Imperial (68 page)

In the southerly reaches of American Imperial,
reliable and efficient men
set one back about forty-five dollars a month plus board; day laborers a dollar seventy-five or more, up to two-fifty, for a nine-hour Imperial Valley stretch.
The majority of the farm labor is American,
thank God for that, boomers and boosters! Now to the exceptions: Negroes for cotton, of course, but not elsewhere to any great degree; Hindus for contract labor such as picking milo,
Mexicans to some extent on the larger ranches and to do contract work, but not by the month on the smaller farms. Japanese are important factors in the production of fruit and garden truck, especially cantaloupes,
and Southern Europeans can be handily employed for dairy and hog.

Migrant workers will certainly prove a great convenience to those who value a speedy picking schedule. One reason is that their employers need not spend too much on them. The State Commission of Immigration and Housing reports:
Camp conditions in 1914 were unspeakably bad throughout the state . . . men sleeping in little filthy hovels, eight or ten in a room designed for two . . . men and women compelled to labor in the field on hot summer days without a drop of water to drink for whole afternoons.
By 2005 conditions have so vastly improved that
the emergency rules will allow farm workers to seek at least five minutes of shade (even if it’s only under an umbrella) if they are experiencing symptoms of heatstroke.
Of course it goes without saying that
farm workers will be reluctant to ask for a water break under the umbrella . . . if they think they might not get hired the next day.
Do you remember what Border Patrolman Dan Murray said?
You should see these guys pickin’ watermelon, bent over all day.

Chapter 68

MEXICANS GETTING UGLY (1911-1926)

Say, old boy, there’s something doing in Mexico . . . Across that line there are crazy revolutionists, ill-paid soldiers, guerrilla leaders, raiders, robbers, outlaws, bandits galore, starving peons by the thousands, girls and women in terror.

—Zane Grey, 1913

I
n 1911, the year that Mrs. M. A. Ritter of El Centro sits down in the far left seat in the back row, blurred, with only a weird hat to identify her sex, to become, so the caption explains, the
first woman JUROR in State of California
; the year also that Harold Bell Wright walks out of his arklike studio and back into his home, which is encircled by young palm trees—he has just completed
The Winning of Barbara Worth
(here he comes now, tall and lean in a suit, inclining his head toward his darkhaired, chubby-faced wife; he has lines in his face and his hair is receding)—Porfirio Díaz abdicates. Bad business for Northside!—Good business, too, because exactly now a certain wealthy rancher from Nuevo León leads his three sons across the line to save them from being conscripted into Pancho Villa’s army of bandits and left-wing altruists; they’ll become migrant workers for life, as will many of the grandchildren. Thousands do the same. Work awaits them, not only because the need for farmhands in the Imperial Valley’s mushrooming acres approaches desperation, but also because the merest year later, Imperial’s Anglo labor force has soured with the socialist virus, and
the Valley was uneasy on account of depredations and fires caused, it was said, by I.W.W. gangsters.
—The Industrial Workers of the World! Although Russia remains half a decade away yet from going Bolshevik, the Wobblies embody radical threat well enough on their own. Here’s one of their songs:

The boss will be leery, the “stiffs” will be cheery
When we hit Farmer John hard,
They’ll all be affrighted, when we stand united
And carry that Red, Red Card.

Who could Farmer John represent? He’s surely not Wilber Clark. Since migrant workers carry the red card, Farmer John must be their employer, which is to say the owner of a grand expanse of irrigated acres. In this era they begin to call him, or the corporation that will supplant him, a
grower.
They’ll put the squeeze on him, and he will do the same to them. Thus class struggle.

In Upton Sinclair’s 1924 play “Singing Jailbirds,” which as late as 1983 the American Civil Liberties Union declines to stage because it remains after all these decades
too angry, too bitter,
the hero, an imprisoned workingman whose name just happens to be Red Adams, warns the District Attorney:
Ever hear of Joe Hill? . . . Out in Utah the master-class stood him up against the wall and shot him with a firing-squad . . . But now Joe Hill’s songs are all over the land.
To the extent that this is actually true, it must be a nightmare for Farmer John, not to mention the District Attorney. The nightmare deepens, for Red continues:
We sing ’em in Dago and Mex, in Hunkie and Wop, we even sing ’em in Jap and Chink!

Just imagine, if Mexican farmworkers started believing in Joe Hill . . . ! And advance detachments of the Mexican Revolution have already infiltrated the Wobblies . . .

“THE MOST PITILESS EGOTISM”

Speaking of Southside, Joe Hill is already there, if only on the horizon.

In 1906, as you may remember, the miners strike at Cananea; in 1907 the Río Blanco textile workers appeal against the miseries of their twelve-hour workdays to President Díaz, who inevitably finds against them; so they strike and they riot; the forces of law and order shoot down a hundred of them. As that taxi driver in Indio remarked:
Because I tell you, Mexico is beautiful but Mexico is tough.

In 1910 the opposition candidate, Madero, gets arrested and jailed for running against the President. Eventually Madero wins; that is when Díaz flees. But Madero will not be Joe Hill.

Article Twenty-seven of the new Constitution (1916) calls for the expropriation of the haciendas and the creation of
ejidos.
These enactions fail to realize themselves just yet, thanks to the cautious nondescriptness of the landowner Madero, who for all his pains gets assassinated and replaced by Huerta, possibly with Northside’s connivance. In comes Carranza, another landowner, who fights over Mexico’s carcass against Zapata and the famous-infamous Pancho Villa. In my time, Zapata is remembered almost as a saint, probably thanks to his own martydom; all the same, his side committed its portion of atrocities.
When the men of Zapata entered the town, they came to kill . . . They also carried off girls. People said that they took them to the woods and raped them there . . . No one knows whether they were devoured by wild animals or whether the Zapatistas murdered and buried them there.
Against Carranza, who again signs a bill to expropriate the haciendas but never meant it, and Villa, who is less ideological than mercurial, must be set their greater crimes. Zapata and Villa do talk a bit like Joe Hill. They share some few of his qualities. Meanwhile, the Revolution leads itself, or, as I should say, gnaws at itself and its original enemies with equal desperation. A Michoacán woman remarks that the violence concludes only when the swine flu epidemic of 1918 paralyzes everyone. By 1919, a million people have become elevated into corpses or refugees. The great muralist and printmaker José Clemente Orozco remembers:
People grew used to killing, to the most pitiless egotism. . . Farce, drama, barbarity. Buffoons and dwarfs trailing after the gentlemen of noose and dagger, in conference with smiling procuresses.
Worst of all, if true, is a certain Northsider historian’s summation:
a triumph for capitalism.

Thus Harry Chandler’s vast homestead in American Imperial continues to flourish. Confluence of interest with successive administrations, and occasional bribery, safeguards the Colorado River Land Company.

But by the mid-1920s, despite incentives to sideline local incarnations of the struggle into issues of religion or water rights, the Revolution’s concatenation of Indians, Catholics, good citizens, small landholders, mestizos, day laborers, sharecroppers, and other partially overlapping subcategories have begun to call themselves campesinos—an angry political term and also a comfortingly inclusive one.

Who are campesinos? What do they look like? Go to the Thirteen Negro in late afternoon, when the foremen have let them off until tomorrow, and you will see them drinking beer in the red-winking darkness, stinking of sweat. Sometimes you will see one who resembles Orozco’s “Head of a Mexican Peasant,” the face wide and blocky, the narrowed eyes resembling double-bladed knives, long moustachios sweeping down like another two crescent knives: He is wary, suspicious, cunning, ferocious. You will certainly find smoothfaced young men who are still strong enough, as Lupe Vásquez used to be, to work all day in the hot sun, then drink and whore all night, returning to the fields before dawn, sleepless, broke and cheerful. You will always see hard old men and sad old men. You might buy them a beer and they might buy you one, but does that mean they trust you?

In 1928, Cárdenas becomes Governor of Michoacán. His manifesto proclaims:
The only way for campesinos to protect their lives and their material interests is if they are given adequate armament.
His Revolutionary Labor Confederation of Michoacán (CRMDT) drowns the province in ominous red and black flags, each bearing the Bolshevik-like emblem of a scythe and sickle upon a book. Sometimes his activists wreck churches. They do expropriate haciendas and create
ejidos,
although most of those actions cannot be ratified until he becomes President of Mexico in 1934. Meanwhile, murders and home-burnings continue on all sides, so that too many campesinos and activists came to feel, as one historian puts it, that
social harmony was a dangerous fantasy.
What if they are correct?

Northside has long since taken notice. Her Southside concessions are endangered or lost. In 1920, a California newspaper explains it all to us in this headline:
MEXICO CENTER FOR BOLSHEVISM
.

“MEXICANS PUZZLED BY U.S. TROOPS”

What should Northside
do
about this Revolution? That we truehearted Americans eschew the cowardliness of lukewarmness is indicated by the following: On 14 February 1914, the Collector of Customs informs the Deputy Collector in Calexico that the President (Wilson) has rescinded the prohibition on exportation to Mexico of weapons of war.
In view of this fact, such articles may now be exported to Mexico without restriction.
I can’t help believing in people.

Wilson, it seems, has determined Huerta to be the wrong leader for Mexico. Well, it’s true that the man murdered his predecessor. What ought Northside to do?—Why, send in the Marines!
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.

And so, in May, the
Imperial Valley Press
regales us with various front-page items:
American Troops Save Life of Dr. Urrutia in Vera Cruz
;
Battle of Saltillo Believed On Today
.
Speaking of unhappy Vera Cruz, which has been overrun by foreigners more than once,
¹¹⁴
the
Press
informs us, in the midst of conveying to us the spectacles of a
Great Battle
there:
MEXICANS PUZZLED BY U.S. TROOPS
, because we’ve made the city of Vera Cruz safer and nicer than ever before, instead of pillaging it. Meanwhile, here’s a Mexican headline: WHILE MEXICANS CUT GRINGO PIGS’ THROATS, IN THE CHURCHES LA GLORIA RINGS OUT
.
—I’m reminded of the nice old lady in El Centro who remarked to me during the second or third year of our occupation of Iraq: We went in there to liberate them. We helped those Iraqis. But they don’t appreciate it. They’re
mean.

“VIRTUALLY LANDLESS”

Fortunately for the inhabitants of Calexico, San Diego and suchlike Northside border towns, the Revolution weighs lightly on Mexican Imperial, although Madero does enter Sonora, to be sure, and Pancho Villa operates on both sides of the international line; his infamous foray into Northside will kill a few of us. But up here in American Imperial, we’re mostly too busy making sure we’ll never get cheated out of a dollar in our lives to worry about foreign events.
¹¹⁵
(I cite again the stern old pioneer from Heber: This is just background information. Don’t quote me on any of this.)

Chandler frets, no doubt. So do his stockholders. But the Colorado River Land Company continues to drive livestock almost unmolested; the first cotton plantings go in, and still the revolutionaries are too busy attacking one another to trouble Baja California.

In 1912, A. F. Andrade, receiver of the Mexican company that controls the canal from the Colorado River into the Imperial Valley, demands
absolute control of all the canals in Mexico.
The American receiver of the now defunct California Development Company, Colonel Holabird, responds that
the Mexican company is simply a creature of the California Development Company erected to comply with the laws of Mexico,
and it may well be that these laws are not held in the strictest regard by Colonel Holabird. Well, why should they be? Who can say that next week they won’t all change?

The Revolution continues; so does Imperial’s canal. Moreover, the following item in the
California Cultivator,
datelined southern California, 1925, gives Northside’s cotton and melon magnates all the more reason to bear with their misguided Mexican brethren, tolerating their errors in pious obedience to the Ministry of Capital: There continues to be
a marked labor shortage in Imperial, Coachella and Palo Verde Valleys.

So thank God for those hungrily industrious young men from Nuevo León and other parts south and east of Mexican Imperial; we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.