Imperial (99 page)

Fortunately, those Mexicans aren’t relevant to my book; why worry about their demands? They’re way up north in Corcoran. The year is 1933. Edith Karpen had just begun teaching school in Imperial. I asked whether society had been stratified in those days and she replied: It was very stratified, oh, yes. The ranch owners and people like that were one stratum, and then there were the salespeople and that stratum, and then the Mexicans that were not . . . They lived, well, you can’t imagine the squalor that they lived in. They lived on the ditch banks, with just a tarp for . . . Throughout the valley that was how they lived, but I think we were the most primitive. There was a department store in San Diego, Marston’s, that was kind of the top store for that area, and they had a daughter, I’ve forgotten her name, but I think it was Adele, and Adele Marston became incensed with the living conditions down there, and she came down there and held meetings. They had the pea pickers’ strike and the Highway Patrol came in to maintain order. I remember looking out the window of my hotel and seeing the Highway Patrol on either side. The buildup lasted maybe a week, but the worst part was over quickly. They say it was put down with force; I never saw any force. I just stayed away. That was probably in ’34. Of course in the classroom my kids didn’t talk about it.

A tubby, ageing man in a white shirt, dark overalls and a dark hat raises a bugle to his lips and blows! A younger man, clutching his straw hat behind him, leans forward to yell. One of the men in the truck behind him has raised his right arm in what resembles a Fascist salute. In the crowd of men, a man sits on a canted motorcycle. They’re on duty now, and they’re staring across the road, into a place which the photographer has not shown us. The caption reads:
Pickets on the highway calling workers from the fields.
Well, that’s still far away in Corcoran. We’d better hope that our Mexicans don’t hear that bugle.
Of course in the classroom my kids didn’t talk about it.

In 1934, Upton Sinclair runs for Governor of the Golden State on the ticket of EPIC—End Poverty in California. Part of his platform reads:
The people of our State find themselves in a permanent crisis . . . We have too many steel mills, oil wells, coal mines, automobile factories . . . What causes overproduction? The fact that the wealth of our country has become concentrated in a few hands.

EPIC owns the answers. What about the lot of Mexican field workers down in American Imperial? What about the days of Lupe Vásquez?
In a State system conducted by the workers for their own benefit, such work will be in the nature of a holiday excursion . . . There will be comfort and recreation for all . . .

What if that could have been made true?
The farmers of America have not been told about what is going on in Russia,
Sinclair continues,
and few . . . realize that under the new system of collective farming, the Soviet Union produced last year a crop more than ten per cent larger than any in its history.
As a matter of fact, between 1929 and 1933, fifteen or sixteen million people were murdered for the sake of collectivization; moreover, Soviet grain and cattle production figures did not surpass their pre-revolutionary analogues until 1954. But what if idealists had forged a better way?

Down in Southside, Cárdenas, fresh from his labors in Michoacán, runs for President on the platform of hope, comes into power, then does the unthinkable: He begins to carry out his promises!

In Northside, Sinclair loses—of course!—while the Depression worsens, and the unemployed, the newly farmless, the beaten down, listen desperately for the far-off trumpet of any rescuing angel. What do they hear?
Pickets on the highway calling workers from the fields.

A Wobbly organizer announces that in the fight between labor and capital,
there is no compromise or arbitration . . . that can solve or settle it; either labor has to come into its own or go down . . .
In other words, DISARM THE RICH FARMER OR ARM THE WORKER FOR SELF-DEFENSE.

In 1935, Paul S. Taylor’s wife, the great photographer Dorothea Lange, records the faces and backgrounds of migrant laborers in the Imperial Valley. In 1937, now employed by the Resettlement Administration, she returns there in order to produce the ninety-seven images now in Lot 345 of the Administration’s files. She writes her boss:
. . . what goes on in the Imperial is beyond belief. The Imperial Valley has a social structure all its own and partly because of its isolation in the state those in control get away with it. But this year’s freeze practically wiped out the crop . . . The region is swamped with homeless moving families.
I just stayed away. Of course in the classroom my kids didn’t talk about it.

A man in a banded hat, brilliant white cigarette in his mouth, hunches above the wheel of a truck, peering over his shoulder at us through the open door. In the truck bed, which is barred with planks like a cage, no doubt to prevent agricultural wealth from spilling onto the road, ten women and girls stand, leaning against or gripping the planks; they look anxious, distressed. Their sign reads:
THE GOVERNOR
SENDS AID TO PIXLEY: 24 DEPUTY SHERIFFS, 11 HIGHWAY PATROLMEN. WE WANT
FOOD!
Shall I tell you who they are?
A crowd of young Mexican women at the picket lines. They are fighters when they get mad. Some are educated.

And now grinning men in pale hats, white shirts and dark trousers are standing against the wooden wall between truck bed and cab; their sign reads:
JOIN THE PICKET LINES. DON’T SCAB.
Behind them are two more trucks and more men walking; it’s a procession on this still grey road. On the back is written:
Out to picket again . . . The officers, however, kept them on the move. In some fields the farmers stood with guns and held them off, in others they swarmed over the fields and beat the men and women who were working there with clubs until they had all the people who were willing to work scared . . .
Fortunately, this is Pixley, not Imperial, where a brown girl, perhaps ten years old, bends as if to curtsey at the end of that narrow wooden pier, and dips her drinking water out of a cloudy canal near El Centro. Behind her is a field, with distant trees on the horizon.

“SCHOOL CHIEF IN DENIAL OF COMMUNISM HERE”

It would be false to suggest that white Californians emoted toward their brown brothers and sisters with anywhere near the same degree of obsessiveness that white Southerners did to the people then called Negroes. If the newspapers of those decades are any indication, Californians were more frightened of Reds and gypsy burglars than of Mexicans. To be sure, the
Fresno Morning Republican
informs us that three men with Hispanic names have been arrested in the murder of a Japanese peddler in Coalinga; two days later the same publication advises us that the Department of the Interior has sent out
circulars urging measures to prevent the entry of Mexican workers into the United States . . . It is pointed out that many Mexicans are in a miserable plight in southern
[
American
]
states, where they can find no work. It is also said that unrestricted emigration endangers Mexican agriculture and industry.
But in the first place, the three murderers with Hispanic-sounding names are explicitly pointed out as murderers; in the second, as you see, the Interior Department’s circular genteelly pretends to be helping Mexicans, not defending whites from them. This is not at all the case with gypsies, who are eternally sinister in some sordid, unknown way; nor is it so with Reds.

As long as Mexicans refrain from going Red, we can use them. But shall I tell you what we don’t like?
A crowd of young Mexican women at the picket lines. They are fighters when they get mad. Some are educated.

And now these Red Mexicans are beating the good Mexicans who accept
our
wage to harvest our crops in season. (In 1909, we paid a dollar per hundredweight of cotton picked in the Imperial Valley. In 1938 we pay seventy-five cents.) Talk about broad and sinister motives!

Here’s California’s position:
We farmers want to be fair, and we think we are, but we won’t deal with any alien Reds.

These business practices may be informed by memories of lurid headlines about the Mexican Revolution, which once seemed to have subsided but which may be rearing up again, thanks to that dangerous, crazy fellow, Cárdenas. How could at least the cannier growers forget atrocities committed (as a historian of the Zapatistas acutely puts it)
by men who wore white pajamas and sandals to work, carried machetes, and presented swarthy complexions, in this last betraying themselves unmistakably as members of an “inferior race”?
¹⁸¹
For the Revolution was no mere brownskinned irrelevance. The expropriation of the haciendas affected the economy of Northside itself. What if alien Reds tried to repeat the procedure in Imperial? That would be unfair, positively un-American.

Not all employers of farm labor dig in their heels. We are informed, almost unbelievably, that a certain powerful grape grower gets
forced to that belief against my own prejudices . . . As an employer of labor, I would welcome the unionization of the common laborer, if it can be done. I don’t know if it can be done.

It can’t be done, I suppose. Let’s hide our heads in the sand.
Imperial Valley Press,
Tuesday, April 1, 1926, front page:
SCHOOL CHIEF IN DENIAL OF COMMUNISM HERE:
Says There Is No Cancer of Anarchy Among the California Students.

Unfortunately for the school chief, Reds will soon make themselves known right here at the center of the world where the Pacific Land and Cattle Co., Inc., offers
IMPERIAL QUALITY
lard; and in due course, a history of the Great Depression will describe
the huge irrigated farms of California’s Imperial Valley, San Joaquin Valley and Sacramento Valley, the three most important agricultural regions in the second most important agricultural state in the nation,
as
the principal arenas
of class conflict.

“THE WORST PART WAS OVER QUICKLY” (CONTINUED)

As early as 1925, the authorities in the Mexicali Valley began to find it necessary to send home seasonally unemployed campesinos, encouraging them to believe, with or without grounds, that
ejido
grants might await them.—You see, there were months when the Chandler Syndicate’s acres required no tending.—Accordingly, those who could crossed the ditch into Northside, radicalized and desperate.

In 1927 there were already thirty-seven thousand migrant children in California.

In 1928 the Imperial Valley Workers Union, eventually renamed the Asociación Mutual del Valle Imperial (AMVI), commences business in the Benito Juárez Mutual Benefit Society Hall. The Mexican consulate gives cautious advice and direction. I cannot tell you what that kindhearted grape grower says about it all. Meanwhile, cantaloupe pickers demand higher wages, not to mention payment of wages already owed. These insolent attempts at extortion being manfully resisted, the pickers initiate a series of wildcat strikes. Imperial County Sheriff C. L. Gillett musters forty deputies, arrests sixty alien Reds, closes down poolhalls and holds the line.

In January 1930, Imperial County growers, drowning in overproduction, lower vegetable and fruit wages, so new strikes naturally arise, the AMVI receiving assistance from three Communist organizers from Los Angeles. The fellowship between the latter and the former achieves such success that the AMVI actually joins with the Chamber of Commerce to denounce them. Undaunted, the Communists prepare a grand conference, to be held on 14 April in El Centro. The name of their organization, the Agricultural Workers’ Industrial League (AWIL), implies, at least to me, a proto-Maoist attempt to conflate migrant workers with that urban proletariat which by orthodox Marxist theory comprises the truly revolutionary class. It might be their hesitation to be enrolled into this brotherhood which explains the leeriness of the field workers; then again, it might be their menacing situation in American Imperial: expendable, replaceable, deportable, lacking representation and many legal rights, and quite aware that their situation in the Mexican pueblos where they originated might be worse. (Juan Rulfo, 1953:
What land have they given us, Melitón? There isn’t even enough here for the wind to blow up a dust cloud.
) In any event, the AWIL finds itself not exactly alone, but certainly isolated. As for the ruling class of Imperial County, no doubt they still
want to be fair, and we think we are, but we won’t deal with any alien Reds.
Moreover, as a government book will later explain,
the demands . . . came at a time when the farm owners were least able to meet them.
And so the worst is over quickly, the lettuce and cantaloupe strikes both defeated, and more than a hundred workers and organizers arrested. Eight leaders receive long prison sentences, although they will be paroled by 1933.

Early in 1931, strong rains make fields impossible to work in the Mexicali Valley. Three thousand hungry campesinos promise to loot Mexicali unless they get jobs within twenty-four hours. Grocers distribute free food in hopes of saving themselves from complete expropriation. Governor Trejo y Lordo calls out the army and expels
all Americans employed in Mexicali,
particularly—here the reference must be to the Colorado River Land Company—
several veteran American cotton ranch foremen, employed below the line.
The effect of these events on labor relations in American Imperial can be imagined. What next?
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Indeed, a history of California farmworkers has this to say about Imperial County:
Working and living conditions, which had long been recognized as the worst in the state, had become unspeakable by 1933.