Imperial (103 page)

And how was Coachella in the forties?

I thought the war years here were kind of interesting when Patton’s troops descended, he replied. All of a sudden we were inundated by Army people and Army wives. Poor things, they were trying to find even a room to rent. So people were renting their bedrooms. It was kind of a wild time. Most of us stayed off the streets. Lots of saloons. They had special buses on weekends when the soldiers had leave. Shall we tell ’em about the time the .45 was shot? We lived in the back of a bungalow court. We had the rear apartment. Between the rear apartment and the neighbor’s garage was a place about four-and-a-half to five feet wide. One night there was all this commotion and yelling and gunshots. Some soldier from Patton’s camp had stolen a car and he stopped outside. He was AWOL and wanted to leave and the military police didn’t see it that way. The .45 bullet hit our house . . .

When did you start to hear about Slab City?

Well, not way back. I don’t know whether Slab City was formed by the military police. I think it was a military police training camp. They had nothing but the cement slabs and the tents. And of course they moved off everything afterward. People took up on the slabs because it was a nice place to camp.

The Tylers were unacquainted with Salvation Mountain. When I mentioned Leonard Knight, they said: Oh, there were always hermits here.

And how was the Salton Sea in the forties?

It was nice, said Mrs. Tyler. It didn’t have dead fish floating around in it. When I was going to high school we had school picnics and it was nice.

I went fishing down there many times in the forties, said Dr. Tyler. Well, it was nice.
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There were boat landings and a group would get together and they would either charter a boat or get their own and the fishing was quite good. They just backed up to the sea along the Mecca shores, close to the town of Mecca. We’d usually just go down in the early morning and come back when the sun set. Usually we’d bring back all the fish we wanted.

Would you eat corvina from the sea now?

No. Apparently it’s pretty bad.

I’ve heard that the Indians built fish traps around Coolidge Springs.

Oh, I know where the fish traps are, he said. I used to go there a lot. It’s all private property now. I think you can still see them.

And what’s your opinion on the situation in Coachella now?

I think we’re getting overbuilt but how would I know? said Mrs. Tyler. It makes me sad but in another way it’s kind of exciting. The only thing that would stop it is lack of water.

Chapter 102

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A FLAX FIELD IN BLOOM? (1940s)

Here the land is green, and words are its fruits.

—Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, 1993

E
dith Karpen’s daughter Alice Woodside, now aged sixty-two, had predominantly happy memories of her girlhood on the ranch at Mount Signal.
¹⁸⁵
She said: The whole valley went to flax during the first part of the World War,
¹⁸⁶
because they needed the linseed oil for planes. Have you ever seen a flax field in bloom? It’s the most beautiful blue! They were growing it when I was really small, but I haven’t forgotten the blue butterflies. There isn’t anything I have ever seen with the intensity of a flax field.

They tried raising saffron, said her mother, but it didn’t take.

Well, you know, said Alice, I was an only child. I really had no trouble just wandering around. My father’s father acquired the ranch. That probably would have been, let’s see, maybe in 1915, 1920. The people who worked on it, I always kind of liked to hang out and talk to. Most of them were quite frankly illegal, and quite frankly those were my favorites. Very gentle. Francisco, Jesús. I would just follow them around when they were irrigating. I don’t think my parents worried about my safety. You know, I was completely comfortable about these guys. My father had a couple of tractor drivers, middle-aged men, who’d never been married, and I used to hang out with them. There was one old guy who lived in a shack, and my mother never thought about him but my Dad warned her to kind of keep an eye on me when I was around him. I guess I mused a lot. You know, my Dad would take me around with him. He taught me how to drive a pickup when I was six years old. One of the Caterpillar tractors, I could drive one of those when I was eight. He’d take me out, and I was shooting a .22 at cans; I remember it used to kick a lot. He had a .45, and I could never shoot that very well. I remember the blistering echo. I keep saying to my husband what my Dad always said to me: (a)
you don’t force things;
(b)
you just stand back and look at it and think.
I was just today shrieking at him. He had just gotten some tool of ours that didn’t work and he was just tearing it apart.

We had a lock on the front door, which is kind of silly when you consider the back door which had just a hook. My mother always used to have ladies who’d come in to do the washing and the cleaning and they never spoke English. I was left alone with them. I remember an Anglo guy who came up on a motorbike, and he banged and he banged and he banged. The Mexican lady just hid in the closet! I was just petrified! As a kid, how wonderful it was to have those ladies around if you were sick or if you were crying, because they could make you feel good. That’s what I remember, is these quiet people coming in, fixing you tea; that’s the way you get well. It’s just that wonderful warm feeling.

Harold and Dorothy Brockman adored me because they thought they could never have children and their house was seven miles from ours. Their house was built I believe around 1910, and the main portion was interior and they had the screened-in porches all around. They made the house very picturesque. There was this very big walkway area where you’d step out from the glass doors. And all those years, it never had a lock on the door.

Harold was a man of very, very few words. I learned to get along with people of few words.
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You’d see him under a truck taking care of his own pickup. He was a wealthy man but you wouldn’t know it, she said proudly.

He had a lot of Mexicans working for him, Mexican families on a compound on his land. He treated them very well. But there was always a line. They were not included in any social activities.
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There were maybe fifteen or twenty of them. I played with some of them. They had one man and one woman who were the elders of the family: Margarita, she was a lovely, lovely Mexican lady who spoke no English, and Francisco also spoke no English. Juan was the one I used to play with. Many years later, when Harold died, it was an Elks funeral, and the pallbearers were all the Mexicans dressed in white, plus my father. He always cared for their feelings. And yet they kept a line. There were two get-togethers at his funeral, one for Mexicans, one for whites. Actually, it embarrasses me to say so.

My main playmates were black, and twins, and they lived in that little house up the way. I was an only child and the ranch was ten miles out of town. I played with whatever living thing I could find.

My school was called Mount Signal School; it would have been north of where we lived; there were three classes; first and second. It was just a country school. I can assure you that there was no other Anglo child there. All the kids I grew up with, they all yelled out,
Viva Villa!
My Mom had already taught me in kindergarten level to read. I remember being a problem for the teacher, because I was bored to death! I think during my school years my really good friends were Mexican, and they came from kind of another cut of class you haven’t heard about. I could understand what they said, but I felt a little shy; my Mexican friend who was the leader always liked me to know who was boss; he liked to laugh at my Spanish.

Here Alice’s mother smilingly interjected: I always knew when she was talking to Nicky or to his cousin Conchita, because she would put on a certain lilt, even in her English. One reason for her not acquiring Spanish earlier was that this was a period of total immersion and you weren’t supposed to speak Spanish on the schoolground. When I was teaching, we enforced it.

Well, Mom, said Alice, on our playground we spoke Spanish all the way along.

When Alice and I were alone, I asked her how on balance she would characterize growing up in the Imperial Valley.

I think as I get older, so much about it I value more and more and more. But there’s not enough to do. I think that really, unless you’re a real self-starter, there’s not a lot of room for real personal growth. I think that operating in that heat slows you down. It’s just too bloody hot. I remember just sitting in those classrooms in June just sweltering, watching that clock just inch along until I could go outside and get a breath of fresh air. That bus ride home was an hour!

Here in the big city, kids don’t have to learn to adjust as much. I used to think it was kind of hard, but . . . I guess it forced me to read. We didn’t have television out on the ranch, and there was hardly anything on the radio. And, as I told you, I could drive a tractor when I was six years old . . .

Chapter 103

THE DAYS OF CARMEN CARILLO AND
SUSANA CAUDILLO
¹⁸⁹
(2003)

They do work most Americans wouldn’t do.

—Border Patrol Officer Dan Murray

W
hen I go to the grapes at Coachella,
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I get up at one in the morning. I wash my face and make lunch and let’s go! No perfume! I feel tired, not wanting to go. And then with the heat, it’s worse. At two-o’-clock I leave the house. I pay nine dollars for a ride. Sometimes it’s the same person; sometimes it’s not. The ride goes from Holtville where I live to Calexico and then to Coachella. Sometimes in Calexico we wait half an hour at Donut Avenue
¹⁹¹
for the people to cross the border.

We arrive at four A.M. Sometimes we go to Mecca; sometimes we go past Mecca toward Indio. When it’s Mecca, we can sleep two more hours. The reason we have to get there so early is that if they change us from one field to another field they don’t want to lose time. At four A.M the foreman is already there. We sleep in the vehicle with our heads on each other’s shoulders. If it’s a station wagon, there are six or seven people inside. If it’s a van, there are nine or ten people. We don’t sleep outside, because there are snakes! We’ve seen big ones. And there are snakes with horns, short ones. They’re meaner than the rattlesnakes, those
chiquitas.
Right there on Highway 86 where you have the Alamo, there’s an Indian reservation; that’s where I’ve seen the small snakes. They’re this color, the color of dirt, so you can’t see them. And sometimes they’re in the grapevines. If they bite you, if you don’t get medical attention soon enough, you die. That’s why we sleep in the car. We sleep with one eye open and one eye asleep.

At six-o’-clock we get up. They give us a briefing on how to pack the grapes and how they want them cut. That takes ten minutes. The foreman does that. A lot of us workers are there, about a hundred. Often the same people go two or three seasons and you know them, and then all of a sudden it changes. Basically it’s the same people. And it’s mainly women. We are better workers, because mostly the men are
borrachos.
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The men respect us and the foreman respects us, too. Everything’s fine. Everyone respects each other. Depends on the person, too. If you get people giving you unwanted attention, you gotta stop it.

At the briefing is when they start counting the hours and paying us.

They give you scissors. They are a special kind because they’ve got a little curved hook on them to take out the rotten parts. If we work eight hours, after five hours we start getting tired. You feel it all over. The whole body aches. At ten A.M. we get a fifteen-minute break. At twelve, we eat lunch under the vines, watching for snakes. We get half an hour then. At two-o’-clock we get another fifteen minutes. We finish at three.

They pay us weekly. It’s minimum wage, but sometimes they pay a bonus. So we get about three hundred dollars, three-fifty, three-sixty, sometimes two-fifty, depending on the hours. If you have a lot of boxes, you gotta hurry up and pack. There’s two cutters and a packer in each group. If the packer is behind, you gotta help the packer at three-o’-clock. We don’t get paid for that. It’s fifteen or twenty minutes extra. At three-fifteen, three-thirty, we get in the car. At five-thirty we get home, straight home to Holtville.

I stop in the store for a soda. Then I take off all the dirt, take a shower. I start cooking and turn on the washing machine. I cook something for my family, something fast. I don’t even eat dinner. I go to sleep at seven P.M.

It’s a sad life because it’s cold; it’s freezing and you cannot go home; you have to work. In the summer it’s also sad with the dirt and the sweat. Sometimes you even feel like crying. It’s hard when it’s cold and you’re wet. And not enough sleep. It’s miserable. But once we get paid, it changes!

You pay the ride, the food and the bills, and there’s only a little bit left. But we’re happy not to have husbands. God freed us from husbands. With them, it would really be miserable.

Chapter 104

IMPERIAL REPRISE (1754-1940)

WATER IS HERE
.
Sign of Slow Growth Sends Stocks Lower
.
IMPERIAL COUNTY SHOWS RAPID INCREASE.
In the past ten years, this county has made the greatest gain in value of its agricultural production of any county in the nation.
The 1938 lettuce season was probably the most disastrous in the history of the Imperial Valley. The constant threat of heavy shipments seemed to be the depressing factor.
I have seen men wicked enough to weep for sorrow at the prospect of a plentiful season.