Imperial (113 page)

And now I begin to understand why in one hot bright flat spot in the northeastern Mexicali Valley there’s a place called Algodones, “The Cottons.”
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Oh, cotton perfected everything; why worry about how much those cottonlands cost? Receipt number 6669, dated 7 December 1954, bears witness that the Cía. Mexicana de Terrenos del Río Colorado, S.A., based in Mexicali, received the sum of 14,252.70 pesos, of which 1,965.99 went for
intereses vencidos sobre
[accrued interest for]
el valor del Lote #13-Porción Sur de la Colonia “Uno”, División Dos.
The other 12,286.82 was for the lot itself, which according to a notarized map from 1936 consisted of 118.5 hectares and adjoined the west side of the Canal Largo del Sur, which flowed into the Río Nuevo. That’s a hundred and four pesos an acre! An attached letter announces that the debtor, Señor Eusebio Meléndrez, was rescued by a Señor Cota Arballo. Is this a sad or happy story? We lack the information to know.

Most of the names on these land documents belong to Mexican men, although amidst the nine names pertaining to Colonia El Triángulo those of two women stand out: Isabel M. de Cervantes enjoys the use of forty one point six hectares, which is nearly twice the average per capita farm size in the Triangle; while Carmen Castro comes in slightly under average at a respectable twenty point six.

So the second gender is present. What about people of foreign extraction? Colonia Hindu contains everyone from Dionisio Castro Flores to Man Singh, Bir Singh, Josefina Castro de Singh and Mala Singh; indeed, out of the twenty-one names, seven are Singhs, my favorite being that of Eva Vega de Singh, who lives and farms on fifty hectares exactly. As for the Chinese, by and large they appear in these documents all too rarely, considering their numbers and considering also the fact that they were the first farmers in the Mexicali Valley. Chong Suey and Juan Wong own fifty hectares together in Colonia Independencia Número Uno. Over in Colonia El Mayor, Delmiro González has two of the nine lots, one at twenty and the other at forty hectares, while Samuel Yee Fong and his señora hold three hundred and eighty-one hectares. Of course we know from the very name Chinesca that they have impressed themselves upon the center of Mexicali, where just before midcentury we find a hundred and thirty-four Chinese businesses, fifty-three of those being grocery stores—and let’s not forget the four Chinese cabarets and three poolhalls. But the expropriation of the Colorado River Land Company in 1937 dispossessed many tentacks of which one Mexicali labor union called
the everlasting yellow octopus, which continues sucking the mexican
[
sic
]
workers’ blood.
And so in 1930, there were more than twenty-nine hundred Chinese in Baja California. In 1940 there were slightly more than six hundred.

In 2002, when the television was clashing with a mariachi band, Señor Armando sat in the Café Canton beneath a ceramic cosmos of birds, lotuses, classical Asian beauties whose looks were not superior to those of the Chinese-Mexican girls in semipermanent residence at the tables; and Señor Armando, who was narrow-eyed and looked both Chinese and Mexican, said: There were more Chinese people than Mexicans. They lived in the Mexicali Valley. Then came the two world wars. The Chinese cannot go to USA. Then came more Chinese.
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Then they opened restaurants because that always worked for them. All the old restaurants here had a basement, and then a tunnel to other basements. The government find them now because they dig up the street. And the Chinese keep a casino in the basement. That was in around 1950. As for now, they don’t say nothing. But Chinese people love the casino! And some Chinese go to play near the border and see the race . . . The tunnels, I have never seen them. Often the Chinese people can go down. You can see tables, cards, but not roulette or Chinese dominoes . . .

Señorita Xu, the pretty Chinese waitress at the Dong Cheng Restaurant, had an uncle down the street whom I interviewed in his
zapatería,
and he stood behind the counter in the year 2003 with shoes on the walls all around him and his wife reading the Chinese newspaper as he said: I came in 1957, when I was twenty-two. I came with my grandfather’s brother. We flew from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, then drove in one of Uncle’s cars from Los Angeles to Mexicali with a stop in Tijuana.

What was your impression of Mexicali?

There wasn’t so much land anymore. The city had been founded. There was still land where they had cotton, and still cotton, a lot of it. My uncle already had businesses here. This business was Uncle’s.

And what were your feelings about the place?

I had lots of feelings about the climate and the people, he said, folding his arms and looking my Mexican interpreter in the face. I spoke no Spanish at all. I had studied no Spanish . . .

And what are your feelings now?

He was silent.

He didn’t want to turn the Chinese tunnels into a myth for me; oh, not at all; he did the opposite. After I entreated him to take me down into his cellar, he did, but, as I have already told you in the chapter about the tunnels, things took a bad turn then. Something in his eyes told me that for him the lost universe was not secret casinos but cotton; perhaps he would rather have cultivated his own hectares of “white gold” in the
ejidos
than sold shoes; anyhow, his life was done, and the Chinese legacy of cotton not much more now than an old photo in an unnumbered album in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali: PLANTA DESPEPITADORA DE ALGODON “Chino-Mexicana.” Soft white mountains of what only the caption informs us must be cotton (for otherwise they could be dirt, sawdust, powdered gypsum or saffron) command the middle ground of a hot white flatness interrupted by the sharp-edged black shadows of the sheds.

WHEN MONEY HAD POWER

Javier Lupercio was born in Mexicali in 1945.—Well, good, he said in 2004, pointing into the air. In those days, Mexicali was a small town. One of the first
colonias
was Colonia Baja California. There’s a big store, straight through this street right here. Where that big store is located, that’s where the train station used to be located. Right next to it was a bus station also; the buses would go south in Mexico. You know where that mall, Plaza Cachanilla, is located at? There used to be a soap factory there in about 1958, 1960. Back then there was more poverty than now, but back then they used to plant a lot of cotton in the Mexicali Valley.

When did it stop and why?

The thing started going bad when the government wouldn’t give out no more loans to the small farmers to help with their planting and like that. When the season’s over and you make your money, give it over. Like that. The people who would pick the cotton would be people from the south of Mexico like Oaxaca and like that. When those people saw that there wasn’t enough work, they started going to Ensenada for the pulp tomato season in September, just running after the work. There was like a lot of vegetables grown in that area; they used to plant bell pepper. A lot of people that were migrant workers from that state are now natives of Ensenada.

What was your childhood like?

I was kinda lucky because my grandparents had some land and they were one of the farmers who planted the cotton. We were a middle-class family. What I remember, it was a nice childhood. The city wasn’t as big as it is now. You could see plantations where there are
colonias
now. That was around 1978. Up until then they still planted up into the city. Colonia Wisteria, Palaco, Aurora, those were the places. Colonia Santo Niño and all those are basically new colonies.

Where did you live with your family?

Toward Algodones, there’s a community called Cuervos,
crows.
Ten hectares of cotton was what we had. They sold it. My grandparents, who used to work the land, died, and we started going to the United States and looked to better opportunities. We got our green card so we decided to sell. We sold it in 1970. I was just a grandson. My grandparents were on my mother’s side.

(José López, who was interpreting, said out of the side of his mouth: Maybe a little family fight, I’m figuring. That can get dirty, you know, so the other side divided the land.)

They sold it for around fifteen or eighteen thousand pesos, so I’ve heard. The dollar was at twelve-fifty around that time, but there’s a big difference now. Back then the money had power. With two thousand pesos you could buy a good new car. For all the night,
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fifty pesos, and for just in-and-out, ten pesos. At the Thirteen Negro, it was twenty centavos to hold a woman and dance with her. With one peso you could dance five songs.

AURORAS AND ALFALFA TOWERS

Those were the days, all right, when a new car cost the equivalent of two hundred acts of intercourse and the Thirteen Negro was in its glory. But many of the farmers, ranchers and
ejidatarios
had no use for the pleasures of the metropolis, and, as I learned from year after year of knocking on people’s doors in the
ejidos,
they still don’t.

I remember driving westward down a rutted dirt road which smelled like cattle, with ear-numbered cows in the barbed-wired field of Bermuda grass, and after the road crossed a levee of heaped powdery earth in great clods, there came palms and cottonwoods and a shallow ditch of greenish-brownish water, with the Sierra Cucapah Mountains ahead. This was the view from Rancho García, which in 2004 was slightly decrepit and secluded by palms. Looking northeast from the front door, one could see the four ribbons of dirty smoke twisting up from the glass factory where they would not let us in because we did not have an appointment.

Señora Teresa García said: My parents came here in 1936 or ’37. They bought some land little by little from the Colorado River Land Company. In 1937 it was finalized. My father died in 1951 and we were still paying the Colorado River Land Company. The company helped us out; they even gave us the seed, for cotton and alfalfa. We grew cotton through the seventies. Now it’s all wheat in this area.

Why did you stop growing cotton?

Because the land started to lose its strength, because the water was really salty. The United States was sending water down here that was supposed to go straight to the ocean, but the Mexican government manipulated that and used it for irrigation.

How salty is the land now?

She smiled and touched her cheek.—Not that much.

But the land gets tired, said her son.

So what grows now is rye grass and Bermuda grass and Sudan grass, because they don’t mind the salt, said Señora García. Rye grass they just use to feed the cattle, and Bermuda the same. We bale the Sudan grass. What you feed the cattle earns more than other crops we can grow.

How much can you make?

The ranch just up the road did pretty well since they planted it, harvested, watered, and got two harvests.

So you have lived here all your life?

I was born here in Rancho García. Both of my parents were Garcías. I was born in 1940. The first thing I remember, my father used to bale the alfalfa, and he would stack it up, very high, and the children would climb up. When you grow up on a ranch you’re not afraid of anything. It was very high! she laughed. You could see all the ranches. Back then they also harvested a lot of corn, many pumpkins and watermelons and vegetables. And the cotton would be so high! And the alfalfa was also that high! Very high and very high! You could hide in it!

When I went to school it was all the way in Palaco. You get on the highway to San Felipe, ten kilometers. We went by bus. It was the only school, so there were many students. I was five. There were forty students in every room. The name of this whole area is Colonia Sieto de Cierro Prieto.

When you were a child, did you always know you wanted to stay here?

We talked about buying a house in the city, but that’s when my father passed away. I got married and would have stayed. Even if my father hadn’t died I would have ended up back here. Here you’re alone and it’s very quiet and you don’t open the door and see a neighbor. Very tranquil!

Right now, the ranch down the road, they’re bringing about four hundred head of cattle from Sonora. On that other road down there, we see many rabbits. When I was little, there were many coyotes and snakes. I don’t know where they went; they disappeared.

What is the most beautiful thing you have seen out here?

One of the most beautiful things is that at night you can see the stars and they look very clean. When I was little I would see comets go by and the aurora borealis. But now because the air is so dirty you don’t see it anymore.

EIGHTEEN PESOS FOR A HUNDRED KILOS

On the highway’s edge a few kilometers south of Mexicali there is a little restaurant called Yocojihua. The proprietress was a woman in late middle age named Señora Socorro Ramírez. She said to me:

The difference between Mexicali and other places is the diversity of the people here. People from other states came looking for work. I came here in 1952, and the people are not your classic lazy people who don’t want to look for work. The people here are
looking.
There was nothing here in ’52. It was desert. Some people came because they were given land. Others came just to work the land. President Cárdenas would even pay the travel expenses for those who wanted to come, in order to populate the new state. My parents decided to come here to work, because they had a big family; at that time there were six children. So in Jalisco my father had the ranch which had belonged to his parents, but it was divided up among the heirs, which made it not large enough to support everyone. So my parents decided to move here. My parents came here to pick cotton, working for different people who had been given the land by President Cárdenas. At that time they were all working for the Colorado River Land Company.
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I remember picking cotton when I was little. Around 1958 other companies started showing up. I would pick for the individual landowners, and they would sell their cotton to the Colorado River Land Company. I was paid between sixteen and eighteen centavos per kilo, so you had to pick a hundred kilos to earn eighteen pesos. An adult in one day, which was from five in the morning until the sun went down, could pick between a hundred and a hundred fifty kilos a day. It was nice. Of course you enjoy things more when you were a kid. We would go out together as a family, and the people we worked for would always take good care of us. They gave us hot lunch and cold water. At six I could pick only twenty kilos. I did more running around! I went to school, but only from January to June, because everyone was picking cotton. Sometimes the teachers would give classes in the cotton fields.