Imperial (119 page)

When I asked how I could meet a Date Queen from long ago, Mr. House replied: There’s only one that I know that’s dead. One of ’em passed away. Passed away at an early age. I know where a beautiful one is in Redlands.

It was a very hot still July morning in Coachella, and Mr. House sat unmoving for a time with the sunlight harshly shadowing his face. Finally he said: I would tell you that the one from 1947, when I saw her in 1997, she was just as beautiful as she was then. Trim and petite. You couldn’t believe how elegant she was.

Chapter 130

YOU CAN’T PRODUCE THINGS THE WAY YOU USED TO (2003-2004)

Migratory working man, I’m on my way—
I am done with sun and sand and new-mown hay;
I have worked from sun to sun,
Nothing have I ever won
And now, thank God, my harvesting is done.

—IWW song, before 1923

CRYING IN YOUR BEER (2003)

What caused Imperial to go wrong?—Why, what on earth are you talking about? Nothing’s wrong.

Way over in Carol, Illinois, which has been detached from Imperial for some years now, the President of a corporation with the Imperial name of Prince Industries
dismisses gloomy industry talk of the disappearance of U.S. manufacturing as “a big lie.”

“There’s a lot of crying-in-your-beer stuff going on” because of China, lost jobs and other pressures, he said.

Prince Industries makes
precision metal products.
What would have taken the company
dozens of humans
to accomplish, it learned to do with three machines, which then got replaced by one machine.

Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution,
explains the President of Prince Industries.
You can’t produce things the way you used to.

Once farming changes from a way of life to a means to an end, once crops become equivalent to precision metal products, why, then you can’t produce things the way you used to. It’s as simple as that.

South of Mexicali, where
maquiladoras
have begun to gobble up ranchos and
ejidos,
a woman said to me: There’s still much cotton in the valley, and right now it goes for a good price. It used to be that from August to January there was a large movement of people all over Mexico to harvest the cotton. It’s just like Mexicans now in the United States. But what happened is that machinery came in, so they didn’t need the workers so much.

What will happen to those workers?
There’s a lot of crying-in-your-beer stuff going on.

Maybe the President of Prince Industries is right. Ten years ago, Winzeler Gear in Chicago needed fifty-five people to make two million gears a month. Now, with thirty-five people, it makes sixteen million gears a month. I’ll bet gears are cheaper. I won’t cry in my beer about that!

In California, annual crop production has increased by two and a half times in the short interval from 1939 to 1959. Just imagine the magnitude of the increase over the lifetime of Imperial County! Shall we pat ourselves on our backs? On the contrary, let’s start weeping into our alcoholic beverage of choice, in deference to Mr. S. M. Beard of Salinas, 1958:
The widespread use of Great Lakes seed increased production in all districts; and this has had a detrimental effect on the western lettuce industry.
(Rousseau:
I have seen men wicked enough to weep for sorrow at the prospect of a plentiful season.
) Well, since lettuce overproduction drives down the price of lettuce, I’ll simply have to produce more lettuce in order to make the income as I used to. But how to manage that? I can’t afford the lettuce-harvesting machine which will make my previous lettuce-harvesting machine obsolete. Nor can I harvest lettuce as cheaply as the big boys do. What will happen to me?
There’s a lot of crying-in-your-beer stuff going on.

In the 1940s there were at least fifteen citrus packers in the city of Riverside. In 1996 there were only six—processing more fruit than before.

In 1950, California contained a hundred and forty-four thousand farms of about two hundred and sixty acres each. In 2000, there were only eighty-seven thousand five hundred farms; average acreage had risen to three hundred and eighteen; but the total acreage farmed in the state had fallen from thirty-seven and a half million to twenty-seven point eight million.
Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.

What
is
a farm, anyhow?

It’s a great feeling, when winter bears down or a drouth comes along, to go down cellar and look over hams and bacon, barrels of sauer kraut and pickles, sacks of dried beans, and plenty of turnips and potatoes and pumpkins. Say, boys and girls, that’s when you realize that the good earth is your best chance for security in your old age.
An old farm-wife wrote those words in 1940. Read between the lines, and her definition is evident enough. But my
California Agricultural Directory
informs me that
starting in 1975, the new definition of farm[s] is “places with annual sales of agricultural products of $1,000 or more.”

In short,
insists Victor Davis Hanson,
democracy—once created through bloodshed by those who owned land for the salvation of a few million others who owned land, in a society that was mostly independent, physical, poor, and rural—was now to be the unconscious entitlement of hundreds of millions who were mostly dependent, leisured, secure, and suburban. Land that was once understood to grow citizens as well as food was now to grow only food for those without land.

(Paul S. Taylor, 1981:
U.S. agriculture is the most productive in the world . . . Yet only four percent of all Americans work on the land.
)

Does Victor Davis Hanson deserve to cry in his beer? Are farmers the victims of the leisure class? But perhaps some of them (for instance, the members of the Chandler Syndicate) have belonged to that class.—One afternoon in Calexico, Richard Brogan was explaining to me some of the doings of the Agricultural Stabilization Board, and he said: They have a complete grid mapping of every county. Those subsidies are based on a past history of production. They will then have the current allotment or what have you for each acreage. If you have a thousand acres of ground and forty acres has a cotton base, I think you can move it around on the ground you control. Well, there’s people who really don’t understand it or are jealous. There’s enforcement, monitoring. But people who know how to lease land are just good, savvy, crafty people.

Let’s say that the times we live in, when every field gets subdelineated down to the last cent, have transformed farmers from stockpilers of their own cellars to savvy, crafty lessors and lessees of the soil.
Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.
Let’s thank science, without which we wouldn’t possess that brand-new dehydrating method which allows Imperial County to sell asparagus to Europe.

In 1982, Imperial remains in fact the fourth most agriculturally productive county in the state—first for cattle and calves, alfalfa hay, wheat, sugar beets and lettuce!
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

A private investigator from San Diego whose business had taken him into Imperial County for years told me that he used to see
sweaty guys in farm clothes
in the bars there; he saw fewer and fewer of them now. He said: The really rich ones own or control eighty-five percent of all agribusiness. Fifteen percent are controlled by the blue-collar guys.

Will the small farms go under? I asked.

Sure, just like in the Central Valley. The Mom and Pop farms are being swallowed up by the housing tracts. The whole thing’s being crunched. That way of life is going now.

Reader, do you want to watch it go?

Imperial County Agricultural Commissioner’s report, 1970:
As you will note, there was an increase in the gross income of 4%, which on the surface appears to be substantial; however, the cost of farming continued to increase at an even greater rate. The result of the continued price squeeze is being felt throughout the community . . .

Imperial County Agricultural Commissioner’s report, 1980:
The disastrous marketing season for the 1979-80 lettuce crop, as well as a declining market in livestock, were the major factors in lowering the gross income for this year.

But wait a minute! Imperial County Agricultural Commissioner’s report, 1990:
. . . the total County Agricultural production values have surpassed the one billion dollar mark for the first time.
Manufacturing must be hitting another level of evolution.

Sometime between 1971, when he hand-lettered the beautiful title page of
I Remember America,
and 1985, when he died, the writer-painter Eric Sloane wrote:
The extraordinary family spirit and agrarian economy that originally sparked America are gone; only the old stone barns are left to remind us of it.
I myself wouldn’t cry in my beer about that. I never saw a stone barn in Imperial anyhow.

CRYING IN YOUR BEER (2004)

My
New York Times
informs me that
American agriculture is at a dangerous crossroads
because
the United States could soon become a net importer of food for the first time in about 50 years. In part because of Nafta and globalization, consumers often find it cheaper to eat tomatoes from Mexico . . . than what is grown a few miles away. Meanwhile, especially in the fast-growing states of the South and West, medium-sized farmers find that selling their land is more profitable than cultivating it.

I personally feel that this country can’t depend on the Mexican industrial sector, Richard Brogan told me bitterly. Just because it’s cheap labor today and everybody wants to outsource, they accept less quality. There’s the issue of the graft, the greed, the corruption. It’s not a level field.

Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

Chapter 131

THE AZTECS ARE BACK (2004)

He was beginning to yearn for Mexico,—for Mexico, which he had never seen, yet yearned for like an exile.

—Helen Hunt Jackson, 1884

W
hat caused Imperial to go wrong?—Nothing’s wrong, at least not on Southside.

A huge blonde sails by, her double chins bearded with sweat-pearls, and a man in a white sombrero chats without hurry or limit to a man in a baseball cap as they lean against the IMPORTMEX window behind the line of angle-parked cars; there is more traffic than there used to be, and it goes faster: more once-yellow buses and men drinking alertly from water bottles, more men raising their sunglasses to their foreheads to study each suspicious situation, more young boys in baseball caps, more pale white cars and even more gringos, who occasionally muse, as did I just this morning, over the shop window of immense silver belt buckles incised with golden bulls’ heads; in the end, I contented myself with a narrow belt with horse-shaped appliqué, and the first red shoelaces of my life; oh, I felt free then; I was a dandy; and I could see the same awareness of becoming free in my fellow gringo’s eyes—he could wear a belt buckle of greater immensity than he had ever imagined! He could walk down the street and everybody would look at him and think about his penis. In the end I didn’t buy the belt buckle, for I feared that my penis might not live up to it. Back to the eternal present: It is hot, I feel dreamy and happy; and two pretty whores from the Hotel 16 Septiembre will soon remind me that if I wish I have permission to deploy the organ just mentioned. Right now they are leaning against a restaurant window, correcting their eyebrows with the aid of a tiny pink-framed mirror. One is much taller and prettier than the other. Her white-toothed smile rivals the river of sunlight on the street. The other, the blonde, keeps going over and over her hair with one hand. They lean; they chat, then sleepily call out to men, all the while correcting their eyebrows. The tall one, whose dark hair resembles a shroud, smiles again sideways, and by now her teeth are even brighter than the pavement; they glow and glow, but nobody cares.
Sign of Slow Growth Sends Stocks Lower.

Compared to American Imperial, Southside’s stocks have always been low; and that’s why a Northsider sees dirty poverty on the other side of the ditch. But Northside’s boomers turned much of American Imperial from a desert to a crazy-growing wonderland of money and agriculture, and this wonderland failed to keep its edge. Meanwhile, Southside augments itself. Its day is finally coming. Oh, yes,
THE AZTECS ARE BACK
. In the
ejidos
west of Algodones I remember meeting in a field of watermelon-pickers a young woman as squat, stone-hard, wide, huge and sinister as an ancient statue of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, whose skirts are serpents, whose bifurcated face sports insect mandibles and whose hands show a skull to the world. Sweat bloomed on her round face and on her meaty arms as she stooped and straightened, cradling between cannonball-breasts this or that immense green fruit; she worked laughing; it seemed that nothing could ever kill her; she could have trampled the entire world.

In the northern zone of sunroasted Imperial, some hide in defeat, some sell out, and some do deals with everyone’s water; some command field-worker armies upon their flat crop-empires. On Southside the campesinos sweat no less; sometimes they complain; but the heat somehow becomes them; they own it and are even proud of it. They work in the squash fields when it is a hundred and fifteen degrees, drinking jugs of water, and in later years sodas; the time will soon be here when they will slowly, patiently assemble products for foreigners in hot industrial parks. Why is Mexicali busier than El Centro? Why has Southside narrowed the gap between Northside and themselves?—Probably the weather, replies Mr. Larry Grogan.