Imperial (60 page)

The history of Mexican Imperial over the first half of the twentieth century is in large part the tale of the Colorado Land Company and its expropriation by the
ejidos.
The history of American Imperial is a mirror image of that: Wilber Clark’s homestead gives way to Bud Antle’s endless empire of lettuce.

In the second half of the century we will find the water farmers, the Interior Department, and God knows who else beginning to transform American Imperial farmscape back into desert for the greater good of housing developments in San Diego.

In Mexican Imperial, the
ejidos,
although they are weakening, have not entirely failed to hold their own.

A DEFINITION

We read that
ejido
is
a colonial-era term that had been used to describe indigenous communities’ common lands ever since the colonial period.
In conception it is surely more ancient than that, as this chapter’s mid-sixteenth-century epigraph reminds us. The epigraph’s author, Alonso de Zorita, travelled sadly, honestly and laboriously through post-Conquest Mexico, recording practicalities of interest to the Spanish Crown while raising his unavailing voice against the dispossession and enslavement of Indians. His data have been variously interpreted ever since. Some say that the
ejidos
were merely administrative divisions of land belonging to, for instance, Moctezuma; others see them as true communal holdings. Indeed, one would be shocked had the forms of land ownership
not
varied across Mexico! In recognition of the fact that some villagers he knew held their
ejido
lands in common, while others subdivided them into individual plots, the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata left it up to each locality to decide the details of land allocation. But the essential characteristics of
ejidos
remained: autonomy, preexisting right, inalienability.

DREAMS

The Mexican Revolution begins in 1911. Zapata fights for the right of his neighbors to keep their village land against the
haciendero
equivalents of Harry Chandler. (Thank God, Chandler couldn’t reach quite that far.) By 1912, the eloquent ex-lawyer Luis Cabrera calls for the new Chamber of Deputies to honor
rights established in the epoch of the Aztecs.
And so a bill is introduced for
the reconstitution of the
ejidos. Article Twenty-seven of the new constitution of 1917 gives villages the right to hold property as such. And in his beloved Plan de Ayala, Zapata announces that fields, woodlands and water taken from the people will immediately revert to them, they
maintaining at any cost with arms in hand the mentioned possession.
Furthermore—and here ancient rights get reduced from justification to inspiration—large landholders may now be expropriated of one-third of their holdings so that new
ejidos
can be formed. Although we find
ejidos
getting parcelled out in dribs and drabs, for instance, during the administration of President Calles in the mid-1920s (he seems to have considered them merely a
Realpolitik
measure of temporary subsistence and tried to privatize them), not until the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas in the mid-1930s will this notion be carried out on a large scale. Never mind. The Revolution has begun. At a stroke the conception of
ejidos
has become dynamic, militant.

Almost from the start,
runs one Northside account,
the
ejidos
bore the taste of salty tears,
being undercapitalized, created from tiny pieces of arid lands, squeezed by rigid state-controlled prices and hindered by bad bureaucracy. Accordingly, the campesinos gained little if anything from the
ejidos.
This may or may not be true for Mexico generally; regarding Mexican Imperial I completely disagree.

José López from Jalisco said:

In the
ejidos,
like I’m telling you, there’s
rules,
there’s
laws
that are applied, and yes, the land is divided equally, whereas in the Imperial Valley a few powerful ranchers work the land because they have the money. Some of them, like M——S——, whom I worked for, he’s even Hindu, he’s a foreigner. But they have the money, the land. Over here the land is divided equally. Then it depends on how your harvest goes. That is the truth here in Mexico. If a rain destroys your harvest, you’re not going to get a big insurance refund like you would in the States, so that’s gonna put you in the hole. If you have the money and use all the hectares you got, it’s almost guaranteed you will come out doing good at the end of the season. Sometimes you don’t have the capital, Bill, to work all the land you have. Then the
ejidos
don’t help you out there. If you spend all the season drinking and partying out, you’re not gonna be helped. You have to look after yourself.

In Jalisco, he continued, there are big haciendas, but I guess it started out being
ejidos
here in Mexicali. (José never mentioned the Chandler Syndicate.) People saw the
ejidos
were a good way of living, he said, a more or less equal way of living. So if a big
haciendero
were to come over here and buy a big chunk of land, no
ejido
guy would go and work for him. A hacienda would probably go broke.

So basically what you’re saying is that this land was settled later.

That’s true. After the revolution, people with money became
hacienderos.
Most of them, as time progressed and we came into the seventies, the eighties, some of them went broke, and the laws were changing in Mexico, and there wasn’t so much repression as before. Haciendas I’ve heard in Chiapas, they call ’em
casicas,
where they just exploit the people, you know, Bill, you just work the skin off ’em . . .

Why is Jalisco more exploitative?

Because it’s a very old province, Bill. Baja is a baby province.

And I thought of the expression
as old as sin.

Once upon a time, the
ejidos
had also been old. But the Revolution renewed them, particularly in Mexican Imperial, which despite the Colorado River Land Company preserved a certain virginal blankness. As early as 1915, the councilmen of Mexicali began to propose the creation of
ejidos
expropriated from the lands owned by Harry Chandler’s syndicate. For weren’t those still largely blank lands?

Indeed, when I invited myself into the Sunday afternoon of the middle-aged rancher Don Carlos Cayetano Sanders-Collins, who sat in the yard with his family in a built-up
ejido
called Ciudad Morelos, his unnamed wife, who did much of the answering, at first described the
ejidos
not as legal reversions or revolutionary seizures, but as simple pioneering in the desert nothingness, so that for a moment we seemed to have returned to the Imperial of Wilber Clark, where
water was in the ditches, seeds were in the ground, green was becoming abundant, and the whole area was dotted with the homes of hopeful, industrious, devoted persons.
But in place of, say, L. E. Cooley, who
entered the town as pioneer, driving a pair of mules and followed by a spotted dog,
a first
ejidatario,
at least as the lady told it, seemed to have settled with and among his old neighbors; for she said:

Mexicali was started by people from many different countries who came at the time of the railroads. They were contracted from the interior to work on the railroads. Many went back home afterwards, but those who stayed spread out to begin the
ejidos.
The
ejidos
were started by different indigenous groups, for instance the Cucapahs. So their thinking is based not on where they live but on who started their
ejidos.

So which group of people formed this
ejido
?

She had to ask Don Carlos, who replied: Cucapah.

Do you have Cucapah relatives?

No.

She said then: In each
ejido,
people often speak a dialect that is different from in other places. But as time has gone by, they have lost their differences. A lot of people born here have gone to work in the United States, so the
ejidos
are losing many people.

Don Carlos was born in Ejido Indo. He said: This
ejido
is Ciudad Morelos. Before, this was Estación Cuervos, Crows Station.

Don Carlos, why do you live in a house and your two brothers live on a ranch?

He shrugged and said: They like it better.

To what extent this answer was intended simply to shut up a nosy outsider I cannot say, but in any event it was a very Mexican reply, expressing that sense of volition which is much more commonly heard on the south side of the ditch than here where I write in the Land of the Free; my neighbors would have provided me with such explanations as:
To be nearer to my job,
or
Because my mortgage requires it.
Among the few farmers whom I have actually been able to interview in American Imperial (they being more closed than their Southside counterparts), I am more likely to hear answers of this non-mechanistic caliber than in urban California. Come to think of it, Alice Woodside, for instance, whom you met a few pages ago in Sacramento, loves and values her Imperial Valley childhood more and more as the years go by. (We will hear her recollections in their place, along with those of her mother.) Her friend Kay Brockman Bishop, also Valley born, expressed the contentment that I felt as I sat on her back patio watching the sunset over the fields while her husband took the dog for a walk, then went to putter in his garage and machine shop, which was also Kay’s studio; between the two of them, they could build almost anything.

As for Don Carlos, he was also a farmer, raising cotton, corn, maize, onions, radishes and chilis. He owned
between twenty and thirty hectares.
Pretty much everybody has the same, he said. I’m the owner. There’s an agricultural law. The person who has the responsibility for taking care of the parents has the right to all the land.

The
ejido
families had crossed the line often enough, or knew enough others who had, to express satisfied incuriosity about Northside. They sipped coconut juice in cafés of concrete or fiberboard, or, far more often, they stayed home. When I asked Don Carlos how often he went into the United States, he replied: All the time.

How is the life here different from there?

He shrugged, waved his heavy hand, and said: Oh, very different.

The wife said: The United States acts very paternalistically to all its citizens. In Mexico, everybody has to fight for his own life. But if you have a good education, you can figure out how to get what you want.

She was polite, but I got the point: She was quite happy in her
ejido,
thank you.

Being Imperialites, the
ejidatarios
existed at the center of their dreamy cosmos; green tranquillity went on forever all around them, as far as they cared to lift up their eyes, and that was not very far. Don Carlos’s wife did eventually tell me how the Cardenistas violently expropriated the two
factories where they took care of the wheat and the cotton,
and so this family ended up with a ranch; but that was long ago and might never have happened, for in the
ejidos
there is nothing but peace.

And so a certain restaurant proprietress, the same one who in the previous chapter had insisted that six hectares used to be enough and that
we had everything,
did not refer, as Zapata might have done, to ancient indigenous titles, but to creation
ex nihilo,
saying: An
ejido
is founded by agricultural people who own parcels. And a
colonia
is started by people who work for the
ejidos.
So here’s a parcel with twenty hectares; here’s another; each parcel has its house. In a
colonia,
it’s just houses: journalists, workers, teachers.

If they want to start an
ejido,
they must buy land from the government. Really now you can only start an
ejido
in a place with a very small population. Because to buy parcels it can take years.

To start more
colonias,
it’s easier. They are always close to a city or an
ejido.
Now they call them
fraccionamientos.
If a man buys a parcel of land, he can subdivide and sell the parcels to others as
fraccionamientos.

Reader, never mind the
colonias
or
fraccionamientos,
at least not for now. What are the
ejidos
? Like all other places, they are worlds within worlds. Beyond the frond-roofed cages of Señor Hector’s fighting cocks in Ejido Monterey begins his world of ruined cars, rows of them in the desert, then the broken engines and electronic parts. He is the ruler of his empire.

Lupe Vásquez’s aunt had a dream; she thought her
ejido
stead was safe forever, but another nephew, Rubén, the one with the sweet distinguished face, sold it out from under her. Be that as it may, in the course of my travels in Imperial I never met as many happy people, at least by their own definition, as in the
ejidos.
⁹⁶

Wilber Clark’s homestead was a dream; and perhaps the reality was as harsh as the shadows of birds scuttering across a flat baked field on the way to Algodones. But who are we to say that the illusion didn’t hold good all the way to the property line?

What did they used to say in American Imperial?
His farm has been highly improved. He made a success through his own efforts. He sold out at a fancy price.

In the
ejidos
somebody’s farm might or might not get improved, and nobody else will give a damn. He might or might not make a success; he might spend the harvest season getting drunk with his mistress, and that is literally his affair. He has no intention of selling out, not ever; he is home.