Imperial (117 page)

The Tijuana that always was did not exist prior to the Volstead Act, of course. The sprawling, slum-riddled, increasingly water-impoverished entity of my time was emphatically present in the midcentury years when Dick’s typewriter excreted pulp manuscripts like bullets; but we ought to remember that as late as 1960, Mexicali continued to dominate Southside Imperial, with more than a hundred and seventy-nine thousand inhabitants to Tijuana’s hundred and fifty-two thousand.

In 1932, just before the end of Volstead, an American crossed the line and after
several blocks where there is no make-believe,
in other words shanties and shacks, arrived at his rendezvous with Tijuana officialdom:
We pass through the portal, the postoffice to one side and the bureau for prostitutes on the other.
He picked up his permit to sail and collect specimens.
Work over, . . . we dropped in Caesar’s, brass rail and all, and ordered a couple of silver fizzes.
For him, the setup was much the same as for other Volstead tourists:
From the new West Gate to the far end of the track
the management, customers and choice of merchandise were all American. Tijuana was still a precursor of the Las Vegas of my time. But Volstead died, immigrants from southern Mexico began to squat in the dry hills, Caesar’s brass rail grew tarnished, and while many customers remained American, Tijuana grew out from under American management and became
Tijuana as it always was.

My parents got married in the late fifties, when Tijuana was, they said,
a dirty, sleepy but wide-open town. The standard joke was, “Do you want to get married? Divorced? My sister is available.”
My parents’ memories, like mine a half-century later, play a pageant of excitingly unpredictable and therefore potentially menacing exoticism on the other side of the ditch:

... For our honeymoon, incredible as it now seems, we drove down to Tijuana one morning with 3 friends to see the jai alai games. (We were taking a 4-day honeymoon in Pasadena!) As the games didn’t start until evening, we went on to Rosarita Beach . . . and the guys gambled in the casino of a hotel. This was advertised in the L.A. papers and we (22 years old) assumed all was on the up and up. We actually won enough money to buy dinner at the hotel! But—exactly one week later, the Federales swooped down and arrested all the Americans who were gambling there . . .

In 1966, Mexicali and Tijuana were nearly equal in population. By 1970, Tijuana had pressed ahead, but by a margin of less than fifteen thousand. The
maquiladoras
began to arrive. By the century’s end Tijuana would have passed the million mark while Mexicali barely exceeded half a million souls.

She might have been fully grown in 1966, but Tijuana, like a fifteen-year-old hooker on Avenida Insurgentes, was already herself. In 2055 she will be vaster and more wrinkled, but no less herself.

Imperial is bifurcation. The Salton Trough is a worm almost cut through by steel fence, the two halves writhing and leaping. The fence shoots westward, its Northside keepers steadily overcoming its intermittence, and arrives at the Pacific, where Tijuana presses longingly against San Diego, like a prisoner kissing his wife through the glass window of the visiting cell. Imperial is constraint indeed. Therefore, Imperial is possibility, and within Imperial it is Tijuana where possibility gets reified above all.
You could obtain anything, do anything, you wanted.
And in material advantages they are already well supplied.

MIRAGES OF A TIME TRAVELLER

Dick’s contention that
nothing changes in Tijuana and yet nothing lives out its normal span
derives in part from his observation of Mexican street prostitutes, who, like their sisters in Northside, do flower and age more quickly than other women. In this respect, his maxim is not especially true. But there is a cheapness to much of Tijuana, and therefore an expendability. The shantytown
colonias
which now begin to found themselves in the dry hills, the
maquilas
which desperately seek employees and then move to China, the infamously evanescent dental work, the warping, mildewed hotel rooms, these legitimately impress themselves upon time-travelling Northsiders whose muteness and deafness in Spanish and whose inability to stay put for more than a night or two cuts them off from the vibrancy of the place, which is far more than the nightmare luxuriance of the red-light district.—I want to marry Tijuana, but look! She was fifteen when I met her, and now she’s a skeleton!—But was her ageing innate to her, or did it happen because the JJ-180 was wearing off and I had to come down to my day job in Northside? Tijuana pretends to want to marry me, but she knows that I’ll soon be gone, back behind the wall where she cannot follow, so she’d better hustle me while she can, all the while cocking a smile at her next ten husbands.
Time moves too fast here and also not at all,
because I never stay long, and I always come for the same thing: free trade. A trumpeter from Northside, enraptured by the rhythms of bullfights, which are prohibited on his side of the ditch, establishes a musical ensemble called Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Then he carries his new rhythms home. So do I. Border Patrolman Dan Murray remarks that illegals do the work Americans won’t do; and whenever he time-trips into Tijuana, Dr. Eric Sweetscent will tempt himself with the possibilities that Americans won’t provide.
You are going to kill yourself, señor?
I can’t help believing in people.

Chapter 124

TECATE (1950)

M
eanwhile, Tecate drowses on.

In 1900, Mexicali’s non-indigenous population was perhaps one or two
Chinos
growing cotton along the banks of the Río Nuevo. Let’s generously allow her a population of one. Tecate then boasted a hundred and twenty-seven residents—half the number of Tijuana’s hordes.

By 1950, three thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine people dwell in Tecate. But Tijuana’s population exceeds hers by more than a factor of sixteen; Mexicali’s, by eighteen. At the end of the century, thanks to the tourist trade, the brewery, her cooler climate and her eventual conveniency for
pollos
and
coyotes,
Tecate will be more vibrant than many a failed Northsider agricultural town, but she will remain overlooked, another Imperial placeholder.
²²²

(How could it be otherwise? In Northside one often gets a sense of a person’s accidentalness in a place, or at least of the person’s feeling that this place is neither better nor worse than any other; whereas on Southside people frequently privilege their own over any other place, even the place next door. I remember the old man on the park bench in Tecate who informed me: Mexicali is very big—
too
big! A lot of farming and agriculture! And it’s very hot,
mucho, mucho!
Here it’s nice and cool. The only problem is that here in winter it gets cold and rains a lot. Winter is very long.—That was the view from Tecate, center of the universe. But in a single city to the west, which is to say down in Tijuana, a newspaper reporter explained the following: Nobody cares about Tecate! They only go there to get to the United States. You can follow the cans of tuna across the line to the United States . . .—And in Mexicali, of course, the trueblood
cachanillas
shone with civic pride; they would never want to live anywhere else, including Tecate.)

Tecate drowses on; throughout the century she will drowse on. Tecate is a slow street, a fat palm tree, a man in white chopping meat for tacos, mariachi music canned and on low, a single honking horn, two blackhaired girls wearing white hair-ribbons and navy-and-white gold-buttoned school uniforms in the back of a white Chevrolet on Benito Juárez.

Chapter 125

HOLTVILLE (1905-1964)

The “Carrot Capital of the World” is a homey community of 3,000 with every resident excited over the city’s present progress . . .

—Holtville Chamber of Commerce, 1952

O
nce upon a time in 1905, we find Mr. C. C. Bowles roasting a million bricks for the new brick plant in Holtville, and I would not be surprised if “the Little Giant,” by whom I mean W. F. Holt himself, wagons or motors regularly down from Redlands to boost this and that in his eponymous city.

Holtville, what can we say about Holtville? Just a little bit east we can find barrel cacti; there are also some of those on Imperial County’s southwest corner.

Here is Holtville advice from 1964:
When you stop at Fifth and Holt, entrance to the park, drop in at the Chamber of Commerce office and say “Howdy.” The Chamber Manager will bid you a hearty welcome. (He’ll give you a free booklet containing more than 100 carrot recipes too!)

In an undated photograph, a doll in a wide white bell skirt like a
quinceañera
dress squats a trifle precariously upon a pyramid of vegetables entitled
CALIFOR NIA’S WINTER WONDER LAND
and
HOLTVILLE: CARROT CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
. More produce and then labeled open dishes of minced edibles lie before her like offerings. Three flags rise from behind her head, one of them being the American. And, resting one manicured, nail-painted hand on what might be a giant cabbage just behind the toy pig (this picture has faded considerably), and wearing a Vikingesque helm with fringe on top like the brush of a vacuum cleaner attachment, a lady grips another flag, which resembles the Tricouleur of France, and life goes on forever . . .

Chapter 126

WHAT A COLD STARRY NIGHT USED TO BE LIKE (1949-1989)

And giants lived in this Sun.

—Codex Cuauhtitlán (Aztec)

I
t was just such a wonderful thing that happened to me, said Alice Woodside. Our little house was out in the middle of the fields, and my eye was accustomed to distant horizons. One morning, very early, my father came and woke me up. I think I was maybe five years old. He took me to the north end of the field, where you can see west forever. For miles, I could see wooden towns, old towns, old houses, in a kind of a pinkish peach atmosphere. I said: Those houses have never been there before! Where have they come from? And then as the sun came up they began to dissipate very slowly. And then my father explained to me it was the mirage to end all mirages. It could have come in all the way from some Colorado mining town.

He had a bad heart. I think he was pretty much aware that he was going to die. I called him on a Saturday, I think it was in 1989. I said, Dad, I keep forgetting to ask you: Did I really see that? He said yes. He also said, you know, Alice, once I had to go out at night and flood the fields because there was going to be frost. And I saw a rainbow around the moon. That was what he said. And he died that night. I never can talk about it without getting choked up.

You just can never believe what a cold starry night used to be like. They used to be blazing, those stars. Even up at Lake Tahoe, you don’t see that blaze. Everything’s filmed over.

Chapter 127

IMPERIAL REPRISE (
ca.
1950-2066)

1

I ’ll never forget cotton, no sir! They used to call it the white gold. Then the United States stopped buying.

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.

Back then the money had power. For all the night, fifty pesos, and for just in-and-out, ten pesos.
I wish to emphasize that these values are Gross Values, F. O. B. Shipping Point . . .

You could obtain anything, do anything, you wanted. As long as it was not done blatantly on the public street.

Everything was open. Something that I remember was crossing the border, which was like crossing the street.

2

It took him time to become a resident, a citizen. But he did it.

The whole families would work; they really had their eye on the dollar.
One would think that every day is a fiesta on the exciting Mexican-American border!
The seasonal farmworkers . . . continue to present a major social problem. The net income to farmers was not increased in proportion to the gross sales.

3

We have a beautiful artesian well which flows copiously all the time. Still, it was clear that the city—and the Navy—would soon need the water from the Colorado River.
THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
. The city wasn’t as big as it is now.
IMPERIAL COUNTY SHOWS RAPID INCREASE . . . We can see the possible unification of Imperial and Coachella Valleys in a continuous garden from the Mexican line.
Why, I would be sick to my stomach if I rode down that valley in California, over those long miles owned by one man.
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.