Imperial (71 page)

Imperial is the only wet city in Imperial; and soon the white-ribboners claim victory there, too.
¹¹⁸
And why shouldn’t they? They’ve long since succeeded in shutting down all saloons in the city of Riverside. Meanwhile,
Calexico W.C.T.U. is located on the Mexican border, and has strong, staunch workers who are doing a grand work
on the near side of the ditch
. This local . . . has flourished and won every battle toward keeping Calexico dry.

Setting aside Victorian prudery (or attempting to contextualize it), why had the city fathers of the majority of American Imperial been so quick to enact vice away? Perhaps they feared all the murders and such which other people resign themselves to as “usual to all new countries.” To them, the violence of Los Angeles must have offered a terrible example. As soon as California fell under American control, if not before, Los Angeles had its “lewd women.” The following statistic comes from 1854:
Average number of violent deaths in the city not less than one a day!—mostly of Mexicans and Indians—but not unfrequently persons in the higher walks of life.
Two years later a vigilance committee was formed; lynchings were already commonplace. The first legal hanging in Los Angeles was considered worthy of remark. Arguably, given the comparative ineffectiveness of statutory authority in that epoch, drinking, whoring and other acts which many of us consider “victimless crimes” were not at all victimless then. Men went armed in the streets as a matter of course; if lust inflamed them, or alcohol weakened their judgment, who would cool them down? The Chinese Massacre of 1871 was said to have started when rivals for a woman’s favors exchanged gunfire in Nigger Alley.

Another way of putting this is that from the perspective of the micromonitored California in which I find myself in this year 2003, a place where I can be fined for riding my bicycle without a helmet or holding an unauthorized barbeque, the rapes and woman-nappings of the Moreno Gang were the result of inadequate police control. From the point of view of an American Imperial pioneer, they would have been the result of bad character, or of susceptibility to evil influences and poisons. Logic calls upon the true believer to ban those influences and poisons. Hence Prohibition and the so-called “war on drugs.”

A TOAST TO MY HERO

In 1916 Imperial County votes in favor of Prohibition by the widest margin in California. Hurrah for the Volstead Act! Ten years later, the county will be against Prohibition by the same wide margin. We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by. Meanwhile, in Mexican Imperial, Ensenada runs out of gold, and so Colonel Esteban Cantú determines that the capital of the Northern District of Lower California shall be Mexicali. Before we know it, there’s a cavalry barracks, an infantry barracks, that famous bridge over the Río Nuevo! (I find on a page of another album in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali a photograph of a water tower surrounded by squares of trees, white field-squares, a grid of empty white streets, here and there an inconspicuous house.) Best of all, bars and whorehouses bloom. In a certain Professor Ruiz’s account, this military governor is one of those who
sold their souls to the devil . . . Having no other source of revenue, he opened his door to vice
—namely, American vice, created by Prohibition in 1919. In 1922, Cantú gets succeeded by General Abelardo Rodríguez, who enriches himself by exactly the same means.

Accordingly, the Tia Juana Warm Springs, known for their iodine, lime and magnesia, adorned by cottonwood trees, start getting known for other things, too. Call it a trend. Back in 1915, even as that wholesome exemplar of the Ministry of Capital W. F. Holt made the newspapers by
coming by special motor car
to meet the actors of the new play “The Winning of Barbara Worth”
(Mr. Holt, who figures in the book and play as Jefferson Worth, is having the actors here to look at the exact
spot where Barbara was found
so that they may be able to feel as nearly as possible the real thrill of the
imaginary
incident),
a Customs Collector in Andrade had warned us all of our decidedly unwholesome future:
It is very well known that the town of Algodones will be based on drink and gambling. Also, I am well satisfied that prostitution will soon run them hard as one of the basic money-makers, and with such a combination smuggling is

a natural consequence.
Should we blame the Mexicans as usual? Our good officer continues:
. . . I understand a Mr. Ingraham of Yuma will start to build a saloon during next week.

(Where might Southside’s developers have picked up their ideas? I seem to see Aleck Gibson’s gambling house, where the bar clamored and roared while a half-dozen monte banks operated in honest accordance with the laws of suckerdom, each green-baized table heaped with fifty-dollar gold ingots. That could have been Mexicali in 1930. It was really Los Angeles in 1852.—And in June of 1904, Imperial County’s
“red light” district was raided by Constable Taggart. Five women and three men were fined.
In 1920, a Volstead year, the District Attorney, Sheriff and thirty deputies
raided thirty gambling joints and houses of ill fame in Calexico, Imperial and El Centro, arresting 150.
Perhaps some of the arrestees went to work for Mr. Ingraham of Yuma.)

The
Imperial Valley Press
runs a recipe for “Russian punch,” whose strongest ingredient is carbonated water. On the other side of the ditch, the
Press
’s readers can drink themselves into the ditch.

From what I remember, said Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes, there were a lot of North Americans who came here to drink in a big cantina called the Owl. But it wasn’t just a cantina; it was a cabaret. They had an orchestra and a dance floor, and a big bar. Every kind of drink! There were dancers; there was poker, baccarat, roulette, all kind of games! There was
everything.
—And here the old man smiled so tenderly that for a moment I would have exchanged my middle age for his decrepitude just to have seen
everything
at the Owl.

It would be full of North Americans, he said. The dancers wore these dresses; I can’t really describe them, and here again he smiled very gently, lovingly and sadly. They wore those little short,
short
shorts and these shirts; I don’t remember whether they were long-sleeved or short, and they danced together, seven or eight of them. You could not dance with them. You would be sitting at a table, and if you wanted to dance, you would dance with people in your family. Usually people came in couples. I was seven years old the first time I saw this. I just looked. I was like a vagabond as a child; I went in wherever I wanted and looked around; I was a shoeshine boy. I just took a look because the door was open, and then I left. I took stock of what was there.

An informant,
whose identity the Agent in Charge declines to reveal, reports that
Charles Hoy and James Coffroth, the latter being connected with the Tiajuana race track, were smuggling opium into the United States from Tiajuana, in automobile tanks.
“Sunny Jim” Coffroth gets mentioned in connection with Mexicali, too; but Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes could not place him.—The name I remember was Jimmy Álvarez, he said. He was the owner of a very, very good bar where the dishes were served on fine china. It was named the Golden Lion. The lion is still there.

Meanwhile,
petitions, resolutions, articles for the papers and other modes of protest swept the Valley against the evils of gambling, drinking and debauchery in Mexicali.
Thus reports Otis P. Tout in 1923. Señor Pérez informs us of the outcome of those protests: Mostly through the late twenties I remember Mexicali getting bigger. The thing that made Mexicali grow was Prohibition. The North Americans came and spent all their money here and the money circulated throughout Mexicali.

To be sure, the money that Americans actually invest in Mexicali’s casinos, race-tracks and saloons is only about a thirteenth of what the Colorado River Land Company’s owners have sent south; but every little bit helps the locals, especially the local talent. And the local talent is industrious and has been ever since a ditch separated Northside from Southside! As early as 1909, the
jefe político
of Mexicali had allegedly received a take of thirty-four saloons, each with its attached whorehouse or gambling hell.

And so Volstead stimulates Imperial’s entire international line. In 1925, the Deputy Collector in Charge at Tecate urgently advises Los Angeles that a beer garden will soon be opening at Jacumba Hot Springs, Mexico. The proprietor
intends running a stage to and from the Gate at the International Line. With the limited number of Inspectors at this Fort I will be unable to properly manage the situation at Jacumba.
We may confidently congratulate that beer garden on its success, for by 1926 Navy men in uniform are driving illegally to Tecate to get drunk! Moreover,
at the present time no immigration officer is stationed at the border at the Tecate gate . . .

In 1924, Dashiell Hammett interrupts the action of one of his crime stories to sum it all up:
This Tijuana happened to be in Mexico—by about a mile—but it’s an American town, run by Americans, who sell American artificial booze at American prices.
Meanwhile, in a Hetzel photograph from 1927, we spy on a WCTU luncheon in El Centro: they are mostly elderly or middle-aged ladies in shapeless dresses and tragic hats, and above them spiral the pillars of the Hotel Barbara Worth. They deserve the gratitude of every one of us for keeping American Imperial clean.

But how terribly the Devil’s minions fight back! A woman gets caught in Boston with a gallon jug of brandy beneath the dress of the doll she was cradling. The
Imperial Valley Press
reports from Fresno:
Beautiful Girl Pays Big Fine for Bootlegging.
And now a huge whiskey still, doubtlesss built by Satan himself, has just been discovered in Madera!

I suppose that our heroines of temperance are able to soldier on in good heart just the same, until that ghastly year 1926, when even Volstead gets quoted as saying that three point seven five percent beer is
innocuous.
Lift up mine eyes, O Lord! And in 1933, Prohibition is undone. Poor ladies!
¹¹⁹

What remains? Why, Mexicali, of course, not to mention San Luis Río Colorado, Tecate, Tijuana.

From my time and place, Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes’s description of the Owl sounds positively innocent, compared with, for instance, the Miau-Miau in 2003, where long, long legs in shining fish-scales, high heels and sinuous leanness enchant my vicious eyes; and behind the triple nickel catty-poles, the waiter in the blue-glowing white shirt leads another stripper by the hand, while on the table a girl in panties permits one man to sniff her ass just as another man slides the panties off her ankle, and the girl of the long, long fish-scale suit has let that suit slip down to her waist; it’s down to her ankles now, so that she can all the more freely chase the happiness of the disco ball’s spots; the girl on the table is naked and laughing along with everyone. When the dazzlingly naked girl who was formerly in the long fish-scale suit comes offstage, the man in the blue-white shirt leads her by the hand into the flowery light of the dressing room. I sit with Lupe Vásquez, and we both clink our tequila-glasses in memory of the great Volstead.

BATTERIES AND CORN PRICES

In Volstead’s spirit, Northside’s enforcement agents seek through sternness to transform enacted hypocrisy into literal truth. In my era, the Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration will throw their police powers into equally impossible tasks.

At first opium is Enemy Number One. They catch
a negro, by name Casino S. Glenn,
in Los Angeles, when he attempts to smuggle opium and morphine from Tia Juana to San Diego by foot. And they achieve many more such successes. Dutifully reporting rumors
that opium in large quantities is being transported from Ensenada to San Diego in lard cans,
they open lard cans, I suppose. But just when they’ve told one another what to watch for, the forces of evil invent an opium container disguised as a flashlight battery! And then, quite suddenly (surely it must be a coincidence that this occurs the year after Volstead goes into effect), much of the opium mutates into whiskey, concealed in false-bottomed cars or whatever, as attested in letters signed by Federal Prohibition Agents. Our harried guardians of Northside must now keep their eyes peeled not only for suspicious batteries but also for the odd quart of sherry wine concealed in a compartment of a Cadillac roadster.

In keeping with their sometimes discreetly packaged products, the smugglers can show a prudent guardedness in their writings. Witness the following intercepted letter from Jesús Guaderama of San Diego, to David Ochoa of Jerome, Arizona. The writer pretends to be discussing the price of corn:
Well in Mexicali three or four months ago it went as high as $150.00 each load but when I came here in May it went down to $120.00 . . . I will tell you to be very careful when you buy it because there is so much fake.
Señor Guaderama has some possessions in pawn, and accordingly needs to borrow money.
I will pay you back as soon as I can go to Mexicali because I can make money over there.

Like the product, the smugglers themselves alter characteristics. They become more likely to be Mexican.

In 1916 a druggist and a veterinarian, both of Holtville, are anonymously accused of smuggling opium and egret feathers from Southside; the veterinarian is
in conjunction with an unknown woman.
In that same year, the Special Agent in Charge at Los Angeles advises us that two musicians in Hoy’s dance hall in Mexicali, one named Emil Block and the other simply called Wolf, are in the opium business. Meanwhile, Los Angeles warns Calexico that Max Singer, Oscar Kirshon and Jack Norton, alias Big Jack, probable members of the Alexander Gladstone opium smuggling gang,
may be operating in this district.