Imperial (37 page)

They dined sumptuously, no doubt.
Corn . . . is generally landed wormy,
the authorities advised.
Lard and cane sugar . . . the heat of the hold melts and ferments.
On the other hand, each settler and his family received, or at least were mandated to receive, two mares, two cows with one calf, two ewes and two she-goats, all four of the latter animals pregnant, a yoke of oxen, two horses, a cargo mule, and a multitude of tools including hoe, spade, musket and dagger . . . It may well be that some of these bestowals were subject to the equivalents of worminess, melt and fermentation; all the same, the intentions of this
reglamento
were admirable.

Still more remarkable to me are the instructions for land distribution. Each parcel was a square five hundred and fifty feet wide (two hundred
varas
in the measurement of the time),
this being the area ordinarily taken by one fanega of Corn in sowing.
Every settler was awarded two of these which could be irrigated and two more which could not. These land grants were not dissimilar to the
ejidos
which President Cárdenas would bring into being in Southside a century and a half later: They were
an inheritance in perpetuity . . . indivisible and inalienable forever,
immune to mortgage and subject to descent to whichever male descendant a family chose,
that the sons of the possessors of these grants may have the obedience and respect of their parents.
They could also go to landless daughters married to other settlers. All taxes were remitted for the first five years.

Sipping from their leather water bags, which they must have filled from the Los Angeles River
(it is simply needless to question the supply of water),
the settlers built their pueblo. In a decade, it had twenty-nine houses, containing a hundred and thirty-nine inhabitants.
And in material advantages they are already well supplied.

Chapter 16

TÍA JUANA (1825)

The dust rises, making swirls, with flowers of death.

—Aztec song

N
ext comes Tijuana, whose name’s origin remains arguable. In 1825, Don José Dario Arguello obtains a grant of Rancho Tía Juana. The Inquisition has been abolished in Mexico five years since. Slavery was prohibited a year ago; to make up for that error, the new Constitution granted the presidency dictatorial powers in case of emergency, thereby guaranteeing that there would soon be an emergency.

In 1825, Tía Juana cannot even be said to boast the presence of Aunt Jane. The official founding date of the city will be 1889. On the other hand, Los Angeles has not yet gone too far ahead; in 1827 it will hold a mere eighty-two houses.

Tía Juana gets river water in dribs and drabs, but
WATER IS
not yet
HERE
. Accordingly, nor is the entity which will someday be called Tijuana.

Chapter 17

TECATE (1830)

Before mapping can begin, control points must be defined.

—The Compact NASA Atlas of the Solar System, 2001

A
nd doomed Juan Bandini somehow took title to sixteen hundred hectares of Cañada de Tecate, which needless to say did not stay in the family. In that time it was an unknown place with a name as obscure in meanining as Tía Juana’s; it might have meant
the water in which a woman wets her hands while making tortillas
or it could have meant a gourd, or (least likely of all, given Tecate’s proximity to Mexicali, which decidedly outdoes her in this respect),
where the sun shines . . .

Chapter 18

LOS ANGELES (1845)

And in spring the sweet goad of compelling desire and mating and mutual love are in season among all that move upon the fruitful earth . . .

—Oppian, ca. A.D. 194

F
or a certain grand ball in Los Angeles, in August 1845, the hosts incurred the following expenses: thirty dollars to prepare the dance floor,
⁵⁷
fifteen dollars for spermaceti so that there would be an abundance of light, twenty-four dollars for four musicians, four dollars for servants and a hundred nineteen dollars for refreshments, in which
aguardiente
played a distinguished part. (Half a century afterward, one county history will define this beverage as
a sort of cognac, which was very agreeable to the palate and went like a flash to the brain.
) Now everything was ready. Soon the music would begin. Soon the gentlemen would doff their cord-tied, broad-brimmed hats and bow to the ladies. Amazons dwelled in California after all, and their names were Ramona, Josetta, Isadora, María Arcadia, Guadalupe and Juana.
⁵⁸

By now the stockaded redoubts of what Bancroft calls “pre-pastoral California” had been partially superseded. In 1834, Louis Vignes planted the first orange tree. Los Angeles rapidly became a kingdom of figs and oranges.
Every house had its inclosure of vineyard, which resembled a miniature orchard, the vines being very old, ranged in rows, trimmed very close, with irrigating ditches so arranged that a stream of water could be diverted between each row of vines.
That was how General Sherman remembered it; the Mexican War had called him here; the time was not come for him to scourge the American South. Nor would the Los Angeles River run dry for many years yet; accompanied by its cottonwoods and willows, it fed the pueblo’s still modest thirst. Near the century’s end it remained powerful enough to wash away bridges and drown people. People were killed by floods in 1825, 1861-62 and 1867. At the beginning of 1886, a huge flood inundated everything from Wilmington Street to the rise east of there.

Los Angeles was the destination of many runaway Mission Indians, for the missions had been secularized in 1834, and the Indians could no longer get food and clothing there. Indeed, the previous year, President Santa Anna had allowed the Liberals to end the Church’s statutory tithe throughout Mexico. The missions crumbled; the padres grew poor and demoralized; Los Angeles swelled.

In 1845, per capita income in Mexico was fifty-six pesos; in 1800 it had been a hundred and sixteen pesos. What about California with her decrepit missions, fidgety converts, variegated
rancherías
and Indian serfs? Specifically, what about Los Angeles, surrounded by head-high fields of wild mustard? William Smythe:
The essence of the industrial life which springs from irrigation is its democracy.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

ANXIETIES OF AN ENCLAVE

The tiny equal plots of Los Angeles are long gone.
I can’t help believing in people.
Her boggy, bear-infested thickets are getting drained bit by bit. There is now a ten-mile-long irrigation canal from the neighborhood of Redlands to San Gabriel. I wonder who did that work. For quite awhile now, the authorities have been renting out Indian field serfs to the original settlers. This policy justifies itself on the basis of its results: Since the beginning of the century, Los Angeles has grown more beans, corn, barley and wheat than it needs, and now it supplies Santa Barbara. In short, I have never been cheated out of a doubloon in my life. And why shouldn’t this benevolent system be made perpetual? Since the 1820s, the Franciscan-owned vineyards of San Gabriel have been trodden by almost-naked Indians. A certain hundred-and-seventy-acre grapery produces several tons each day.

But how might the poor Fathers be managing now that their mission has been secularized? And how well do property owners sleep in Los Angeles? Mexican California is getting increasingly stung by Indian cattle raids; indeed, one commentator believes that by 1845 the Indians have actually succeeded in squeezing back the Spanish frontier. Will there be more Yuma massacres? Who lurks tonight in Los Angeles’s tule swamps?

“OFTEN BEWITCHING TO MY SIGHT”

Los Angeles’s fandango continues. An American clergyman’s son who sees one in Baja California at about this time calls it
an exceedingly lascivious dance.
All the same,
I am not Platonist enough to deny that
the women
often appeared bewitching to my sight as they whirled through some of the intricate figures of the
Jota . . . And this old Los Angeles likewise bewitches my sight. I gaze upon it as upon the crowning of the Date Queen in Indio. How long can it last? For just as date royalty epitomizes that fading agricultural empire of smallholders, that American dream called Imperial, Los Angeles stands in for Alta California, where some trees were sixty feet high. (At midcentury, the railroads of our rival, the United States, reached no farther west than the Alleghenies. Carmel’s mountains teemed with deer and bears as they now do with automobiles. And what did Los Angeles use for automobiles? Wooden-wheeled oxcarts.) In short, Los Angeles is the very capital of Imperial, not yet inimical to it.

The women wear short-sleeved gowns
after the European style.
They sport brilliant-hued belts or sashes, necklaces, earrings. (An American observer is interested to note that they go naked of corsets.) The men wear dark broad-brimmed hats whose bands are generally colored and sometimes even gilt. I suppose that they throw off their jackets of calico or silk when they dance, showing their open-necked shirts. Sometimes they wear short breeches and white stockings, sometimes gilt-laced pantaloons.

For an entertainment, bulls and grizzly bears get roped together in pairs, to maul and gore each other until one party perishes. James O. Pattie reports that on one occasion in San Carlos, fourteen bulls died to destroy five grizzlies. Meanwhile, at the fandango, the lady smashes on her chosen partner’s head an eggshell filled with gilt and colored confetti.

An observer from the United States of America, a nation which at this juncture can merely be called Northeastside, looks upon this revelry and sees
the laxness and filth of a free brute, using freedom as a mere means of animal enjoyment . . . dancing and vomiting as occasion and inclination appear to require.

Chapter 19

WEST OF THE RIVER (1803)

God, there never was a bigger game! It couldn’t flop—unless we spoiled it for ourselves. And that’s what we’ve done. It was too big for us!

—Dashiell Hammett, 1924

O
f course agricultural Los Angeles, like the Spanish Imperial it epitomizes, will endure forever. Spain’s enemy, the United States, lacks interest in the region. will endure forever. Spain’s enemy, the United States, lacks interest in the

I grant that in 1803, Alexander Hamilton expresses relief over what he considers to be the fortuitous accident of the Louisiana Purchase; he’s especially happy to gain the Mississippi River, which can someday be employed to recompense Spain for the Floridas, which are
obviously of far greater value to us than all the immense, undefined region west of the river.
May I be more specific?
On the whole, we think it may with candor be said, that whether the possession at this time of any territory west of the river Mississipi will be advantageous, is at best extremely problematical.

Chapter 20

DRAWING THE LINE (1803-1848)

We replied that the laws of our country did not require that honest, common citizens should carry passports . . .

—James O. Pattie, 1830

TÍPICO AMERICANO

Never,
cries Jefferson to Bowdoin (1807),
did a nation act toward another with more perfidy and injustice than Spain has constantly practised against us; and if we have kept our hands off her till now, it has been purely out of respect to France, and from the value we set on the friendship of France. We expect, therefore, from the friendship of the Emperor that he will either compel Spain to do us justice or abandon her to us. We ask but one month to be in possession of the city of Mexico.

In 1803 the Louisiana Purchase entitles the United States to an ill-defined stretch of property to the west, some of it extending into Mexico’s equally unsurveyed claims.
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
Might Imperial be included in our new domains? No, but the Rio Grande surely is—never mind; forget the Rio Grande; we’ll compromise on the Sabine River.

Just for once in this book, let’s please think about Texas with its rivers and wild horses. As a Californian, I know that my state is bigger and better, but sometimes, simply to be fair, it’s necessary to mention insignificant territories. Did you know that there’s a town in Texas whose inhabitants dwell under the ground for fear of Indians? I just wanted to put that in. Corpus Christi, where the Americans traded tobacco and calico for Mexican silver, has nothing at all to do with Imperial. Neither do the Mexican massacres of Americans at Goliad and the Alamo, and the occasional American counter-murders. The point is this:

In 1827 the United States offers Mexico a million dollars for Texas. In 1828 the United States offers Mexico five million dollars for Texas. In 1831 the Treaty of Limits recognizes Mexican sovereignty over Texas. In 1836, year of the Alamo, Texas declares itself
sovereign and free
—that is, free of Mexico. The same year, so does California. By some coincidence, the majority of insurrectionists in both districts happen to bear Anglo-Saxon names. Or, as my 1976
Britannica
tells it:
The Texan revolution was not simply a fight between Anglo-American settlers and Mexican troops; it was a revolution of all people living in Texas against what was regarded as tyrannical rule from a distant source,
Mexico City, I assume, not Washington. Now, how does my 1911
Britannica
put it?
Three abortive Anglo-American invasions during the first few years of the century indicated the future trend of events.
Translation:
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.