Imperial (109 page)

In Sonora, they’re famous for making those big tortillas. In the back of the house, my Mom had that fifty-five-gallon drum on which to make the tortillas. They would fold them in a triangle. I grew up eating tortillas for everything. None of us learned to do that. We depended on our Mom to make those.

I would dry the meat from Safeway in a little cage and I would pound it; I would pound the dried meat in a
metate
made out of petrified wood. Then I would make the
machaca
for a stew, and my Dad loved it.

You know, when I was growing up in Brawley, we had the east side and the west side, divided by the railroad tracks. My mother would tell me, back in the 1930s the east side was a real thriving community. It had restaurants and pharmacies. I think there was more economic development back then than now. Why it changed—I don’t know. I remember on the east side of Brawley, we would leave in the summer, to go to Los Banos, we would always come back around Halloween, and especially—you have to understand that the valley—the politics have always been controlled by the landowner. And that has been one of the reasons why development has taken so long. I’ll tell you when the big change came, was when the prisons came into the valley, and they started giving their opinion. I was on the Brawley City Council at that time, and we lobbied for it. I felt it was good, because it would provide good jobs for people here. The biggest employers are the county, the IID and the prisons, the schools. So it’s mainly service related. The county, they have the courts, human resources, roads, welfare department, sheriff’s department.

All I know is that my Dad, and our extended family, they always worked the fields, and they always had work. There was always food on the table.

Growing up, my mother’s sisters lived in Mexicali, and I was maybe eight years old, and we could go on a Sunday morning and spend the whole day and come back. My Mom gave me money to go to the corner store, and they said of me: Who is she? My friend said: She’s from the other side.

What I remember was that life in Mexicali was a lot harder. They have more freedom, but maybe they have less to lose.

My Mom would always help her sisters. She would always take them food and money. My mother lived in Kilometer Fifty-seven. My mother died before my aunt. When she died, she told me, you need to take care of her; so we, her daughters, we continued to take care of my aunt. She liked canned roast beef . . .

Chapter 109

COACHELLA (1950)

... the road was anisotropic—just as history is. There is no way back. And he went right ahead anyway. And met up with a chained skeleton.

—Arkadi and Boris Strugatski, 1964

I
n 1947, when Coachella green corn drinks sunbeams for two thousand five hundred and seventy-five acres, a certain Mr. and Mrs. La Londe, who before then had been living in Riverside with the bride’s parents, complete their first year of residence in the entity which I call Imperial. In that part of Riverside County with which we are concerned—namely, Indio, Coachella and “surrounding desert areas”—population has more than doubled between 1940 and 1950. Indio’s growth has been especially spectacular: a hundred and thirty percent!
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
That was for sure. Banning and Palm Springs had experienced an increase somewhere between seventy and eighty percent. And it was only going to get better and better, because, well, because
WATER IS
finally
HERE!
²⁰³

The La Londes arrived in Thermal during a cool spell. Coachella incorporated just the previous year; Thermal remains unincorporated as I write. As Art La Londe put it: It was October and it rained. October twentieth was the date I got hired, and also my discharge date from World War II. We thought it was great. Weather was great. We had an outhouse which was about a hundred feet from the back.

His wife Helen sat in her wheelchair and said: We had to go to Riverside to my parents to take a bath. We had to go to Indio to use the wringer.

I was hired to be the seventh-grade teacher, said Mr. La Londe, who had once, so I was told, been a hale, large-presenced man but who was now skeletal.—I had two grades, sixth and seventh. I had two rows of one and three or four rows of the others. I’d just say there were around thirty students at this point. I do remember that the next year I had around fifty, including two sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds. We had the little green schoolhouses where the Mexicans went. See, when we got here, the World War had ended. Anyway, they had eliminated any kind of segregation.

Mexican families were very well thought of, Helen put in, and we keep in touch with them to this day.

Thermal had about three hundred students in ’46, her husband continued. And then they combined with a school district called Ensign. We got three teachers from that school. Thermal, it’s way up there now. Close to five thousand. Now, in ’56 the superintendent died and I got the job. I ran the district for seventeen years.

We like it when you go on Saturday afternoon, go to Indio and see all your friends. It took fifteen minutes in ’46. Thermal to Coachella is still two lanes, one each way. Then when you get to Coachella, well, they have a road that goes around it now, an expressway. That’s where they made a mistake. Freeway means you can drive straight through and can never worry about intersections. Expressway means you can have access to it. They have had some very bad accidents.

How often have you gone to Mexico over the years?

The only trip we took to Mexico was a rail trip, from Mexicali. This was a one-day trip. I don’t even think we stayed over.

Do you see any difference between Tijuana and Mexicali?

Mexicali and TJ, they’re about the same. Third World. Oh, the poverty! On the other hand, Mexicali had a hospital, and one of my teachers had a gallbladder problem and went down for surgery. We didn’t have such a thing as health insurance. That didn’t come along until the middle sixties.

How would you differentiate Coachella from Imperial?

Well, geologically they are one big area
²⁰⁴
with the Salton Sea in between, but actually the Coachella Valley and the Imperial Valley are two separate entities economically and in all ways I’d say.

The La Londes were very proud of their sector of the long binational valley; they were certainly not the only ones. A booster called it “America’s Garden of Allah.” Carolyn Cooke, who arrived in Coachella in 1957, expressed much the same feelings; and when I asked her whether Imperial was different from Coachella she replied:

Yeah, well, they are different. For one thing, they are based solely on agriculture. We used to go back and forth a lot into Imperial, and it was strictly agricultural, and they would be growing alfalfa or corn or sugar beets, where up here there were the citrus ranches and grape ranches and there was a lot of sophistication here that there wasn’t down there. We started from Palm Springs and their little core of movie stars and it spread from there and became the golf capital of the world and went from there, and enormous wealth came into Indian Wells and Rancho Mirage and set the tone totally differently than in Imperial Valley. There’s a lot of roving population down there, a lot of vacant houses.

On another occasion, the old lady put matters slightly differently: I have lived briefly in the Imperial Valley, in El Centro. Imperial Valley is agricultural pure and simple. There is very little tourism. There is definitely no glamour. It’s just a farming valley and I envy them. I love farming valleys and ours is rapidly losing that. Now I haven’t been down there for years. We used to go back and forth all the time. I don’t know where the line is even. I don’t know what it’s like anymore, but it used to be there’d be like reduction of civilization as it were, for many miles, and then you’d get to Brawley and you’d start to see the ranches and the farms and so on.

The headgates of the Imperial Canal first opened, as you’ll recall, back in 1901, which was Wilber Clark’s time; whereas the first water didn’t make it down the Coachella Branch of the All-American Canal until 1948, just two years before this chapter opens. Reader, you can be sure that that waterway would be treated as a jewel! I remember all the people at Slab City who liked to cool off in it at the turn of the following century, all of them hoping that the
irrigation goons
wouldn’t come and give them a ticket. (That’s what we call
by the people and for the people.
)—Now here’s an idyllic midcentury photograph of two men in a broad flatboat, one piloting it, facing forward into the future, the other standing facing us, spraying many overlapping chevrons of aerated liquid at the shrubs on the white and sandy bank of the Coachella Canal, which goes on straight and flat, bisecting Imperial’s grander flatness. The caption explains that this is a weed-control boat. Weeds drink water, you see, and we don’t want to waste a drop. (I remember a scene from the Preston Ranch near Calexico in 1904: A man sits contentedly fishing at the Imperial Canal’s edge, with verdure all about. We don’t do that anymore. We’re all business.)

Like Imperial County, Riverside County was enjoying an income boom. How could she not, with all those new people coming in? In 1950 Riverside County produced more than ninety percent of California’s dates, and most of the date plantations were in the Coachella Valley, which accordingly looked forward to even greater things, because
about 20,000 acres are now under cultivation and 75,000 more can be put into crops when the All-American Canal is completed in the near future.
(De Beauvoir:
Their own existence is a thing of chance to which they attach no importance. That is why they are interested in net results, and not in the spirit which engenders them.
)

Speaking of net results, Coachella will outperform Palo Verde in income by twenty-one to fifteen in 1952, by twenty-three to seventeen in 1953.—My beloved brethen, shall we speak next of the spirit? Anytime you want to experience that, we kindly invite you to attend our next Date Festival.
²⁰⁵
—Now for the procedure:
The scientifically clean dates then move down an endless belt, over the grading tables, where medically approved girls, dressed in immaculate white, remove the culls and separate the fruit into lots of uniform ripeness, consistency, size and general appearance.
Peering down through a square metal framework studded with lamps, we spy the medically approved girls, who wear striped party hairbands and white uniforms, their white arms out on the work surface before them as they studiously sort dates into boxes. They appear to be lost in ecstasies of concentration. Within the square perimeter of date-boxes frozen in mid-conveyance, parallel belts run beyond the photographic horizon. The mild exoticism of the dates and the pleasing spectacle of youthful femininity save this industrial spectacle from the usual factory dreariness, although I wonder whether it is any more fun or at least more profitable for the girls than it would have been for me.

Now, what about Coachella green corn?

In 1947, the opinion of C. H. Hollis, corn grower and shipper in Thermal, is this:
Well, one man and a Ford tractor or two horses can easily plant ten acres a day, four dollars and a half to five dollars.
That does not sound too bad. But that is hardly the total cost to grow corn. In 1954, one farmer calculates the total cost at a hundred and fifty-one dollars per acre. Both field and tractor labor at ninety cents an hour. Gifford Price, who farms in Mecca, says to us:
Most of us have to go out and borrow our money . . .

A rancher in Thermal named Douglass Nance now utters that dreaded phrase,
crisis of overproduction.
A thousand new Coachella acres this year are going into corn due to cotton going out! This is a marketing order hearing, of course; and Mr. Nance’s expressions are all to a purpose: We want
to try to bring the Imperial Valley and Borrego Valley in with us so we would all be operating on the same basis.
This strategy may well prove essential to the salvation of Western civilization; for Paul Sandoval of Indio worries that
if we stabilize and have a good market up here in the Coachella Valley and they see we are doing fairly well, they can put in some big acreages
in Calipatria.

It’s not only the Imperial Valley that Coachella must watch out of the side of her eye. This area of early corn competes with Alabama and Florida. And thank God Texas doesn’t ship good corn! J. L. Mapes in Indio, who grows, packs and ships all the way to Detroit, Boston, even Indianapolis,
²⁰⁶
expresses his worries about that giant tract of formerly Mexican real estate:
I think this year they have taken about all of the eastern play on the carrot market, which they could very easily do on corn if they ever grew the quality of corn down there.

Even as Coachella’s farmers worry about competition and overproduction, they stand on the verge of decline. One of their own dearest wishes, a branch of the All-American Canal, will gradually, if so far partially, undo them. For a long while yet, Mexican-Americans and a few others will continue to get their living in Coachella by hand-sorting lemons into one of four classes on a rubberized canvas belt. As early as the mid-fifties, however, a regional geography perceives all too well that
agriculture was long the chief source of income in the Coachella, but now a booming urban development along the Valley’s western edges and below San Jacinto Peak is beginning to encroach upon the farming land.

The La Londes were part of that urban development. As you remember, Coachella had hired on Mr. La Londe as a teacher. (Carolyn Cooke became a grape grower’s bookkeeper, so we can call her agricultural.) I myself would have enrolled in the residential legions; why not confide to you that one of my greatest, sleepiest pleasures in entering the entity known as Imperial is to imagine myself living young and newly married to the woman I love in a little American homestead in about 1950? To be sure, ever so many Imperial homes have caught my fancy on both sides of the line: high desert ranches around Tecate and La Rumorosa, tree-shaded, pastel-colored concrete houses in Mexicali, farms in Campo, Seeley’s residences set apart from the world by being centered in furrowed fields, semi-secret eucalyptus-shaded dreamhouses in Brawley, Heber or even El Centro—but where I so often crave to be is in Coachella, in sight of a date palm grove and the Salton Sea with its mountains either east or west; I’d want to be on the porch beneath the grapefruit tree, in late afternoon in the love swing with my pregnant wife beside me and date shakes in cold glasses in our hands; yes, in 1950, when the All American Canal brings me all the water I’ll ever lust for and we all still believe in progress and my own real life (commenced in 1959) has not scorched me with any problems;
it is simply needless to question the supply of water.
Never mind the Cold War, black segregation and Mexican peonage; particularly don’t worry about DDT. Exclude the self-congratulatory parochialism which has defined America from Babbitt to President George W. Bush and which might have reached its zenith in 1950; the Imperial Idea likewise seemed to be an eternal desert star; I can make my own life and to hell with the rest of the world!