Imperial (246 page)
Authors: William T. Vollmann
In downtown Los Angeles, early sunlight often warms the west side of the tall white canyon called Flower Street. Beneath a lush awning of tree-leaves against the scaffolded coast of the University Club, a bus blinks its red lights. The shadow of one skyscraper upon another seems as ancient as any survivor of geologic or even celestial time. But bit by bit, the shadow shrinks and thins; the yellow-tan glow takes over, brightening all the while; and Flower Street becomes busy with people and cars. This is Diebenkorn light.
See comparative population table, p. 1222.
For other answers of a more quantitative sort, see the source notes to this chapter (excerpt from Paul Foster’s Imperial color commentary).
Depicted in my 8 x 10” negative IV-CS-ELC-01-02. This is El Centro’s second courthouse. The first, now not very far from SEXY LINGERIE—WE HAVE TOYS AND THING’S
FOR WOMEN!,
has since become an Elks Lodge. From across the street the courthouse appears almost inexpressibly inviting. That cool white portico, the copper doors, the thirteen white steps are perfect embellishments to that old Imperial adage “He sold out at a fancy price.”
Since he was born in 1945, this would have been
circa
1952. Perhaps this was the first time he stayed in Northside for a significant period, since he later dated his “first time across” as 1949 or 1950.
More data may be found in the citation to this information.
At this time most of the rural
colonias
sport only a handful of landholders, some of whom rent and some of whom own outright: Colonia Astorago has five families, Colonia Bravo ten; among the most populous of these islets are Colonia Chapultepeo at fifty-nine households, Colonia Silva at seventy-eight (on the average, they work around fifty hectares each) and, grandest of all, the below-mentioned Colonia Zacatecas at three hundred and fifty-two. Colonia Moctezuma is already substantial at forty-nine lots.
Above, “Farm Size (1910-1944),” p. 568.
In 1969, 22½% of Imperial County was farmland; by 1974, it was 18.9%.
On 24 February 1933, Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur had informed the Imperial Irrigation District that the limitation would not apply to Imperial and Coachella. In 1945, Interior Solicitor Fowler Harper repudiated that good news, at least for Coachella. A subsequent Interior Secretary, J. A. Krug, in Taylor’s description “left the situation as he found it. He stood by the Ickes decision to apply the law to Coachella Valley” but not Imperial although the latter “action might now be subject to valid question.” In 1957, Solicitor General J. Lee Rankin arrived at Harper’s opinion and said: “The limitations of the reclamation law upon the quantity of privately owned lands which might receive irrigation water under the All-American Canal are applicable in the Imperial Valley . . .” In 1964, Solicitor Frank J. Barry invalidated the old Wilbur ruling, noting that “long practice, especially long practice of neglect, cannot make legal that which was initially illegal.”
Kay Brockman Bishop explained: “Sudan, we grow a lot of it, because the Orient needs a backhaul for all their computers that come this way. And Texas is becoming a great big market for our Bermuda grass because they just can’t grow it down there. Horses like it and it’s good for them. The truck driver says: I can’t get enough of it to haul.”
We met him briefly in “The Braceros,” p. 664.
This may be considered proof of their proletarian internationalism. But the Wobblies had another song: “And Scissor Bill, he says, ‘This country must be freed / From Niggers, Japs and Dutchmen and the gol durn Swede.’ ”
A similar case involves “Robert Powers,” who hires two hundred and fifty harvesters for a similar period, and owns one labor camp.
I have not vetted this information, and removed the name out of libel concerns.
The authorities gave evidence that they, too, were of a higher caliber. The
California Farmer,
proud of its bias, gleefully informs us that in April 1975 United Farm Workers “wanted to hold a major ‘rock concert’ in the Coachella Valley to feed funds into its ailing coffers,” but got refused by the county supervisors, five to zero.
A foreman’s lot is not always enviable. “Most of the time I’m a worker,” said an old man named Celestino Rivas. “I don’t like to be a foreman. I have everything; I have the license to be a foreman, but it’s very hard, because they want you to push the workers so much, to hurry up, hurry up. And then, they’re always stealing time from the workers. They take fifteen minutes, like they’ll say you’re starting at six-fifteen when it’s actually six. It’s only fifteen minutes, but with fifty people, that’s a lot of time. They don’t pay overtime. This area is not like other areas. You have to be here at two or three in the morning even if you start work at eight or nine; they don’t give a shit. Right now a lot of people come early, because of the terrorism. I got here at one-o’-clock this morning. There were about ten people. Then some foremen started arriving. Another problem is that I have to carry all the equipment in my car, and the people have to pay to go to Blythe eight to ten dollars a ride for only five hours of work in watermelon, cantaloupe, broccoli. So a lot of people don’t want to go, and then that’s my problem.”
Needless to say, this point of view was rejected by its intended forum, the Sacramento Bee, because “it is my impression . . ,” explained the editor, “that your articles have an emphasis more on criticisms, old and new, of the present system. Goodness knows we have published a great deal of the criticism in recent months.”
Lamentably, in 1963 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Arizona.
Tijuana built the Rosarito Desalination Plant sometime during the 1960s, but decommissioned it in 1983 on account of its expense.
Specifically, 88% of Baja California’s water lies in or under the Mexicali Valley. Why wouldn’t Tijuana want to drink that up? Fortunately for us all, in 1977, the end of thirty-one drought years, Baja can expect her 2,634,779 acre-feet to be augmented by rain; for didn’t she get a forty-seven-year wet season before the dry time? This reminds me of the pious prayer of the professor in Claremont, California, back in 1904: “We have had ever and anon years that gave a great down pour. We may safely expect another of these very soon, I feel sure. Thus the men that plow in hope and faith, I believe will not reckon without their host.”
The Río Hardy still has some trees, a good number of which are dead. But the Colorado’s former mouth is a desert of detritus.
I assume this is per acre.
Approximately equivalent to parts per million. These figures are all rough. They mask sampling error, incomplete data, and such local variations as the following finding (1954): Two Coachella wells within half a mile of each other, one 565 feet deep, the other only 180, showed the following respective salt concentrations: 400 and 8,500 ppm.
Appletons’ Annual Cyclopaedia, 1892: “California is the third petroleum-producing State in the Union, ranking only after Pennsylvania and New York . . . the wells of Ventura and Los Angeles Counties turning out a constantly increasing quantity of oil.”
In 1985 California has three-quarters of a million wells, so this works out to less than 0.4% of them.
Indeed, the sea is rising, thanks to outflow from Imperial County’s expanding irrigated acreage. On Imperial County Assessor’s Map number 9-12, where the Riverview Cemetery District meets the Niland Fire District, and the Southern Pacific Railroad inscribes a sine wave en route to Yuma, we discover the Salton Sea’s recession from 1915 to 1919 and then to 1925, its original vastness beautifully inked in blue, but then posterity’s pencil has scrawled in
Est. Water Line 1955
, a line which lives between 1925 and 1919.
La Ocotilla.
She was a student at Brawley Union High, where “Milling Cattle, Prancing Horses And Hard Riding Cowboys And Lovely Cowgirls Came Together For The Brawley Cattle Call of 1958.”
Southsiders had been saying that about cotton ever since the 1950s. In 2003 one rancher in Ejido Morelos told me: “But the trick is that the Americans were screwing over the Mexicans, that the Americans were stealing. They’d say, Cotton is going to be worth a lot this year. Then after we picked it, they’d say, What do you know, the price is low.”
The reader has already been introduced to her in “The Chinese Tunnels,” p. 422.
In 1904, the naturalist Hugo De Vries takes a ramble out of Imperial City. “From the inn, located at about the center of the young city, I walked for about one hour along one of the irrigation canals, between luxuriant fields, mainly planted with wheat and barley, some with sorghum and alfalfa and special cultures. After that time, I reached the boundary line of cultivation and hence the desert.” Then what? He sees sandhills to the east, the New River to the west. The desert reappears. A century later, that is still the feeling one gets when strolling past the border of one of the
ejidos,
or even Mexicali itself.
California held 186 carrot farms and 30,760 carrot acres.
Climate does tell: In 1925, southern California ships out nearly twelve thousand traincar lots of oranges—twice the production of central California, and twenty-five times that of northern California. But what does climate tell? Excluding the Colorado River and the westward part of the international line, the entity which I call Imperial is essentially desert. Citrus needs water. But even in Arid America we can do anything, since
WATER IS HERE
.
Columbus brought citrus to Haiti in 1493; Ponce de León seems to have established it in Florida in 1513; south of the entity I call Imperial, some of the Mexicans were growing it by the early 1700s.
What about the orange’s sour sister? Among the Imperial County Agricultural Commissioner’s papers I came across a time-beiged USDA newsletter from 1915 announcing a
NEW SUMMER BEVERAGE.
Grapefruit Juice Easily Bottled—Simple Method of Making Byproduct.
Boil it in an enameled kettle, pour it into a bottle, and hermetically seal. “While as yet, as far as known, there is no commercial market for sterilized grapefruit juice, it is believed that many persons will find it . . . a pleasant variation.”
I have in mind California’s navels and Valencias versus Florida’s Valencias, Hamlins, pineapples and Parson Browns; we’ll panic unless we leave out the Shamouti oranges of Israel, the Peras and Hamlins of Brazil, the blood oranges of Spain. But sometimes, thanks to misfortunes of others, California can sell citrus even in foreign parts. For instance, here come Mussolini and his Fascists! “California has had an unusual opportunity to market lemons in Europe, principally Great Britain, due to the sanctions against Italy . . .”
The lemon market has continued strong for the moment, but the oncoming fifty-percent reduction on lemon tariff is bad news for California lemons, because we hate it when we have to produce by others’ rules. Italian lemons will now muscle their way in to New York: lower labor costs, you see. Currently, lemons go for two and a half cents per pound, which adds up when you realize that California grows fifty percent of the world lemon supply!
Even before 1945, Imperial was losing her position. In the state citrus report of 1938, San Joaquin receives the most press; Fresno, Tulare and Kern get nods; there is no mention of Imperial. The Imperial County statistics for that year are very brief, but record forty cars of oranges shipped, eleven hundred and forty-five cars of grapefruit, and no lemons.
Indeed, one folklorist who visited all the Malaverde shrines he could find wondered whether this man had ever existed; no one knew what he looked like, and his life and death (the latter represented by hanging in his prayer cards) might have been a conflation of two other Sinaloan bandits. In any case, prostitutes began to pray at his supposed execution site in the middle of the twentieth century; in time the drug traffickers grew so enthusiastic about him that one Arizona lawman proposed that discovering a Malaverde image in a suspect’s wallet, together with the phone number of a house of narcotics, “might be sufficient grounds for indictment.” No doubt by the time Malaverde’s memory had flown all the way into Imperial, it had grown as immense and distorted as the shadow of a high-flying drug-laden airplane.
“If you are called
pesado,
you’re one of the big guys,” said a policeman with a smile.