Imperial (72 page)

Now for some Mexicans: The convicted opium smugglers V. Zurbano and T. de la Fuente come briefly to life in the old Customs documents because the Special Deputy Collector took the trouble to describe them for us. Zurbano had blue eyes and black hair. He weighed a hundred and forty-seven pounds and was twenty-seven years old. Since he pled guilty, he received four months in the San Diego County Jail. (What would he get now? Twenty-five years?) Tibicia de la Fuente might have been his sweetheart, since her time and date of arrest were the same as his and her criminal number was 1765 when his was 1766; those two must at least have been travelling together. After pleading guilty to smuggling five cans of opium, she got six months. She was thirty-six years old, five and a half feet, a hundred and fifty pounds, with brown eyes and
Ch. hair.

In the same year, agents of Northside spy on a certain Francisco Gonzales in Calexico, who may be implicated in pearl-smuggling from Lower California.
Gonzales is a small Spanish appearing person, having some resemblance to a Hebrew.

In 1918 we learn that
Miguel Gonzalez is a Mexican and resides at San Diego, Calif. He is well known as one of the leading merchants and importers of Lower California . . . I must say that his business has always been more or less under surveillance by this office on account of his great opportunity to engage in illegal operations, but nothing definite has ever been found against him.

Mexicans may pass for Anglos on occasion. A certain Mark Yeates, sometimes seen
in a mixed gray suit, soft round crown hat,
turns out to be Juan Mata, alias Mark Yeater. His is of
dark complexion, height about 5 feet 5 inches, dresses like a working man.
The eyes of Northside detect him setting out for El Centro and Mexicali in company of someone named J. L. Whitton. That fall they arrest him in San Diego for opium possession.

Sometimes Anglos and Hispanics are in it together: In 1919, Ben Hodges, a bartender for “a Spaniard” named Mr. Barrera, seems to be his partner in the opium smuggling trade. In 1921, A. Leyra and two unknown Americans get arrested by Mexican officials in Southside
for transporting, without a permit, 5 three-gallon copper canteens of whiskey.

Oh, yes, it takes all kinds to smuggle, even Asiatics! The following alert has just come in over the wire from 1922:
N. Sakiyama now in Mexicali, Mexico, believed to be from San Diego, Calif., is in smuggling booze game in large scale.

“EITHER WHISKEY, DOPE, OR CHINESE”

Speaking of Asiatics, it is now time to remind ourselves that Volstead’s ancestor, the Chinese Exclusion Act, remains in force, and with equivalent aims and methods. And so Chinese may be found in the ranks of the smugglers, among the contraband commodities themselves, or both. The following letter from Inspector H. G. Dunlap is typical. This officer has heard on the train to Yuma that a man named Cecil Dennis
was engaged in smuggling, either whiskey, dope, or Chinese, or perhaps all three; that Dennis was good for nothing. . . that Dennis made frequent trips to the Mexican border . . . that Dennis always left the house after dark, and would always get back before daylight . . . that when he returned . . . he was always well supplied with money . . .

Thus Chinese as items. Now for Chinese as agents: Watch out for
Leon Maddox, Los Angeles police number 13762, who it is alleged on or about the 1st instant traded a stolen Ford automobile to a Chinaman in Mexicali named Louie Yee or You, in return for eight cans of prepared smoking opium, and that Maddox smuggled the opium at Calexico and brought same to Los Angeles.

Given their magical fungibility, it is no wonder that Chinese need merely to be on the scene for Northside’s spies to take suspicion. Do you remember the Owl, about which Hermenegildo Pérez Cervantes dreamily assured me that there had been
everything?
Even prior to Volstead, Northside keeps an eye on the Owl. In 1916 the following alert goes out on Dan Hayes of Calexico:
He is 5’ 8”, dark complexion, smooth shaven, wears blue trousers with fine white stripe, black shoes and black hat; and while he is reported to be a Cherokee Indian he would invariable
[
sic
]
be called a Spaniard in this section. . . Hays has lived in Imperial Valley at least two years . . . He was recently employed by Edwards Brothers cotton growers in Mexico who have a house directly on the boundary three miles west of Calexico. The place has long been under suspicion . . . The city marshall
[
sic
]
reports that Hays always seems to have plenty of money without doing much for it, also that he is supposed to have had some sort of criminal record or trouble in the East. He is now stopping in Calexico and spends a great deal of time in Mexicali. Inspector Stott reports that hays
[
sic
]
was seen conversing with several chinese
[
sic
]
in the Owl Saloon in Mexicali yesterday evening.

What were the Chinese up to in Mexicali? I promise that it will take me less than a hundred pages to tell you.

Chapter 73

THE CHINESE TUNNELS (1849-2003)

Stay home and lose opportunities;
A hundred considerations led me to Mexico.
Political parties are like wolves and tigers
exterminating each other;
Hatred and prejudice against foreigners take
our property and many lives.
Unable to stay on,
I creep across the border to the America,
But collide with an immigration officer . . .

—“Gold Mountain Song,” 1911-15

I
’ve already told you that it was on Good Friday night, at the threshold of that church on Avenida Reforma, with the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image invisible overhead and the border wall faintly discernable, like a phosphorescent log in a dark forest, that I first met the sisters Hernández. When the loudspeaker sighed
María, la Madre de Jesús,
I thought that they looked sincerely distressed, Susana in particular: the Crucifixion had just occurred again. When they mentioned Jesús, María and Judas, they were speaking of people they knew. Later our talk turned to Mexicali, and they began to tell me about the time of the great fire when all the Chinese who lived secretly and illegally under the ground came out “like ants,” to escape the burning; and everybody was shocked at how many of them there were. Susana and Rebeca had not yet been born when that happened, but it remained as real to them as the betrayal of Christ. I couldn’t decide whether to believe them. When was this great fire? They weren’t sure. (In fact there were at least three great fires.) But they knew that Chinese,
many, many
Chinese as they kept saying, used to hide in tunnels beneath Mexicali.

Well, why shouldn’t there be tunnels? I’d seen the Valley of the Queens in Egypt (dirt and gravel hills, sharp-edged rockshards, then caves); I’d convinced myself of the existence of Pompeii’s Anfiteatro, which is mainly a collar of grass now, with a few concentric ribs of stone beneath—oh, there are so many parts of the earth comprised of dirt, tunnels and sunlight; sometimes there’s even a Catholic church’s tower among the four cypress trees above it all! Havre, Montana, maintains its underground quarter as a source of tourist revenue: Here’s the bordello; there’s the purple-glassed skylight, originally clear, now stained by the decades of sunlight reacting with magnesium in the glass. Don’t forget to see the old black leather dentist drill—a foot-drill, actually, which was operated by the patient! So why shouldn’t there be more than sand beneath Mexicali?

Jose Lopez, my fine and cheerful co-navigator of the New River, told me that a year or two ago a friend of his (Mexican, not Chinese; Jose didn’t have so many Chinese friends; come to think of it, he didn’t have any) delivered a truckload of fresh fish from San Felipe up to a certain Chinese produce market in Mexicali. What was the address of this market? Jose couldn’t say. It was surely somewhere in the Chinesca, which you or I would call Chinatown. At any rate, the merchant opened a door, and Jose’s friend glimpsed a long dark tunnel walled with earth.—What’s that? he asked.—You don’t need to know, came the answer.—Jose’s understanding was that even now the Chinese didn’t trust banks. They kept their money under the ground.

The owner of the Golden Dragon Restaurant believed that there were four or five thousand Chinese in Mexicali. A certain Mr. Auyón, who will figure significantly in this report and whose statistics always took first prize for magnitude, informed me that there were currently eight thousand Chinese, thirty-two thousand half-Chinese and a hundred Chinese restaurants.

Most were legal now, but in the old days they’d come illegally from San Felipe, and then their relatives or Tong associates had concealed them in those tunnels, which, it was widely believed, still extended under “all downtown”; and there was even supposed to be a passageway to Calexico, as why wouldn’t there be, although none of the storytellers had seen it, and some allowed that it might have been discovered and sealed off decades ago by the Border Patrol. I’ve read that during Prohibition
in the Chinese district of Mexicali, tunnels led to opium dens and brothels, and for the convenience of bootleggers, some of them burrowed under the international line to Calexico,
which might have been that tunnel or a precursor. In the cantina around the corner from the Hotel Malibu, Mexicans bought me drinks and insisted that the tunnel was still there. As Jose Lopez liked to say about every conceivable legend, why not believe it? A tunnel under the Hotel Del Norte got discovered and closed in the 1980s; the Chinese didn’t have anything to do with that one, I’m told. In the autumn of 2003, when I was concluding this investigation, people with guns and uniforms found another tunnel which began in a mechanic’s shop east of the Chinesca and came up in Calexico, someone told me in a fireplace, but it wasn’t a Chinese tunnel so I paid no attention. A whore in the Hotel Altamirano knew for a fact that the Chinese had been behind it because
they always work in secret.
It made her happy to believe that; it made life more mysterious. And who was I to say that she didn’t know what she knew? Frank Waters recalls in his memoir of the days when the Colorado River still flowed to the sea that in 1925, Chinese were smuggled across the border
in crates of melons, disguised as old Mexican señoras, and even carried by plane from Laguna Salada.
Why not suppose they went by tunnel, too? They went from Mexicali’s Chinatown to Los Angeles’s Chintatown, both of which have since burned.
They came out like ants!

My own mental image of the tunnels grew strangely similar to those long aboveground arcades on both sides of the border; on certain very hot summer nights when I have been under a fever’s sway, with sweat bursting out on the back of my neck and running down my sides, the archways have seemed endless; their sidewalks pulse red like some science-fiction nightmare about plunging into the sun, and as I walk home out of Mexico, the drunken woman and the empty throne of the shoeshine man are but artifacts, lonely and sparse, within those immense corridors of night. I wander down below the street and up again for the border formalities, which pass like a dream, and suddenly I find myself in the continuation of those same arcades, which are quieter and cooler than their Mexican equivalents. Bereft of the sulphur-sweet stink of the New River, which loops northwest as soon as it enters the United States, they still go block after block in the same late-night dream.

Why not in Mexicali indeed? It seemed that everybody knew about these tunnels—everybody on Southside, that is; for when I crossed the line to inquire at the Pioneers Museum, two old white men who’d lived in Imperial County all their lives stared at me, not amused at all, and replied they’d never heard anything about any tunnels. Up in Brawley, Stella Mendoza, wife, mother, ex-President and continuing representative of her Imperial Irrigation District, passionate defender and lifelong resident of Mexican America, who spoke Spanish, traced back her ancestry to Sonora, and went to Mexicali “all the time,” said that the tunnels were likewise new to her. Well, but why should
we
know? Mexico lay on the other side of the ditch.

VAMPIRES AND CIGARETTES

The clandestine nature of the tunnels lent itself to supernatural evocations. About thirty years ago a rumor had settled on Mexicali that the Chinese were harboring a vampire down there. Later it came out that the being was human, but a “mutant,” very hairy, two of whose lower teeth had grown like fangs right through the skin above his upper lip. He “escaped,” said the woman who’d seen him, but the Chinese recaptured him and that was the end of the story.—I asked Jose Lopez whether he credited this, and he replied: Look. You have to keep an open mind. In the 1960s the Devil himself came to Mexicali. He actually killed a woman! Everybody knew it was the Devil. If you keep a closed mind, you can’t believe it. But why not believe it?

They live like cigarettes, said a Mexican journalist on a Sunday, cramming all his upright fingers together as if he’d shoved them into a box. He advised me to search for people who looked
like this
(pulling his eye-corners upwards), because only they could tell me everything. Although he’d never seen one, his sources inclined him to believe that there might be a tunnel under Condominios Montealbán, those ill-famed grimy concrete apartments beside the Río Nuevo, where tired women, some Chinese-looking, some not, complained about the illnesses of their children, and teenagers sat day after day in the shade of the old stone lion. It had been at Condominios Montealbán that that Mexican mother had compared her country and my country thus: Here we’re free. Over there they live like robots.—So we lived like robots; Chinese lived like cigarettes. To repeat: They lived like cigarettes, they protected a vampire, they came out like ants; might it be that not all Mexicans invited them into their hearts?