Imperial (240 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
(The San Diego County Water Authority was rudely unhelpful. I would particularly like to single out the following two unpleasant individuals: John Liarakos, the so-called public affairs officer, who never returned a single phone call, and Dana Friehauf or Fridhof—she never verified the spelling of her name—who required that I put questions to her in writing, then never answered a single one in spite of many requests. In Pasadena, Romaine at the Huntington Library refused to give me a research card, so I was unable to see several photo collections whose images might have benefited my book. The California Department of Motor Vehicles proved indifferent, incompetent and useless regarding research on Wilber Clark.)
Alejandra Lopez at the San Diego County Recorder’s office helped me discover that the child who was born Imperial Hazel Deed did not die with the same name.
I would like to thank Señor A., Mr. D., Mr. W., Chuck, Adam Raskin, Liz Cruz Kaegi, and other half-named or unnamed private investigators; Mandy Aftel, whose eleventh edition of the
Britannica
has been a window into another world and whose sympathy and kindness made several of my trips to the Imperial Valley much better; the very patient Jose Angel, Branch Chief of the Regional Water Control Board in Palm Desert; Meagan Atiyeh, for much help and companionship in the Imperial Valley; my designer, Carla Bolte, who as usual took many extra pains on layout, typography, etc., and who remains the
corazon
of my
corazon;
my Viking editor, Paul Slovak, whom I made very tired and who I am sure believes my promise that this will be my last long book (Paul, I’m sorry); his assistant, Dave Martin, who got stuck dealing with permissions because he is a nice man and because by then I was also very tired; my copy editor, Maureen Sugden, whose painstaking work extended to such lengths as verifying the names of streets in Mexicali (not to mention Spanish words I never learned to spell), and who cleaned away a truly shocking number of errors in my manuscript; my production editor, Bruce Giffords, who let me do ever so many things my way; my agent, Susan Golomb, and her assistant, Casey Panell—both of them my friends now; the U.S. Border Patrol, especially Officers Gloria Chavez, Dan Murray, Michael Singh and Brian Willett; Ben Brock of Brock Farms in Holtville; my paid informant, Mr. Richard Brogan, whom I like and respect; Fred Cagle of the Audubon Society for answering many questions about the ecology of the New River and the Salton Sea; Carlos, who I hope has made it over the fence by now; Christofer, to whom I extend the same wish; Mr. Herb Cilch of San Diego; various residents of Condominios Montealbán in Mexicali; Carolyn Cooke, the Director of the Coachella Valley Historical Society, who shared her recollections with me and facilitated other interviews; José Rigoberto Cruz Córdoba; Elvira from Mexicali; Mr. and Mrs. Claude Finnell in El Centro; Ramón Flores, who was used to the Río Nuevo; Ray Garnett, who risked his boat in the New River; Tirso Geraldo of San Luis Río Colorado, who shared his life with me; Lizzy Kate Gray, who helped inspire me to take up this project; the Guanajuato couple in Mecca; Bob Guccione, Jr., for underwriting the Border Patrol chapter; Susana and Rebeca Hernández; Elizabeth Hightower for getting
Outside
magazine to publish and pay for some of my excursions on the Salton Sea and the New River, not to mention the chemical tests; Roger Hodge from
Harper’s;
Sabine Huynen of the University of Redlands Salton Sea Database Project; Karla from Mexicali; the late Edith Karpen, who very kindly told me about her life in Calipatria, El Centro and Calexcio; Alex Kasavin, who gave me Charles Elmer Fox’s
Tales of an American Hobo;
Tom Kirk of the Salton Sea Authority; Leonard Knight of Salvation Mountain for being so nice year after year; William Linne, whose friendship and photographic capabilities have benefited me; Jose Lopez for being such a fine companion on my first New River excursion; another José López, this one from Jalisco, who was an excellent interpreter and storyteller; Louise and Floyd of Slab City; Bob Love from
Playboy;
Javier Lupercio, whose paid interview made the past a little bit clearer here and there; Juan the cokehead, who might have robbed me but didn’t; Micheline Aharonian Marcom, who journeyed with me through Imperial and with whom I experienced much happiness; Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory for introducing me to the region and showing me quite a bit of it year after year; Eugenia McNaughton of the Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco; Shannon Mullen, who presided over my first button camera experiments, kissed me soundly and remained cool when our rental car was crushed to a pancake; Ben Pax, who drove around Imperial with me for a couple of hot days even though he wasn’t impressed; Pedro; Ross Peterson, for sharing his recollections of day farming with me; Sydney Peterson, who did genealogical research; my friend Chuck Pfister, for reasons he knows; Mike Pulley, occasional Imperial Valley companion; José Quintero, temporarily of Mexicali; the private detective Adam Raskin, whose work helped me to stand behind my
maquiladoras
chapter with confidence; Natalio Morales Rebolorio of Rancho Roa in the Mexicali Valley; Stephanie Reynolds, without whom I never would have seen the Mixtec shantytown in Tijuana; my good friend Jordan Rothacker at the University of Georgia in Athens, who shared with me some of his insights about the Virgin of Guadalupe; Daniel T. Ryu, who furnished various maps and documents on the Inland Empire; Alice Solario from Mecca; Oscar Sánchez of the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali; Amelia Simpson of the Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego; Alejandro José Tamayo of the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali (he made perfect copies of maps for free); Maria Thomas, the only nice person I met at the San Diego County Water Authority; Deborah Treisman, whose quiet voice expresses not only mind but heart; Dr. John Tyler and his wife Margaret, who gave a fine interview about the old days in Coachella as we sat in their cool house in Palm Desert; David Urbanoski of Desert Shores; Andrew Wilson at Dawson Books in Los Angeles; Alice Woodside, who was kind enough to share some of her childhood experiences in Calexico; Daina Zollinger, for genealogical research; and I’d better not forget cherry-lipped Barbara Worth. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to all the unnamed illegal aliens who told me their stories.
This estimate was from 2005.
As a media spokeswoman at the Mexican consulate tactfully expressed it, “I assume there are some agents that are not very good, just like in a family, like if your brother is maybe not so good, but your father and your mother and your brothers make no problem. And some agents make some mistakes very bad, but it’s not the whole Border Patrol. For instance, if they find a body now, they will phone us right away . . .”
In 1982, according to a Mexican-American cab driver in Indio, a certain coyote had charged $1,500 to bring his chickens all the way from El Salvador through Mexico to Imperial County. By 2001 it cost $1,500 just to get across the border from Mexicali.
Officer Gloria Chavez told of similar conditions in her sector: “They take advantage of darkness for sure and we know that. But they have three to four days’ walking to the first freeway in the county.”
Or
las guías,
the guides.
The woman, so Murray’s story continued, was well endowed. She pretended that she could not speak a word of English. Many of the agents peering into her holding cell made apppreciative remarks. When Murray learned that she could speak English quite well, she asked him not to tell anybody else, because she enjoyed listening to those men’s compliments.
“They don’t like to be called coyote,” Juan the cokehead reminded me. “Because the police are gonna take the coyote if they know who he is.”
Homeless shelter run by a religious charity.
“When you find the dead body of a
pollo,
how often can it be identified?” I asked.—“Most of the time, after some work. But not all the time. There’s a guy and he had an accident here. He’s in a coma. He’s been in a coma since he was detained. He fell in detention. It’s very sad because the TV stations in Tijuana and everywhere have helped us show his photo, but nobody can identify him.”
“So, Gloria, what happens to an alien whom you keep catching over and over?”—“Well, the third time we arrest them, they get a notice to appear for formal deportation. The fourth time, it’s up to the court system. They might be detained one day, then three days, then a week, and then . . .”—In these days of the Patriot Act, her answer now seems as quaint as the Geneva Conventions.
“The presence of a boundary or measure necessarily implies the possibility of exceeding it . . . The consideration of this leads to a dialectical conception of the finite, according to which it may be understood only as the unity of its own being and its own nonbeing, as the mutual transition of one into the other.”—
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
(entry on the finite).
Practically every town in Imperial County seems to have its Imperial Avenue. Meanwhile, south of the line, Mexicali boasts Imperial Milk and the Imperial Hotel; on the edge of the Pacific stands Imperial Beach. Hence in the photograph now before me, whose caption reads, “Third Largest Department Store in San Diego County, Corner Imperial Avenue and Eighth Street,” I can’t even be sure which town I’m seeing—El Centro, probably. I see a parasol’d buggy reigning over much pale, crisscrossed dirt; I glimpse white-shirted humans in the awning’s shade; I read two signs: BILLIARD HALL on the left; and on the right,
HICKORY WOOD
.
Extract from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Article V:
The Boundary line between the two Republics shall commence in the Gulf of Mexico
and continue all the way
across the Rio Colorado, following the division line between Upper and Lower California . . . And in order to preclude all difficulty in tracing upon the ground the limit separating Upper from Lower California, it is agreed that the said limit shall consist of a straight line, drawn from the middle of the Rio Gila, where it unites with the Colorado, to a point on the Coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the Port of San Diego . . .
If, however, we have it in ourselves to set aside the un-Imperial character of so much of Indio, we can follow Highway 10 westward to Banning, which is where the Colorado Desert visibly comes to an end, sand being succeeded by grass and smog beneath the gaze of Mount San Gorgonio. This is an equally plausible and less subjective frontier for Imperial.
According to the 1976
Britannica
(article on the Colorado River), the Colorado River Compact of 1922 between the seven concerned American states proceeded thus: “The total flow of the Colorado River was established at 17,000,000 acre-feet . . . of which 15,000,000 acre-feet were equally divided between the lower and the upper compact states. A water reserve was maintained for Mexico, which was agreed upon by treaty in 1944 . . . controversy continued between the United States and Mexico over the high salt content of the Colorado’s water by the time it reaches Mexico.” For bleak understatement this vies with Tacitus.
For years I’ve made a hobby of asking people in Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali and San Luis how far south they still “feel the border feeling”; the usual answer is: about a hundred and fifty kilometers. To the south of Mexicali, the town which best fits this bill is San Felipe; I accordingly decree that Imperial ends there.
An orchard keeper in Thermal told me that Mecca had the highest per capita violent crime in the U.S., the place being both somewhat violent and extremely unpopulated. Such numbers games amuse only in a shallow way. After Cain slew Abel, 33% of all humanity became murderers. At any rate, the couple whom I interviewed in Saint Anthony Trailer Park said that “everybody is friendly and peaceful; you can leave the garage door open,” and Alice Solario, introduced below, likewise did not consider Mecca to be dangerous at all.
First-generation immigrants rarely lost consciousness of their connections, which nourished and obligated them. This cab driver’s brother schematized the matter thus: “Recently arrived immigrants that do not have relatives in the area or friends, these are the ones who work on the farm. The others, they are more likely to get a job in hotel, restaurant, construction, or as a gardener.”
According to Tom Kirk of the Salton Sea Authority, the birds were dying mostly from avian cholera, botulism and Newcastle’s disease.—“We seem to have far too many of these,” he said to me in 2001. “But keep this in mind. Twenty thousand birds died at the Salton Sea last year. That’s less than one percent of the bird population.”
After writing this chapter, I had a chance to visit Yemen, and discovered that the Gulf of Aden, with its unfinished concrete structures, its garbage and its greasy gas stations was a near-perfect duplicate of the Salton Sea.
The Audubon Society’s spokesman Fred Cagle characterized the Alamo’s fifty-two miles of water to me as “all irrigation runoff” and the Whitewater as “like the Alamo but less of it.”