Imperial (11 page)

To my mind, the place extends westward along the border all the way to the Pacific Ocean,
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on the shore of which a certain Officer Gloria I. Chavez of the Border Patrol gazed over the fence at Mexico and answered my question as follows: I think we all feel sorry for ’em.—More than just a line, but fluidly, variably so, this left arm of Imperial, thanks in part to Gloria, cannot ball up its muscle to any extent sufficient to breach San Diego, except maybe late at night, in evanescent, perishable globules of reconnaissance, immigration and trafficking; but it surges less deterred than redirected through all breaks in the ever failing border, its illegal hydra-heads popping over the wall south of Chula Vista where Officer Brian Willett remembers the murder he saw in No Man’s Land; and it makes forays into the green grass and the red dirt, takes hold of the harsh eroded hills and the high mountains between San Diego and Calexico. Imperial rules all this. How then could we draw any borderline as sharp as a palm-crown against the desert sky? (I keep marveling at the way I can walk across the line with legal ease when so many Mexicans can’t. It may or may not be “necessary”; meanwhile, it makes me so sad.)

To the north, as I implied, Imperial certainly includes the topmost quarter of the Salton Sea, which where Highways 86 and 111 curve away from its stench becomes a narrowing stripe of multiply differentiated blueness riddled by a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern feeling. No matter that Riverside County has begun: in addition to four thousand one hundred and seventy-five square miles of an eponymous county, Imperial certainly contains within itself the ghost beach-towns of North Shore and Oasis Palms RV Park; past the Salton Sea where the date plantations rise and the perfect round yellow lemons and grapefuits are crowded like many breasts on the bushes of the Coachella Valley, it comprises Mecca, Thermal, Coachella and probably Indio, although the new city of La Quinta just west of Coachella must be excluded, for its clean wide streets and gated communities require us to lump it in with Palm Desert, Palm Springs and other stigmata of Los Angeles. Indio deserves at least qualified inclusion not only for the names of its streets (Sungold, Biskra, Arabia, Deglet Noor, Oasis and Grape), not only because long trains sigh across its eastward edge, with work-thirsty
pollos
jumping off and Border Patrol vehicles hunting them, but also because many of its hot wide streets are almost as lifeless as those of Brawley or Calexico. Within the next five or ten years, however, Indio will have seceded from Imperial. The second of its two casinos is slated for enlargement next spring. Angelenos drive the two or three hours from their behemoth to play in Indio, or, more telling still, to do business there. That business will enlarge Indio. As it speeds eastward, Highway 10 grazes the city, making it the last “important” watering hole on that road before Arizona. The other stops have become as alien to Imperial as is San Diego—no matter that some of them remain administration and transshipment points for Imperial produce which was nurtured by such instruments as, say, the bent backs of workers in a legume field, the big boss observing all as he squats beside his car, patient, distant and less than friendly. Yes, I’d have to say that Indio is Imperial’s northwestern terminus.
¹⁴

East of Mecca, the Orocopia Mountains and the Chocolate Range certainly deserve to be counted as Imperial territory, no matter which county they’re in. After Brawley, you can ride east on Highway 178 past the East Highline Canal into the dune country around Glamis; and beyond the dune buggies, beyond the bearded hunters in camouflage shirts with guns and binoculars, beyond the stereotypical California blondes in tank tops who squealingly buggy-swerve between ocotillos, you’ll find flat reddish-beige sand all the way southeast to the Cargo Muchacho Mountains. Here the twilight moon cannot ride over any sky of palm silhouettes. This is the place of beleaguered trading posts, of mine tailings and of ghost towns from whose marker-robbed graveyards fangs of bone peep out from the cracked earth. South of the dunes, along Highway 8, our zone declares itself in a pale green tendril-carpet of an asparagus field in the sand. No doubt it holds its own some distance east beyond the Arizona line, but I can’t tell you how far, for I’ve never gone that way. Anyhow, the Colorado River would be as plausible a border as any. Imperial’s towns owe their water to it, as we know; it’s what the Book of Revelation calls
the river of the water of life, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb.
(By the way, it’s dammed for the furtherance of expropriation and control. Nobody wants to waste stray droplets on any additional Salton Sea—Los Angeles and San Diego are too thirsty!) Even this far from its source, that parasitized watercourse, unlike Imperial’s Salton Sea towns, remains rich in almost untainted water—never mind the taste of salt. Let’s say, then, that the Colorado River’s the eastern bound.

To the south, matters of definition become most problematic, since this region has been saddled with more administrative subdivisions than the others. Resurrect the confusing matter of names: North of the Riverside County line, the Imperial Valley gets called (doubtless as a concession to civic boosters) the Coachella Valley, while below the international border it’s the Mexicali Valley, or formerly and binationally (in Spanish, of course) the Valley of Death.
Our Dutchman insisted that the plain over which we passed, should be named the devil’s plain, for he insisted, that it was more hotter as hell, and that none but teyvils could live upon it.
Old newspapers call it “a section of Arid America.” Certain memoirists and novelists know it as the Palm of the Hand of God. Geologists call it the Salton Trough, which is to say
a northwestern extension of the basin in which the Gulf of California lies.
To one-armed Major Powell, the Grand Canyon’s most famous explorer, it was
Coahuila Valley, the most desolate region on the continent.
The technical label for the whole basin is the Colorado Valley, but since we’ve strongarmed so much of the Colorado from Mexico,
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such an appellation seems as dryly, cruelly useless as the salt-infested lands for which our neighbors can thank the Americans. No, not for Mexicans the Imperial Valley’s hypnotic sweeps of green, with water darkly sparkling in between them! If you travel the Mexican side from Algodones to Mexicali, the tawny dunes looming beyond the border, you’ll find the cotton fields to be full of bald spots, and while it’s always possible that the cause is bad farming, people will complain bitterly about salt from the United States. My floral guide to Baja California remarks in carefully neutral tones:
Vast agricultural areas of the Mexicali Valley that were formerly farmed now have been taken over by tamarisk. This is a result of agricultral salinization of the Colorado as it runs through Arizona.
And yet the border sometimes seems lusher on the American side, sometimes on the Mexican. Let’s agree, therefore, that it’s all one valley. Certainly Mexicali and Calexico are the same city, merely bifurcated, and distorted by that bifurcation as East and West Berlin used to be. How could Calexico be understood or even described without reference to Mexicali, which can be seen, heard and smelled between the steel pickets of border fence? I remember standing beside a certain Border Patrolman five feet north of the wall as he trained his binoculars curiously and almost wistfully upon a Mexican wedding, the veiled bride, her groom and her acolytes descending the church steps into the sunset-stained street. One member of the party intercepted his gaze and angrily lobbed it back into the United States of America as if it were an enemy grenade caught just in time; the others, reluctant I suppose to waste time on gringos on this day, refused to look. The Border Patrolman lowered his binoculars. He told me that he’d gone to Mexicali once on a day off, but only once. First of all, he’d been shocked at how little was in the stores. Secondly, it really wasn’t healthy for him to go alone, even in civilian clothes. He knew that; he’d spent his professional nights staring southward, and yet the fascination of the line would not let him go. In that moment he seemed as lonely as the wan night-suns of hotel office lights. Embarrassed, he allowed that it looked to be kind of a nice wedding and that he “just liked to know what those folks in Southside are doing.” So do I. And if Mexicali deserves to be included in this partly amorphous region which for want of an even less down to earth name I’m calling Imperial (no matter that a city of that title lies on Highway 86, between El Centro and Brawley), then perhaps some of the towns in the blinding white desert to the west and south of Mexicali on Highway 2 between Mexicali and Tijuana also deserve to be Imperialized.
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—Not Tijuana, to be sure; Tijuana’s not sleepy enough!—For Imperial is wide and slow and sunny like the streets of Mexicali with their long straight shadow-lines.

DEFINITIONS OF IMPERIAL

Imperial is green, green fields, haystacks, and wide mountains. Imperial widens itself almost into boundlessness, like the Salton Sea as you go south. Imperial is bright fields, then desert wastes, stacks of hay bales almost Indian yellow. Imperial is a dark field glimmering white with irrigation sprays.
(There appears to be a widespread impression,
runs the 1909 Department of Agriculture Yearbook,
that the fertility of irrigated lands is inexhaustible . . . the experience of generations of farmers in humid regions is disregarded.)
Imperial is a loud lonely train whistling like darkness. Imperial dreams fragrant vegetable dreams. Imperial dreams resentfully of the wealth that it could have if the stink of death would only depart from the broken-windowed resorts on the Salton Sea. (
THIS VALUABLE COMMERCIAL PROPERTY FOR SALE
, says a hand-lettered sign in Bombay Beach. In Brawley, somebody who prefers to have it both ways has posted the following announcement on a ruined garage: KEEP OUT! INQUIRE AT OFFICE
.
) Imperial is the smell of a feedlot on a hot summer night. Imperial is the beautiful, smooth-skinned, reddish-brown fat girl with monumental breasts who replenishes the bowls of salsa and relish in a taco stand in Mexicali. Meat grease glistens upon her gigantic cleavage. Imperial is that nameless bygone California beauty queen in the uncaptioned photograph, and the nameless grave-inmates at Tumco. (Their names exist forever, like the Imperial County line, and if I hunted with sufficient exactitude I could discover them.) Imperial is Barbara Worth, the sentimental heroine of (and here I quote the commemorative edition’s dust jacket)
A Saga of Love and Rivalries Set in the Pioneer Days of Imperial County.
Around the egg-shaped illustration, breathtakingly garish, of dark-haired, cherry-lipped Barbara Worth in her wide sombrero, staring dreamily past a cactus
(Often as Barbara sat looking over that great basin her heart cried out to know the secret it held),
we’re informed:
Movie Was Gary Cooper’s Screen Debut
and (thank God for the quotation marks)
“A Clean and Wholesome Book”
and
“Strong People” • “High Ideals”
and finally:
Three Years on U.S. Top Ten Best Seller Lists
, those years being 1911, 1912 and 1922.
The pioneers in Barbara’s Desert were, in fact, leaders in a far greater work that would add immeasurably to the nation’s life.
In other words, KEEP OUT! INQUIRE AT OFFICE. Imperial is the slender, wrinkled inhabitants of Slab City, together with their trailers, weeds, and heaps of scrapwood. Imperial is the brownskinned man who somehow missed every immigration amnesty and who now laments for the good old days of the 1950s when
all we needed back then was just a rancher to give a signature to back us up.
Imperial is solid white farmer-citizens, and the conglomerates who now own so many of them. Imperial is the grocery store clerk who begs every stranger to buy a plot of dust while he can, because the Salton Sea’s going to get entirely cleaned up within five years and then values will go through the roof! (You can hardly get away from the Salton Sea in Imperial.) Imperial is the grower who
changed our direction from dates to flowers, especially annual color for country clubs and hotels. They’re quite lucrative.
(Annual color in this case meant poppies and petunias. Her corporation raised eighty thousand of each.) Imperial is Cahuilla Indians and East Indian liquor store clerks. But most of all, Imperial is “Mexicans” legal and illegal, and Imperial is also “Mexican-Americans.”—They just dig in, a Border Patrolman once told me, as if he were speaking of a strange species of insect. They hide in the weirdest places.—Yes, they dig in, like us. Legally and illegally they establish themselves upon the land, and they try to stay; they want to live. (I can tell you that most of the people who come to the U.S.A. don’t go back, said a taxi driver in Indio. Because I tell you, Mexico is beautiful but Mexico is tough.—He’d majored in electrical engineering, but then he fell in love and, as he put it, “went out of college.” Now he was divorced, with alimony and child support to pay.)
Imperial is the continuum between Mexico and America.

A CLARIFICATION ABOUT WHITENESS

The continuum between Mexico and America is, some people opine, the continuum between brown and white skin. Did you know that the California of the 1910 census, the very first in which Imperial County appears because before that it remained undissected from the flesh of San Diego County, was
ninety-five percent white?
—Well, in those days the census-takers seem to have called Hispanics white. Imperial County had a population density of between two and six persons per square mile then, and that population had increased by a hundred fourteen and a half percent in the previous decade, the decade when Imperial City and Holtville got incorporated and the Salton Sea flooded itself into being. (For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, so of course the population of the Yuma Indian reservation had decreased in the same period, from eight hundred and seventeen to six hundred and sixty-nine souls.) What is whiteness? In 1824 a boy from Kentucky crosses the line into Mexican America and finds
much to my surprize and disappointment, not one white person among them.
A Latina in El Centro whose skin was lighter than mine said to me: A white boy gave me this tattoo.
Prominent among the wide-awake and progressive businessmen of Brawley is Walter P. Casey . . . He was married April 29, 1913 to Miss Irene La Fetra, native daughter and the first white girl born in Long Beach, California.
—Barbara Worth herself, who was white enough to be adopted by a banker and who possessed “the wholesome, challenging lure of an unmarred womanhood” (
THIS VALUABLE COMMERCIAL PROPERTY FOR SALE
), cantered out under the desert sun often enough to be “warmly browned.” Where on our continuum did she ride? The submissively adoring Mexicans whom she saved called her
La Señorita.
Anyhow, if Hispanics are white then I imagine that Imperial is still ninety-five percent white at the very least . . .