Imperial (245 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
Here’s that glorious year, 1944, when Imperial became the state’s number one county in carbon dioxide production! The gas was used to make dry ice.
In 1916 the first plank road, comprised of pine boards, marches across the Imperial Sand Dunes. In 1924 it will need replacement, and the authorities try two thousand feet of redwood boards, but conclude: “No permanent solution of the problem has yet been found.”
By the way, merely subdividing large farms into family-sized units could not achieve Emersonian self-reliance: They’d need to be
diversified
family farms in order to utilize the labor of their inhabitants throughout the entire year. Granted, this requirement becomes less onerous in the almost-perpetual growing season of Imperial.
As usual, Paul S. Taylor tells the story very well: “The farmer buys a tractor. He thinks it will make work easier and hours shorter . . . Also his wife will not have to feed and do the washing for the hired man.” At first he’s happy with the time he’s saved. But “after a while the farmer realizes that after all the tractor in the shed is “eating up” something while it sits . . .—interest and depreciation . . . These hours and days begin to look to him like idle time . . . He sees that he could handle more land than he does . . . If the farmer is slow to realize these possibilities, there are articles in the farm journals to help him. . . . Most of them won’t see—or heed it if they saw it—the little 1936 pamphlet of the Federal Department of Agriculture which asks the farmer in black-faced type, “If you bought machinery to get increased returns, what would happen if your neighbors did likewise?”
At that time the USDA defined a large-scale farm as one whose produce was valued at $30,000 or more.
Here is one of them, admiringly introduced to us by Judge Farr in 1918: Willis F. Beal, who filed on his hundred and sixty acres in Water Company No. 8 (Brawley) in 1903, “still owns the original homestead and has added to his holdings until he now has, all told, one thousand acres in Imperial County.”
She had just been telling me about the pea pickers’ strike, so “those days” would have been the middle 1930s.
For definitions, see above, p. 237.
He actually left the country a year later.
This was of course the term that the Bolsheviks used for their reactionary opponents in the Russian Civil War. Whether the CRLC called its security detachments by this name I cannot say. If not, it would be indicative of Yolanda’s politics that she used it.
Indeed, in Oaxaca, the average parcel size was one to three hectares.
Cárdenas visited Mexicali from 3 to 6 July 1939.
Predictably, this adoration lessened in the urban centers: San Luis, Mexicali, Tecate, Tijuana. The
maquiladora
workers in the dirt hills overlooking Tijuana did not strike me as excessively happy; they never mentioned Cárdenas of their own accord, and many had no idea who he was. Those who remembered him sometimes blamed him (with justice) for closing the border’s gambling dens. Among city dwellers, it was mostly the citizens of Mexicali who paid Cárdenas lip service.
In 2004, the Rural Development Institute favored privatizing the
ejidos
on several grounds, one of which was the fact that most women who live on them are not full
ejidatarios.
That year there were fifteen thousand pickers in the area, three-quarters of them Mexican.
In every respect but the swarthiness, this description anticipates 1960s images of Viet Cong.
One of Steinbeck’s many fans kindly explains the derivation of the term “Okie”: “This word was born in the mind of a novelist whose current book portrayed the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the state of Oklahoma as a slovenly, hopeless, dirty-thinking, vile-talking class of people.”
Some of the forty-two Chinese who set out from San Felipe for Mexicali in 1902 lacked shoes and hats. Thirty-five died.
A photograph from this period shows a floating grandstand with a great clock on it, and a shore lined with people; it’s the Salton Sea Regatta.
About the mountain she wrote that her mother “loved its electric blue in the morning and she couldn’t resist stopping to watch the everchanging mauves and purples at dusk.”
In 1949 flax continued to be Imperial County’s number one crop at 130,779 acres out of more than 600,000. (Flax had also been the largest single crop in 1948.) Alfalfa was second at 127,790 acres.
In a letter written to me after her mother’s death, Alice likewise described her father as “a man of very few words . . . so typically Imperial Valley. He was an old time rancher.”
Her mother mentioned still another distinction: “The Mexican women had their own society, and the Spanish Mexicans had theirs.”
Most of these words are Susana’s, with interjections and corrections from her friend.
In contradistinction to the
Desert Sun,
which informs me that the season in the Coachella Valley runs from late April to early July, Carmen Carillo said: “The grape season starts in March. There’s green ones; there’s purple ones; there’s black ones. They’re all the same.”
A bakery-restaurant.
Drunks.
Couts on “Jumas” west of the Colorado: “They use blood generally for painting and are so filthy that their presence is nauseating. They watch the slaughter ground, and whenever a beef is butchered secure the entrails, the whole of them, and when the blood has cooled and begins thickening, clogging up, they scoop it up with both hands, as we do water in washing, and rub it over their entire face and neck, then with their fingernails make waving lines over their cheeks and forehead. Blood is frequently made to stick until quite an inch thick. The women although they use the same for painting ordinarily do not clot it upon their faces as the men, except during the time of their
courses
when they invariably do it, and it is probably required of them by their men.”
About the Indians of Mexico my 1910
Britannica
informs me: “Neglect of their children, unsanitary habits and surroundings, tribal intermarriage and peonage are the principal causes of the decreasing Indian population . . . The death rate among their children is estimated at an average of not less than 50%, which in families of five and six children, on the average, permits only a very small natural increase.” But we are mainly talking about southern Mexico, it would seem, where “the native population on the plateau of Mexico, mainly Aztecs, may still be seen by the thousands . . . The face is oval, with low forehead, high cheek-bones, long eyes sloping outward toward the temples, fleshy lips, nose wide and in some cases flattish but in others aquiline, coarsely molded features, with a stolid and gloomy expression . . . The complexion varies from yellow-brown to chocolate (about 40 to 43 in the anthropological scale) ... ”
Pronounced
Kwatzan.
A linguist now informs me: “Hokan hypothesis never substantiated, seems very unlikely.”
My copy editor writes, “That’s interesting—it means ‘reason’ in Spanish.”
A different source ascribes to the Kumeyaay, identified as “southern Diegueño,” the land from the San Diego River to beyond Ensenada to the sandhills east of the Imperial Valley. What did that culture come up against? Still another source, a mid-twentieth-century anthropologist who specializes in the Four Cor ners region (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah) refers to “the long arm of the Corn God’s northerly conquests,” which stretched almost to the frost of the Great Lakes. “A shorter arm reached into the arid Colorado River basin to halt finally in the latitude of Great Salt Lake, with the harsh desert zone of the western Colorado River drainage,” namely Imperial, “barring it from the Pacific.”
Spelled by a local informant. “Both words seem unlikely to be spelled correctly,” writes a linguist.
He died on 21 November 1951, almost forgotten; the only notice I could find was a small picture-obituary in the
San Rafael Independent Journal
labeling him “the man most responsible for changing southern California’s Imperial Valley into rich farm land.” Harry Chandler had died in 1944; his obituary said much the same.
About this deed, Zulema later remarked: “We Middle Eastern people, we’re very passionate and very subjective.”
Described on p. 428.
In the middle 1950s, the irrigated areas in Coachella, Borrego, Palo Verde and Bard will add up to 563,000 acres.
I am assured that Coachella is perfect for dates, whereas the Imperial Valley is so only in “some sections” (El Centro and Bard), since its soil contains so much clay.
This book would not be complete without mention of R.M.C. Fullenwider, who became Date Festival Manager in 1943 and “replaced the Western theme with an Arabian theme to coincide with the names of some Coachella communities . . . and streets ...”
Los Angeles is not all bad, either, since he can send his inferior corn to that hive of honest commerce, there being “always someone that wants to—different stores that use a cheaper grade of corn.”
According to the county directory, the city of Riverside was actually fifty-three miles east of Los Angeles.
These are real cases I have read in Agricultural Labor Relations Board restricted files from the seventies; it was surely like this in the forties and fifties.
United States Employment Service.
Braceros are guaranteed a dollar an hour; domestic workers have no contract minimum.
South of Mexicali a woman said to me: “The wheat you plant in December and harvest in August. Your second planting can be cotton. Right here you’re going to see a lot of vegetables planted, and cardamom. But if you go further east,” meaning toward Algodones, “that’s where they plant the cotton. All of this here is wheat ...”
In fact the Chinese population declined throughout Baja, not only thanks to the expulsion of non-Mexican tenants of the Colorado River Land Company, but also thanks to market economics: The Depression lowered cotton prices.
With a whore. But you don’t need to believe him, because a guidebook from this period assures us that “about the only reminder of Mexicali’s unsavory past is the relatively large number of bars and night clubs.”
I asked her whether on the whole the Colorado River Land Company had been good or bad, and she replied: “It was good because it was the first company to arrive here and because the things they did brought people here. But it was bad because they did not have any competition.”
Claude Finnell’s long reign as Imperial County Agriculture Commissioner lasted from 1954 to 1986. Mr. Finnell’s own recollections appear here and there throughout this book, and especially on pp. 983-986.
Mr. Auyón, the renowned painter of horses and nude women, claims that in 1913 there were a thousand Chinese in Mexicali, who grew thirteen and a half thousand hectares of cotton.
In 1920, the California Cultivator profiles
America’s Champion Cotton Grower
, a Mr. John Walthall, who has achieved $365 worth of cotton per acre. Alas, he dwells across the great river, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Riverside grows 20,087 acres; Los Angeles’s acreage is zero.
That year the world yield of cotton was 22.43 million tons, of which 86% was grown by the ten primary cotton producing countries. Of these, China was number one at almost 5.5 million tons, followed by the United States at 4.39 million tons. Mexico did not make the top ten.
In place of Imperial’s old Plank Road, Ocean Park has invented a boardwalk of dark planks, possibly creosoted like train tracks, in the tan sand, its destination not the sea, which lies a few paces farther on, but a beach umbrella striped blue and white in imitation of that ocean.