Imperial (114 page)

What did you do for fun?

We played with the animals, rode our bicycles, fished; at school we played volleyball, football. In the afternoons we played Cops and Robbers. I fished a lot. I liked to catch carp and shrimp and other fish.

Did your parents get rich? After all, people called cotton the white gold.

No. The white gold, yes, some got rich, but the workers, no. And it was only for a very short time that it was good. I’ll tell you why it didn’t last very long. What happened with the white gold was that people started getting really rich really fast, so they bought a new car or something for their wife so when the good times ended they had to go to the bank and get a loan. At first the parcel owners got loans from the Colorado River Land Company. They paid it back. Then the banks came, and people started borrowing from the banks, and it just caved in, because the banks were charging a lot of interest. Also, when the government got involved, people borrowed from the government, saying, If I don’t pay it back this year, I’ll pay it back next year, because it’s only the government, so what can they do to me?

So here’s the difference between the people here, she resumed. In other places they wait for it to rain. They wait for the government to come to help them. Here, no. When people first arrived, there was no water, so they built the canals, she said proudly. And now they take the canals all the way to Tijuana and other places! Here, the people know they have to protect the plants from the heat and in other places they just throw water on the ground . . .

The ways of farming my parents knew worked in the south of Mexico, but here it is different. In Jalisco they were used to farming but they were also used to going to the cantina with their friends. But here you had to work much harder.

I had just begun to perceive the sorrow and bitterness beneath her pride when she said: This is something that I will never understand, that people will sell everything and come here, get a new life, a new wife. So many doctors and lawyers end up here washing dishes. Where they come from there’s work. But here there’s
hard
work . . .

END OF THE GOLDEN AGE

In spite of that
hard
work, some people enveloped their recollections in a nostalgic luminescence of white gold; and for the ending of the White Gold Epoch, most of the rememberers I had the privilege of listening to did not, like Señora Ramírez, blame the banks; they followed habit and blamed the gringos. It seemed that there was a Northsider plot to get the good people of the Mexicali Valley to plant as many cotton acres as possible, on the promise of high prices; then the prices dropped.

Strangely enough, Northsiders did not remember it quite that way. Richard Brogan for his part said: In the 1950s in Mexicali the boll weevil was probably as problematic as anywhere else in the world. They don’t have ploughdown times. There can be stalks and debris on the ground. We ran the weevil out of here and they probably all went to Mexicali and thrived! That hurt their cotton. And then cotton is a world-driven commodity. We’re not growing cotton on our Cotton Belt like we used to. Imperial’s not producing hardly any. We were able to grow three bales-plus here per acre, even with salinity and boll weevil problems. I don’t know if at one time we weren’t realizing at least a gross of a thousand dollars an acre. But we’ve lost everything. The cotton gins are gone. The structures are gone. The pickers have been sold off. I believe Finnell
²¹⁵
and his farm connection did it for some reason. I don’t know why. People who were in the cotton business will sit back and remember the cost. They didn’t realize that there could be somebody gaining in that process. I always thought that Claude was of such stature that no one would question. And here he is, a major key player in this water thing. The Kuhn family, they were big cotton growers but it doesn’t matter to them . . .

Chapter 117

SUBDELINEATIONS: COTTONSCAPES (1796-2007)

Cotton would grow very well if it were sown.

—José Joaquín Arrillaga, exploring the Mexicali Valley near the Río Hardy, 1796

A
man stands quizzical in cotton which has already grown up to his elbows. This must be the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk!

A tan-colored man in a tan-colored suit grips an immense tan-colored blossom with boyish pride; the stalks rise above his head to lose themselves in a tan-colored fog; the tan ground cracks at his feet.

At Pomona,
no definite conclusion as to the value of Egyptian cotton culture in that region has been reached.
That was in 1903-04, exactly forty years after Sacramento offered the first-ever cotton exhibit at the State Fair. In Imperial, of course, where we’re wide awake, the first experimental planting took place in 1902. In strict obedience to that hundred-and-sixty-acre limitation, Joe Macdonald announces that he plans to raise six hundred acres of cotton in the Imperial Valley come 1905. Whatever happened to him? Judge Farr swears to me that the first commercial planting of three hundred acres did not occur until 1909; moreover, it might have failed to please the Ministry of Capital; for in 1910, a mere fourteen acres get consecrated unto cotton. But in 1911, that statistic enlarges to fourteen
thousand
acres! Next year, Imperial Valley cotton will take first prize at the New York fair. Gaze with me at this old photo of the white loveliness of the cottonballs in a field’s variegated darkness: The caption reads
Meloland, one of Imperial’s first cotton fields!
Harold Bell Wright surely admires those cottonscapes likewise; he emerges from his ramada from time to time, blinking in the sun, trying to invent another plot twist for cherry-lipped Barbara Worth. Within an oval in the 1912-13 Imperial Valley directory I read:
IMPERIAL VALLEY: Cotton Is King.
There’s a Hotel King Cotton in Imperial. The Imperial Valley Oil & Cotton Co. has built five cotton gins, one in each major town. In 1914, the
Imperial Valley Press
advises:
Cotton Industry Reaching Giant Proportions Here
. (“The valley” being still only weakly delineated, the paper refers to an estimated
40,000 acres of the crop on each side of the international line.
) Meanwhile, the 1914 Imperial Valley directory informs us that
this year
cotton covers
over 28,000 acres, and some say as high as 80,000 (the reader may accept either of the figures).
The beanstalk shoots up!
The outlook for the crop is so good that it is believed the yield will average a bale to the acre.
In 1917, seventy thousand Imperial acres produce thirty-five thousand bales!

In 1910, a certain foreman of the Colorado River Land Company leases six hundred Mexicali hectacres, plants some of them in cotton, and becomes ecstatic. In 1912 the company plants twelve hectares;
²¹⁶
in 1920, fifty thousand. The peak year is 1927 at sixty-four thousand hectares. A historian will define the
white gold
as follows:
cotton—the key to Baja’s economic growth and independence.
On the other side of the line, the California Board of Agriculture utters its own invocation of praise:
The yield per acre in the Imperial Valley is much larger than in any other state in the Union.
Indeed, the average production of 1916 was four hundred pounds an acre, Virginia, whose name one can’t help but associate with cotton, coming in a very distant second at three hundred and ten.

The pickers walk beneath the rows,
writes Paul S. Taylor,
or crawl if the stalks are short, and pick with both hands into a sack suspended from the shoulders or waist, and dragged either at the side or between the legs.
In Kern County there will be ten to fifteen thousand pickers in 1933. More than ninety percent of that year’s production will be shipped to Japan. A crop and chattel mortgage will be taken, as the farmers say, on
everything except the farmer’s wife.
But what do we care about Kern County down here in the Paradise of self-sufficient homelands, I mean
the wonderland of factories?—
Well, you see, Imperial has competition; everybody in California wants to get in on the white money! (For the California crop, a new grade has been created:
extra white.
Poor old Virginia!) By 1929 nearly one-third of all large cotton farms in the United States may be found in California,
where the pattern of cotton culture approximated industrial rather than family farm production.
Here in Imperial, we’d better watch them.

Palo Verde and Coachella have already begun to emulate us. The San Joaquin enters the game during World War I. Production grows and sprouts and buds until the depression of 1921. May we hover, please, in the peak year 1920?
²¹⁷
That was when eighty-six percent of all California cotton came from the Imperial Valley, Palo Verde and Coachella, and only fourteen percent from the San Joaquin.

Since 1920, however, the advantages of the northern valley in yield per acre have been so marked, and the effects in Imperial Valley of the encroachments of alkali, and
competing vegetable crops so great, that by 1932 the percentage of California cotton grown there had risen to 96 per cent . . .

In 1929 we find H. H. Clark, General Manager of the Colorado River Land Company, addressing the California-Arizona-New Mexico Cotton Association in a congratulatory mood: This year’s crop is worth a hundred billion dollars!
He believes the time is ripe
for
a selling agency.
We need have no fear that our monopolies will not become better and better as the years go by.

In 1930-31, cotton acreage is down to twenty-seven thousand six hundred hectares in the Mexicali Valley.

In 1932, the Imperial Valley produces less than one percent of California’s cotton.

The national crop limitation of 1933 destroys only thirteeen thousand acres, or six percent of Northside’s cotton. The Colorado River Land Company considers increasing cotton production, since it is not bound by Northside’s laws, but finally decides that this would not be in the economic interest of the Chandler Syndicate.

SWINGS OF A GRAPH

What is cotton, but swings of a graph? In 1953, Imperial County acreage peaks at nearly a hundred and thirteen thousand; in 1957 fewer than forty-four thousand will be planted, due to
acreage controls.

The
California Cultivator
told the parable in 1925. The protagonist could have been practically any crop over almost any longish period:
Many fell into it. Cotton fell in price. Growers were ruined. Their only asset was gone. Cotton was abandoned as a crop. Cotton rose in price. Many land owners rushed again into cotton, to sow every acre thereto.

In 1917, Imperial’s average cotton yield was a bale per acre. In 1953, it achieves over a bale and a half; in 1954, nearly two bales.

In 1958, a lettuce grower complains from El Centro:
The cotton deal, we have lost—the United States has lost their world outlet for cotton because of your controlled marketing.

A Minnesota farmboy has a rather different take on it:
Here is a cautionary tale on failure to diversify. Buoyed by the peak in agricultural markets in 1920 (lots of reasons, most related to the aftermath of WWI), Imperial farmers began a spectacular climb in the 1920s followed by an even more spectacular crash (Column D, lines 2-16, and Rows 22
39, Ag Census). It’s primarily for the sake of cotton that I include the acreages for the even-numbered years between 1910 and 1920, and the dollar production number for 1920 is not a typo. Unfortunately, cotton was devastated by declining prices in the 1920s combined with the eventual arrival of all the pests that devastated cotton in the south. This was the simple result of short-sightedness, as the use of cheap cotton batting from boll-weevil states for packing vegetable and fruit crops was common at the time. Despite optimistic reports in the 1920s and 30s on the number of bales coming into the county that were burned by inspectors due to pests, cotton virtually disappeared from Imperial in the 1930s and 40s as low prices and unreliable yields drove farmers to other crops. Comparative advantage eventually won out (along with improvements in pest control), and Imperial is a leading (and profitable) US producer in the niche market of high quality long-staple cotton, thanks mainly to its long growing season and stable water supply.

Meanwhile, Lupe Vásquez blames coldblooded manipulation by the gringos for the cotton recision in Mexican Imperial, and Señora García accuses salinity; while Señora Ramírez shakes her head and sighs: It was only for a very short time that it was good . . .

Yet what is any of it, but the merest, craziest swings of a graph?