mexican side of the All-American Canal, a thin-woven striped sweater lies trodden and half-buried; it reminds me of the scraps of clothing I once saw at the Choeung Ek killing fields in Cambodia, where by means of guns and iron bars and other convenient tools human beings were converted into flecks of bone and bits of cloth from which the threads grew like crazy grass; even had I never seen Choeung Ek, there would have been something sad to me about this garment, still serviceable, which some agency has flattened into the dirt. What became of its owner? Had he swum across the All-American, wouldn’t he have taken it with him? Anyone who abides at this spot must be poor. It’s a hot, glaring place, a hostile bit of No Man’s Land. Perhaps he came here by day, knew he had to wait until nightfall to make his attempt, got hot and went for a dip, while from the other bank the white Bronco watched without comment. At this place I’ve so often seen would-be
pollos
in the blue-green water, wet and laughing
(those waves of people coming across),
only their heads out; their shoes wait at the very edge of the shore, in case they need them quickly; their folded clothes crown the zone of flowering weeds where sand meets water. Then what? It’s possible, but unlikely, that the owner of the sweater drowned; along this border only two people die per day. More likely the Mexican police came here by surprise, and either seized him or scared him off. Or—why not wish him the best?—maybe Jesus came along and whisked him right to America. Whatever the case, a poor man got parted from his clothes.
Now I hear the people smugglers are getting so brazen, now they got the Humvees with the guns mounted on them.