Imperial (41 page)

In Orozco’s famous painting, the sinewy old snow-white patriarch’s arm crosses Malinche’s nakedness like a barrier, while she holds her naked lord’s other hand, gazing at him in a kind of empty stolidity or perhaps grief. He sternly eyes the trampled faceless native below their feet. They sit in state, lord and temporary lady of Mexico, but he is holding her back, perhaps from weeping over the fallen one on whom he has set his right foot. Malinche is beautiful after a squatly crystalline fashion; nor has Orozco denied her master his own dignity. It is one of the saddest pictures I know.

So many choices! Ascension (or, if you like, Asunción), Juaquina, Eloisa, Sole-dad, Jacinta, María de la Luz (one of my favorite names), Catherine Magdalena! Cortés’s generation could take their pick of such Aztec delicacies as Xicomoyahual. But in American California, she would have had too exotic a taste. Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel
Ramona
does offer up a happily sentimentalized mating with an Indian woman, but the bridegroom is, after all, a mere Mexican Californian. A book on the California Indians notes that
the American civilization . . . viewed miscegenation with the greatest antipathy . . . No blood bond could ever become established which would mitigate the indifference and contempt with which the Indians were regarded,
and by the mid-nineteenth century, white males who defile themselves with Indians have earned a specific term of contempt:
squaw men.
Theodore H. Hittell,
History of California,
volume III (1897):
The marriage of Indian women by white men of course involved degradation of the latter.

We do read of a certain Don Hugo Reid, who after getting naturalized in 1839
was married to Victoria, an Indian woman with a solid claim to the Rancho Santa Anita.
But this ignoble ability to hold one’s nose for the sake of commerce is un-American, no? Mr. Reid was British.

William Hartnell of Lancashire converts to Catholicism, visits a rich Don in Santa Barbara, and in the natural course of things espouses his daughter, Doña Teresa de la Guerra y Noriega. Perhaps there was love involved. Let us at least hope that Malinche, Mercedes, Josefa and Teresa all sang some version of the ancient song that the women of Chalco sang to their Aztec conquerors:
I have come to please my blooming vulva, my little mouth. I desire the lord . . .—
Why not hope so? A certain twentieth-century researcher has determined from studying rural California divorce records that the nineteenth century
is the decisive century in the development and realization of the companionate family.
Eighteenth-century divorce records mention children in relation to economic quantities; nineteenth-century records describe children as objections of affection. So let’s extend our best wishes to these mixed marriages and their offspring. May our hopes be as lovely as the woman’s name Cayetana.—Everyone has hope, a Mexicali barber once said to me, resting his hand upon my forehead in an almost loving gesture. I asked him what his hope was, and he replied: God. He said that God was his private hope, that all true hopes were private, and to explain himself he imagined an orange being passed about the barber shop; everyone could see it, but only he, the barber, had tasted it; no one could know whether that particular orange was sweet or sour. He asked me whether I had chosen the woman I was with or whether God had given her to me. I asked him his opinion of the matter and he said: God.—Surely the conquistadors felt so. So perhaps did the Yankees, if they believed with true faith in the Ministry of Capital.

SEEN AT THE CLUB ANAHUAC

San Diego County, which at this time stretched all the way from the Pacific to the Colorado, thereby encompassing the entire width of the entity I call Imperial, contained twenty-nine Mexican land grants, all of them in the west and center, and some, as we have seen, quite large. Colonel Cave Johnson Couts’s twenty-two hundred nineteen and a half acres was one of the smallest.

Couts was born in Tennessee in 1821, the same year that Iturbide asserted Mexican independence from Spain. Now for his career: West Point (where he took his comrades’ autographs), Indian Territory, Mexico, San Diego.

The Bandini family now comes back into the story. Couts marries Ysidora Bandini. In other words, he who trekked through Imperial and estimated the width of the Colorado River at Yuma now enters an Alta Californian house of whitewashed adobe, succeeds in his wooing, and settles with his new bride on
the Guajome Grant, a wedding gift.
Syncretism definitely has its advantages; and Mrs. Couts must have been ripe for it; for when she was still a maiden, she and her sister sewed the first American flag to fly over San Diego. Theodore Hittell again:
Much more suitable than the Indians as wives for the early comers were the Mexican women.

Then what? The bridegroom carries on the tradition of Cortés’s viceroys and deputies.
Having been appointed subagent for the San Luis Rey Indians, Colonel Couts was able to secure all the cheap labor needed for the improvement of his property.

It was treeless; he caused orchards to rise. His orange grove was the first in San Diego County.

Rancho Guajome, by the way, was a wedding present not from the bride’s father but from Abel Stearns, who had conveniently obtained it from
Andres, an Indian, and . . . his two sisters.
Speaking of this latter syncretizer, I might mention that his wife Arcadia, a rather plain woman who styles her hair in opposing diagonals across her face, is Ysidora’s sister. Yes, Juan Bandini has mother and daughters enough for two Anglos! He will die, aged either fifty-nine or sixty, at the home of Abel and Arcadia Stearns.

(Speaking further of Mr. Stearns, in an 1873 booklet for southern California homesteaders, I see a map of the Abel Stearns Ranchos,
for sale in sections or fractions
by a San Francisco company, which announces Farming Lands-Perfect Titles
,
namely
Early Mexican Grants, confirmed by U. S. Courts.
)

One historian refers to Couts as
one of the worst abusers of Indian field hands.
A habitual drunk, Couts whipped two Indians to death, and also killed an anonymous Mexican, not to mention his children’s tutor. But perhaps he was kind to his wife. A county history informs me that he was
the soul of honor . . . a genial companion . . . a perfect gentleman in society.

He syncretized, prospered and died. His lineage survived awhile. Sometime around the end of the teens of the next century, we find a Señorita Couts at a dance at Los Angeles’s exclusive Club Anahuac for Californios; one commentator insists that she is a descendant of this family.

It does indeed appear that the syncretic path was safer and more lucrative than the way of William Walker or the wearisome gamble of a Mexican miner at Picacho. The trouble was that in the eastern reaches of San Diego County, and even south of the line where Imperial’s eponymous valley continued, there were no women to marry and no lush acres to acquire. Imperial continued to drowse beneath her sandy blanket.

Chapter 28

THE INDIANS DO ALL THE HARD WORK (1769-1906)

And as the concomitant differentiaton and specialization of occupation goes on, a still more unmitigated discipline falls upon ever-widening classes of the population . . .

—Thorstein Veblen, 1904

W
alker wanted slaves, as do we all. One definition of human contentment is
having somebody else do my chores.
Here is an outsider’s description of Mexican California in the 1830s:
The Indians . . . do all the hard work, two or three being attached to the better house; and the poorest persons are able to keep one, at least, for they have only to feed them, and give them a small piece of coarse cloth and a belt for the men, and a coarse gown, without shoes or stockings, for the women.
O joy! O conveniency! I have never been cheated out of a peso in my life.

In 1769, Padre Crespi and Captain Rivera lead forty-two Cochimi campesinos from Loreto all the way north to San Diego. This must be the first use by Europeans of exploited labor within the entity that I call Imperial. By the time they arrive, thirty of these workers have run away or died.

Fifteen years later, the Ministry of Capital calculates the expense of shipping them from Baja, factors in the significant mortality rate, and decides to replace the Cochimis by Alta California natives. In 1828, a French sea-captain sees only one Cochimi field hand in Mission San Diego; all the others are Chumash. The Chumash will get used up in their turn; so will many others.

Indeed, the history of Imperial agriculture is the history of waves of farm labor, in this order: Native American, Chinese, Japanese, and then, with or without interludes of blacks and Filipinos, Mexicans.

This book has already alluded to the charms of the California missions. Since most of them lay outside Imperial,
⁶⁵
I cannot devote many lines to them. All the same, it may be worth reflecting on an observation of the noted
Californio
Antonio María Osio: The mission registers display two-thirds more burials than baptisms. Let me give the final word to Richard Steven Street, whose massive
Beasts of the Field
relates the history of California farmworkers from the beginnings of the missions in 1769. This chapter and several others are heavily indebted to him. Although he grants that many Indians joined the missions voluntarily, they quickly learned that they could not leave. If they tried, they could expect the following:
rape, murder, execution, whippings and intimidation at the hands of the leather-jacketed mission soldiers.

Another commentator believes that
the Ibero-Americans consistently followed the procedure of utilizing the natives and incorporating them in their social and economic structure,
while
the Anglo-American system . . . had no place for the Indian . . . All Indians were vermin, to be treated as such.
This oversimplifies the case; for California’s Indians, who were indeed considered vermin, did get
utilized
on their way to extinction; and, as we say just now, a very few were even spared by syncretization; while Mexico’s Indians, who got
incorporated,
to be sure, remained the lowest caste of all; so the divide between Southside’s inescapable peonage and Northside’s capricious enslavements and genocides might not have quite been as wide as one imagines. In the Yucatán, an American observer concluded that
the Indians worked . . . as if they had a lifetime for the job,
which they did, since their lives would hardly be spent doing anything but working. In Mexico City, a diplomat’s wife noted
the innumerable Indians loaded like beasts of burden.
Meanwhile, Southside’s Indian rebellions got punished with mass atrocities. They sometimes responded in kind. On one occasion in 1849, Comanches and Apaches murdered eighty-six Sonorans near the international line.

Back to Imperial’s edge: In 1833, we find many secularized mission Indians doing unskilled vineyard labor in Los Angeles. By 1847, they have been placed firmly under the thumb of the United States government. In 1850 their word no longer means anything in court; “idle” Indians can be rounded up into serfdom. I will spare you the horrors of the roundups. A Ranger writes:
Indians did the labor and the white man spent the money in those happy days.
In 1860, California Indians are dying off rapidly; a still crueller law extends their indenture period; and the
Humboldt Times
enthuses:
What a pity the provisions of this law are not extended to Greasers, Kanakas and Asiatics. It would be so convenient to carry on a farm . . . when all the hard and dirty work is performed by apprentices.
The indenture law gets repealed in 1862; but the
utilizations
continue.

These Indians of California have large bodies, writes
an 1870s Angeleno,
but small hands and feet . . . At one time long-lived, they are now becoming strongly addicted to brandy. The women drink as well as the men. This, together with the prevalence of syphilis, which has been brought in by the Europeans, is what has increased their death rate . . . When used—as they are throughout the county—as laborers they are harmless and industrious, although somewhat slow.

He estimates that there were nearly a hundred and one thousand of them in 1823; now there are probably fewer than twenty thousand.

In 1906 we hear of five hundred workers, mostly Indian, gathering brush “mattresses” on which to found the dam of rocks and logs that will close Imperial’s Colorado River break.

By then, Imperial has just begun to plough her gardens of Paradise. More labor, much more, will be needed.

Chapter 29

THE INLAND EMPIRE (1860-1882)

We wish to form a colony of intelligent, industrious and enterprising people, so that each one’s industry will help to promote his neighbor’s interest as well as his own.

—Judge J. W. North, circular advertising the founding of Riverside, 1870

THE THREE STAGES OF DECOMPOSITION

True allegiance to the boundaries of the entity called Imperial would require me to exclude from this book the western marches of what is not yet Riverside County, whose settlements will be founded on vast
rancherías
such as Bernardo Yorba’s. Talk about fairytale principalities! No wonder west Riverside’s so far beyond the pale! The history of Imperial, like that of California and indeed our United States, may be summed up as follows:

(1) Exploration.

(2) Delineation.

(3) Subdivision.