Imperial (107 page)

We touch down in the city of Imperial, with the dust dulling down the grey-roofed houses and the lawns peeling off the lots like old pool-felt. That is how it was in 2002, and that is more or less how it would have been in 1950. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t as dusty then; for the President of the Imperial Valley Pioneers noted that
Imperial Valley is more than a highly-developed farming area—it is a wonderland of factories running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Its products are moved to every point in the nation and some few of them all over the world.

In
The Largest Irrigated District in the World,
retail sales and income for civilian residents had both more than tripled between 1939 and 1947, and it kept rising. “W. F. Holt Looks into the Future with the Direct Gaze of the Confident Man.” In Brawley, some of them were well-off and leisured enough to hold their 1950 annual picnic in the coolness of Long Beach. I know it; I’ve seen the photo in the Imperial County Historical Society Pioneers Museum.

Agriculture remained the primary source of income, of course: Twenty-nine and a half percent of all the county’s wages and salaries came from fruits, vegetables, fodder and beef. A pound of beef, by the way, needs twenty-five hundred gallons of water to raise the alfalfa, keep the cow from dying of thirst, and hose down the barn. Good thing we’re in
The Largest Irrigated District in the World!

“THEY REALLY HAD THEIR EYE ON THE DOLLAR”

Unfortunately, Imperial County’s percentage of California’s locally assessed tangible property values remained one-third lower than it had been before the Depression. Relative to other California counties, Imperial had by some measures fallen into near insignificance. In 1950, California collected more than twenty million dollars in county inheritance taxes. Nearly half of this derived from Los Angeles, which overshadowed San Diego by a factor of almost ten. San Diego in turn approached being six times richer than Riverside, which came close to a sevenfold victory over poor Imperial. In short, if Los Angeles counted for half, Imperial counted for less than an eight-hundredth. Well, after all, we’re only talking dollars and cents, not more meaningful things—but wasn’t it dollars and cents that Imperial (American Imperial at least) was built on?

A man who’d worked for the Bureau of Reclamation from 1948 to 1950, surveying the Colorado and taking samples of the bottom
to see what was shifting,
told me the following about this
wonderland of factories:
The fields were working, sure, but all you ever had were little shabby motels and cabins to stay in! The pickers were white and Filipino in those days. Not as many Mexicans as now. The whites were hardworking and aggressive. The whole families would work; they really had their eye on the dollar. They looked like they were from Oklahoma. One group of Filipinos, pickers, they had one Cadillac convertible and they had one blonde livin’ with ’em. They probably had only one suit between ’em!

Well, so what? The cash value of Imperial County farm products had risen even faster than income! In 1940, that all-important number was a bit under fourteen million dollars. In 1953 it would be more than a hundred and thirty million. (Simone de Beauvoir, 1948:
It is because of the abstract climate in which they live that the importance of money is so disproportionate.
Please don’t take it personally, dear Imperial; her observations were formulated in Chicago.
It is because they cannot frame or declare real values that Americans are satisfied with this symbol.
)

“AN IMMENSE GREEN-GOLD GARDEN”

Lettuce was the most lucrative crop at twenty-five million dollars. Herbert Marcuse, 1955:
The sacrifice of libido for culture has paid off well: in the technically advanced areas of civilization, the conquest of nature is practically complete, and more needs of a greater number of people are fulfilled than ever before.
In other words, we’re a wonderland of factories running twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year!

And what makes a wonderland even more wonderful is that improvements can always be made. For instance, the Imperial Valley’s production norm of six-tie carrots under the travel-packs system (you know what I mean) has been raised from thirty crates per packer per hour to forty-five crates per hour. Don’t worry; this is no recapitulation of the Soviet Gulag; it’s a celebration of our helpful machines! I’m sure the Mexicans won’t complain. Another revolutionary scientific advance: If we use pallets, lift trucks and low-bed trailers in our orchards, we can
cut this phase of the labor by a third.
Hopefully that can translate into fewer laborers (the excess can just go back to Southside); in any case it will mean higher profits. You see, I’ve never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.

But what if Progress cheated me?

One might imagine from the foregoing that the agribusiness magnates of Imperial were selfish, callous individuals who sought to squeeze more out of their laborers simply in order to raise their own profits. In fact, they, too, were getting squeezed. In his Agricultural Crop Report of 1950, B. A. Harrigan writes:
I wish to emphasize that these values are Gross Values, F. O. B. Shipping Point . . . The net income to farmers was not increased in proportion to the gross sales due to lower farm prices and increased costs of labor and all materials used in harvesting and handling the crops.
What then can the farmers do?

All the same, they and their laborers are unlikely to become better friends as a result.

In a distinctly half-hearted vein of reassurance, Marcuse continues:
Neither the mechanization and standardization of life, nor the mental impoverishment, nor the growing destructiveness of present-day progress provides sufficient grounds for questioning the “principle” which has governed the progress of Western civilization.
Should we question it now?

The 1950 high school commencement program at Wilson School in El Centro consists of a processional, an invocation by the perfectly named Reverend Hypes, the Pledge of Allegiance, of course, and no less naturally “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played by the Wilson School Band, and so forth and so on, up to the presentation of the American Legion Award to not the most outstanding but the
Most Representative Girl,
Prudy Lydecker, and the
Most Representative Boy,
Russell Kirk. American Imperial is America indeed, which deifies the average. What was average in 1950 is no longer so in my era; I sometimes worry that that is the main reason I love American Imperial.

But even then, Imperial was never average!

At first I thought we’d come to the end of the world, said Mrs. Claude Finnell, the retired Agriculture Commissioner’s wife. See, we lived in Bakersfield first, so I was used to the heat. But the streets were just covered with these crickets and the cockroaches. And we just had one air conditioner in the bedroom, so we just lived in that bedroom.

Her husband showed me a photograph of their house on Barbara Worth Road,
a three or four room house with three or four kids,
he called it.

I asked her whether the towns and cities of Imperial had shown much growth during the fifties, and she said: The biggest problem was the heat, of course, so as we got more air-conditioning, the farmers began to move to town, and the mothers and the wives got next to the other wives. It’s interesting to be in the country and see one of those old farmhouses. You wonder why they wanted to be there at all!

From that answer, it sounds as if Imperial had become a trifle less isolated, but when I asked Alice Woodside to tell me what her future husband had made of the place when he first visited, in around 1962, she replied: He had
no idea
! At that time Calexico was maybe ten thousand. And there had not been a whole lot of development. The old part of Calexico was about all there was. He was out there looking around and it was about a hundred and eighty outside! He was just wondering what on earth he had gotten into. We took him to Comacho’s. And he had never had one scintilla of Mexican food in his mouth. Mexicali, now, I don’t think he had ever in his life been exposed to so much poverty, so much filth . . .

Her family had moved into town in about 1956, when she was fourteen.

And how was your life then? I asked her.

Let’s just say that I hated it here in Sacramento at first. I was used to Calexico where everybody knew me. The brewmaster of the Mexicali Brewery lived right down the street from us in Calexico. He was German. Mexicali beer, now, that beer, my parents used to have it on hot afternoons, and they poured it into pitchers and it would get that big head on it! Just wonderful! They had a pretty bottle. I think there was a sun on it and a lot of gold printing. The beer had a very golden color . . .

Back to business: After lettuce came in descending order carrots (whose high commodity status was a postwar phenomenon), sugar beets, melons, tomatoes and of course alfalfa, at over a million dollars apiece!—Next year, alfalfa would be the premier crop, occupying a hundred and seventy thousand acres. (It comes and goes, said Kate Brockman Bishop in 2006. It sort of depends on the number of cows in L.A.)—I’m sorry to say that by midcentury, grapefruit profits were down to under half a million a year, but these moon-jewels still shone most lucratively of any in the Imperial Valley’s citrus treasury. (Try not to worry about Coachella, Yuma, Borrego, Florida.)—We had citrus here, an oldtimer would tell me in 2004. It was proven to be a difficult crop and probably not a dollarwise crop.—Meanwhile, cotton was coming back: forty thousand acres in 1951 (that’s the year that Barbara Worth’s “Empire Builder,” W. F. Holt, passed on in Los Angeles),
²⁰⁰
eighty-five thousand in 1952 (in which connection please allow me to introduce you to the smiling, sturdy blonde in what must be a two-piece bathing suit—it resembles a pale bra with mid-grey shorts—who curves her hips, swings her right knee, and flaps her polka-dotted cape beside the
FIRST BALE 1952 PLANTED I.V. COTTON
), nearly a hundred thirteen thousand in 1953. At midcentury, Jack Kerouac, en route from Yuma to San Diego, looked out his bus window and in his journal noted only the following three specific commodities:
Orange groves, cotton—new houses . . .

As for farm pests, Mr. Finnell, the former County Agriculture Commissioner, assured me: We worked together in those days with the Mexicans on the capra beetles. We’ve always worked very good with them. Never had any trouble.—
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Oh, yes; oh, yes! Even the Imperial County Assessor’s office couldn’t help pausing in the midst of cash tallies to rhapsodize about
the flourishing fields and the mile-long trains that carry Imperial County products to the market places of the Nation.
In other words,
his farm has been highly improved. He made a success through his own efforts. He sold out at a fancy price.
As for that commercial Bible, the
California Blue Book
(Harold Bell Wright’s heroes might as well have consulted it), it doesn’t in the least mind interrupting its tabulations to opine that
Imperial’s warm, sunny winters and many strange desert attractions make it a pleasant playland.
In fact, it’s
an immense green-gold garden.

“EVERYTHING WAS OPEN”

Zulema Rashid, who grew up in that garden, was born in Calexico in 1945. About her native city she said to me: I think it is so beautiful, the skies, the houses. It seems like James Dean will appear, in a movie from the fifties. Those tall palm streets. I think it’s just great! But I didn’t see that then. All I saw was Mexicali.

She was an elegant redhaired woman, divorced not terribly long since, who’d come back home
for the summer,
which proves her to be a real Imperialite. And in her origins, in the success story of her family, she was utterly Imperial, too.

My mother is Mexican, from Sonora, she said. Most of the people in Mexicali are from the states of Sinaloa or Sonora. My Dad came from Lebanon. He established himself here in Calexico and brought himself over. My mother is extremely Mexican, and she brought us up and said: You are Mexicans, and I don’t want you to be confused with ugly Mexicans, and you speak Spanish at home and you speak English outside the home.

Now I feel American in mind in many ways and I feel Mexican at heart. I feel very proud and very grateful for an education in the United States, and I am very grateful to be brought up in the different culture, a culture which is more sensitive and has more family values and is more open to other values.

My grandfather went to Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century for land and then he sent for his wife, who was only a fourteen-year-old girl, and my father was born in Argentina. But my grandfather had a quarrel with one of his brothers and shot him and thought he had killed him,
²⁰¹
so he ran away to San Francisco and he stayed there for I don’t know how many years, and he came here to the valley as a merchant in about 1910. Once he had enough money, he sent for his family. My grandmother had had to wait for eighteen years. So my father came here at the age of twenty-five. He was an illiterate; he only spoke Arabic.

This must have been in 1925 or ’26. He helped out in the store and then he inherited it, he and his brother. My father and my uncle, they both became landowners, merchants. They had their stores right here in the center of town. They became landowners, for commercial use, right here between First and Second streets.

I retired two years ago. I just live off the rents off what our father made, coming in here. A total illiterate! It took him time to become a resident, a citizen. But he did it.

My grandfather must have passed away in about 1935. My Dad, he missed of course his tradition, and what was more similar than the American culture was the Mexican culture, so he would cross the culture and come to Mexicali, just for those social events, and that was how he met my Mom. He was going to marry his first cousin, but instead his brother fell into the trap!