Imperial (70 page)

At the beginning of this century only four out of every ten Americans live in cities. By 1925, more than half of them may be found there. Roth and Marshall’s Feed Store isn’t yet an anachronism, but new sorts of businesses are definitely in evidence: Peering down Main Street in 1918, I find automobile supplies in the Davis Building; then comes the opera house (on the other side of the empty dirt street, the Hotel El Centro bestrides the archway’d establishment of John E. Davis, druggist; and other arches beyond counting recede on both sides of the street). In 1926 we find the Imperial Valley Motor Agency selling Studebakers in El Centro. I can almost see Babbitt smoking an exultant cigarette behind the wheel of one of those ultra-modern machines. By 1930 El Centro will possess two of the county’s four
automobile laundries
and eight of its twenty-four automobile dealerships.

El Centro has not acquired a large Japanese population, many more East Indians, Mohammedans and Hindus being seen on the streets. These people are not residents of the town, however, being wholly rural in their habits.

The Hotel Barbara Worth remains bright and white in 1928, with its American flag and its white, white pavement; and Miss El Centro 1928, Wanda Johnson (Garret Johnson’s sister), poses with a chipmunk smile beside a Dodge whose headlights resemble breasts; my grandfather, who was born not long after Imperial County broke away from San Diego, always called women’s breasts headlights, and now I know why. Wanda wears a fringy shawl of a thing wrapped around her shoulders and tickling her white shoes; her stretchy one-piece garment is like a swim-suit, her legs shockingly naked from the lower hips down.

Chapter 71

MEXICALI (1925)

Impressed with the success of numerous small commercial farmers in the
Imperial Valley, they recommended following a similar development pattern
on the Mexican side.

—Dorothy Pierson Kerig, 1988

“PUBLIC OPINION WOULD NOT SUPPORT IT”

Puente Blanco, also known as the Colorado Bridge and the New Town Bridge, now ran fresh and quadruple-railed across the Río Nuevo gorge so that the city of Mexicali could be joined to her first
colonia,
Pueblo Nuevo, which the photograph shows to have still been surprisingly tree-lined in that year 1925, the year that the Teatro Municipal (which resembles a Hopi pueblo) and the Biblioteca Municipal were constructed, the year that Don Federico Palacios was Presidente del Concejo Municipal. Next year the Masonic Temple would go up. The Southern Pacific Railroad had promised to lay track all the way to the Río Hardy and maybe even to San Felipe, so that the cotton crop could ship straight to Europe or Japan! And so Mexicali possessed due justification for sporting boomers and boosters. As a certain Hector González explained,
due perhaps to the rosy prospects which the cultivation of cotton offers capital, enterprise and enthusiasm have gathered with more vigor around Mexicali than around any other place.
No doubt that’s it. We’ll leave out the other vigorous enterprises made possible by Northside’s Prohibition-disease.

Mexicali was still a long flat swath of dirt, textured with ruts, furrows and the odd house. Avenida Reforma was dirt and houses—not to mention (as Mexican boosters often didn’t) the Chinesca’s two Chinese theaters, three teahouses and twenty-eight associations, not all of which survived the fire of 1923. An album in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali shows us blurred flat fields of silver-grained dirt, corduroy’d plough-stripes, low houses far away. The date is 1920. We see a picket-fenced house at the intersection of Avenida Madero and Calle Oriente, and in the photograph the unpaved street resembles white beach sand, everything emptily immaculate. Shacks display their laundry above the dirt. In March 1924 they are laying drinking-water pipes on Avenida Lerdo de Tejado. Why not? Mexicali’s cotton fields are already drinking deep.

When I imagine those days I smell again the dust and manure from the feedlot, the smell that enters my nose as I come northwards toward Mexicali in the golden sunlight; and of course the feedlot would not have existed had there not been cattle and dust; and then as now there would certainly have been white birds, fluttering in the brown grass. Going west alongside the border toward the mountains, there would have been the same beautiful palm trees and many more rabbits. And I am quite sure that then as now, somewhere on one of Mexicali’s wide dirt
avenidas
a little girl with an immense spade-shaped stick of roasted corn clutched her father’s hand.

I’ve read a book which assures me that starting in 1907, once the Salton Sea had been stabilized, Mexicali began to boom, especially since
the concession policies of the Porfirio Díaz Administration . . . promoted U.S. investment in the Mexicali Valley, which led to the establishment of the Colorado River Land Company.
And that company needed workers. Workers came, many of them, then as now, from the interior. Indeed, by 1910 Mexicali’s population was more than half of Tijuana’s; in 1930, close to
fifteen thousand
residents were counted in Mexicali, fewer than eighty-four hundred in Tijuana. Be that as it may, here are the memories of one who was born into the serene stasis of those days:

In all of my childhood, insisted an old man named Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes, Mexicali did not grow. I was living in Calle B. From the edge of Mexicali, the northern edge, to where the social security office is now, on F Street, there was a drain, a
canalito,
and that was the southern border of Mexicali. It ran right alongside Avenida de Larroque. The canal is covered up but the street is still there. But the western edge was Calle Eleven. The
colonia
was called Pueblo Nuevo. There was a wooden bridge at the end of Reforma that was called the White Bridge. The bridge took you right to the corner of Avenida Baja California and Fourth Street. That was in Pueblo Nuevo. Before the flood, there was nothing there, but when the flood came it made a big wide canal. So the houses that were on that side disappeared; in 1906 there were houses. In my childhood it was a canal about as wide as this room. But I remember that the water, it wasn’t dirty. It was slightly muddy. There were no fish; that’s true. Just in front of F Street, which would take you down to that canal called Drain One Hundred Thirty-four, that was the southern edge. The Río Nuevo divided Mexicali into two parts, Old Mexicali and Pueblo Nuevo. Between F and G Street would have been your eastern border.

(One reason why Mexicali had not grown might have been that the Colorado River Land Company’s holdings enclosed it. In 1920-21, the municipality was allowed two hundred and forty acres from Chandler’s syndicate
to enlarge its urban area.
Kindly Chandler threw in a free thirty-one acres for a park.)

The first thing I remember, continued Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes, is the musical group formed by the owner of the Industrial Soap Company of the Pacific. It was a military marching band. But they also played old Mexican music, like
corridos.
That would have been in 1929. I was born in 1924.

Now, the Industrial Soap Company of the Pacific was owned by—and he jerked his hand at the border fence, which was just outside the window; and his meaning passed so magically and freely right through it into Northside. (
The entire plant is of steel and concrete,
enthused the
Los Angeles Times, and the machinery bears the labels of manufacturing firms at Chicago, Pittsburgh, East Bridgewater and Piqua. It all came from the United States.
So did the investors. The Industrial Soap Company was of course a partner of the Colorado River Land Company.)
—
They wore sailor uniforms, Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes said, very handsome. Black shoes, white pants, a sea-blue stripe all the way down,
muy bonito!
A closed vest with golden buttons. And they had epaulettes. The vest was navy blue, a cropped jacket with long sleeves, with a golden ball and stripes. And a white cap with a black brim.

Do you remember some of the songs they played?

He smiled.—The “Zacateca March”! Some North American marches, but I don’t remember. They played a lot in the parades. There were about eighteen of them. They were there for three years: 1929, 1930 and 1931 . . .

He did not know how old the Thirteen Negro was. He had never been there. Well, after all the Thirteen Negro had a bad reputation . . .

What did people say about Chandler and the Colorado River Land Company? I asked that ancient man, who responded: They were from San Francisco, right? Everybody talked about the fact that these North Americans were basically the owners of the whole valley. The Colorado River Land Company bought the land from Señor Guillermo Andrade. He was the first owner. I think the Mexican government sold Andrade the land for ten cents per hectare. But it was all desert. And anyway, that was before they closed the canal.
¹¹⁷
I never saw them. They must have come, but not very often.

In the flatness outside Mexicali’s flatness lay the first few rural schools (established in 1915); beyond them, bales of cotton, squared up on flatbed wagons, awaited their turn between the sheds, towers and railroad tracks of the Colorado River Ginning Company. Through this fertile blankness, the Colorado River Land Company had begun to build the Mexicali and Gulf Railroad, so that cotton bales could be shipped to San Felipe without the
complications
of crossing the border. The company had already cleared many of the mesquites and willows in the Colorado Delta, and carted them to Los Angeles for firewood. Then it had raised livestock. Next, bit by bit, as it could borrow more capital, it sought to irrigate and therefore to expand its cultivated holdings. It wanted to turn Mexican Imperial into a perfect mirror of the American side. No Southsider could stop it.

In 1923, it undid Marcelino Magaña’s expropriation of thirteen thousand eight hundred acres. By 1927, it had sold off three large parcels, totalling thirty-two thousand acres; it still had about eight hundred thousand acres left. As a rule, it preferred not to sell, but to lease.

Speaking of leasing, the company has always been accused of putting Mexicans last among its parcelees.

Since 1916, Chinese had been subletting parcels from the Colorado River Land Company. Indeed, there were now fifty Chinese ranches in the Mexicali Valley, the largest being the Kam Lin Yuen, whose wages fed and sheltered four hundred souls. In 1926 the Colorado River Company rented out forty acres to the China Leasing Company to grow
potatoes on a large scale for local and Southern California markets.—
There have always been Chinese people since 1903! laughed Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes, wagging a finger. As for the Chinese tunnels, I never knew about them exactly, but all the people
knew
there were tunnels. The first thing I really heard about it was the fire in 1924. All the people who heard about it said the people just came up out of the ground! The ones who came up still had the long queue, all men! They all slept there. But they worked in the grocery stores,
lavanderías,
restaurants.

Did Mexicali hold eleven thousand Chinese and fifteen hundred Mexicans or fifteen hundred Mexicans and a hundred and fifty Chinese? It depends on which book you read. From the standpoint of a certain Phil Swing, whom I have already introduced to you as one of American Imperial’s most ambitious lawyer-orators, the trend was ominous no matter what. He cautioned the United States Senate:
There have been 8,000 Chinese imported into Mexico, and while no more Chinese can be imported because of the exclusion act, there is no exclusion act against Japanese, and Japanese have been looking for years toward Lower California as a possible colony.

So what? Why would Mr. Swing care about Southside?

Well, by 1920 fifty thousand hectares had already submitted to the plough in the Mexicali Valley. (That’s a hundred and twenty-three thousand, five hundred acres to you, my fellow Americans.) Eighty percent of that was cotton, grown for the greater good of the Colorado River Land Company. In 1925, one of the Imperial Irrigation District’s five directors insisted that Southside now contained over two hundred and nineteen thousand moist acres! Perhaps not all these figures were precise; who am I to say? Anyhow, prescient Mr. Swing spelled out the potential consequences to the American Imperial:
If Mexico should succeed in putting 600,000 or 800,000 or 1,000,000 acres under cultivation, I challenge any one of us here to make the assertion . . . that we could . . . subsequently withdraw that water from that land. Public opinion of the world would not support it.

ENSLAVED BY MANUELITA PERALTA

No matter. We Northsiders
love
Mexicali.

In 1930 the Climax, “Mexicali’s Fashionable and Leading Cafe” (Jimmy Alvarez, proprietor) was still advertising its American and Chinese dishes, its
private booths for families,
in the Imperial Valley directory. I would have enjoyed a meal at the Climax. Still more I would have liked to attend the Carnival of 1929, when Manuelita Peralta was Queen . . .

Chapter 72

VOLSTEAD (1919-1933)

The Mexican side of the border is a place where free-spending Americans go to do things they’re not allowed to do at home. Loose money always attracts persons of questionable character, and the border cities have plenty of those.

—Mexican teacher, 1962

W
hy did the Climax advertise in Northside? What made Mexicali grow? Both questions can be answered with a name: Volstead.

ENCOMIUMS TO A WHITE REPUBLIC

In 1903, as soon as Imperial County is born, the Valley Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
took on the dignified name of Imperial County W.C.T.U. Through continued effort the county was born white,
meaning dry,
and the first legal act of the first supervisors was a strong prohibition ordinance . . .
Next, our good ladies establish
a detective fund
and prepare
an apparatus for ascertaining the per cent of alcohol in liquids.
In 1914 they hold a barbeque in Calipatria and perform the cantata “The White Republic.”