Imperial (124 page)

“I JUST LIKE TO BE HERE”

Meanwhile, in Mexican Imperial, Cárdenas’s undoing of the Chandler Syndicate—as attested by the document from 1949 in which Conrad C. Caldwell, representing the Colorado River Land Company, conveys to the señores Chi Chun Chan, Chiu Chon Yee, Yee Sue Chan and Alfredo Chang Fong a single parcel: lot number twenty in Villarreal, extent twenty hectares—has strengthened the Imperial Idea. Yes, those with smaller means or different agendas may buy their Imperial dream jointly; but does that make them any less enterprising than Wilber Clark? No doubt the bifurcation between competitive individualism and
ejidatarianismo
strains the Idea a trifle, but Southsiders are less burdened by grandiose expectations. They certainly say less about their rights.

(On the subject of rights, here is José López’s codicil to the Imperial Idea:
What you have is what you are worth.
If he, too, could have owned a ranch, perhaps José could have been as proud as Vandenberg. But he did not, so he said: It’s like this thing with the police. If I have a backpack and my clothes are dirty, and I haven’t got an address to show, I’ve been taken in to jail for thirty-six hours, just for being poor. There’s no food, no blanket, no heating, no air-conditioning, and it’s filthy. Especially here in Mexico, you have to fight to survive. I’ve seen fights break out just for a piece of bread or a taco somebody got sent from outside. Then they want to kill each other. And then you have to defend yourself or they’ll take you for a pussy. Me, I’ve always been left alone, ’cause I respect people and I won’t let anybody just walk over me.)

In 2004, in Colonia Santo Niño, I met an employee of the State Commission of Public Services in Mexicali, a kind and hospitable man of late middle age who in true Imperial fashion declined to have his name printed in my book. When I asked him why he had chosen to live in this particular patch of sand, he replied: I don’t really like the city, so I came out here. Too many people out there! I was the first person in the place.

Did it look the same as it does now but without houses?

Pointing to dirt, flatness, tires and rubbish, he said: That vacant lot out there, that’s how it was.

And why did you choose this particular
colonia
?

Because I got tired of the noise, he said. I like solitude.

(Translation:
My house is on a hill, and at night I could look for miles in any direction and not see a neighbor’s light.
So what if there was no hill?)

Who named the
colonia
?

The state government. They named it because of the Rancho Santo Niño, which has been there I don’t know how long. I was transferred from Tijuana and the ranch was already here. I have been here for eighteen years. The people who were paying rent in Centro began to come here. And because of that it got big.

And did that disappoint you? Because there’s not so much solitude now.

No. Because I’m right here on the edge it doesn’t matter.

So the
colonia
began to grow. Then what happened?

Services. Water, light, electricity, telephone . . .

Did you build your house yourself?

Yes.
Sólo.
I learned how to do it when I was working in Costa Mesa, San Diego County. I did it in one month. I have been married here for four years. I met my wife right here, when I was four blocks away from where I am now. My wife lived two blocks away.

It’s very calm here, he added. You can leave the door open.

What’s your favorite thing to do here?

I like to be here alone, or with my wife, just the two of us. I just like to be here.

What’s the future of this
colonia
? Skyscrapers?

I think so. It’s happening little by little.

That makes you sad?

No, the opposite. Because in Centro I rented, and here this is mine.

Chapter 138

IT SEEMS LIKE THE MONEY IS BEING TAKEN BY SOMEBODY (2003)

L
upe Vásquez was born in Newman, California, a Central Valley town whose exit sign I pass when riding Highway 5 between Los Angeles and Sacramento. I have never been to Newman, which is, of course, a hot, flat agricultural town. When Lupe came into the world (sometime in the 1950s, I believe), his father was picking melons.

He was raised in the Imperial Valley, in Heber. He met his wife while picking broccoli.

When I was about six years old, he said, up in the summer, we used to pick prunes, grapes, so we could make some money for clothes, shoes. My father taught us how to make our money for ourselves. It wasn’t hard, it was
fun
! he cried, glaring at me.—We stayed in this camp without electricity. We had oil lamps. I hear there are still some places like that in San Diego, north county: Oceanside, Fallbrook, Escondido. The people stay in shacks in the bushes, and they pick strawberries, lemons . . .

Which crop is your favorite?

Well, none! They’re all a bitch to pick. But the easiest I’ve done is corn, ’cause you don’t have to cut it with a knife; you just break it off. The women pack it off in the machine. The broccoli is a bitch because you get wet. You have to wear rain equipment, and cloth gloves on the inside and rubber gloves on the outside. Plus, a lot of times you have
la perdida,
what they want from you: A lot of time. They want three loads. They don’t care how long we work. I don’t know how long, because I just work on the ground, cutting. We use a thin shredding blade, thin blade knife, the same you use to cut lettuce. It’s dangerous because it’s very sharp. There’s incidents where people get drunk and they fight with the knife. When you come into Mexicali, don’t carry it with you after work, because the cops will say it’s a deadly weapon. I put it in my backpack where they can’t see it. Anyway, it’s only an
arma blanca,
a white weapon. It’s not as dangerous as an explosive or a gun.

I’ve picked bell peppers and grapes up in Coachella. I’d say the conditions are better up there. They don’t work you as hard. Over here it’s hurry up, hurry up. The cooler wants two loads . . .

Cantaloupes, you just pick ’em up and off. There’s a packing machine. The ones that come off the stem easy are ripe, and you see the color: The ones that are a little bit yellow are the ones that are ripe. But sometimes they want the ones that are not ripe, too, although that’s not too common.

I think the Mexican labor started in 1910, 1915, he said then. That’s when they built the All-American Canal. That’s when they were selling the acres, ten cents an acre. I don’t know why Mexicans didn’t buy.

Why are Mexicans often so poor?

Because there’s exploitation. Those contractors, the farmers pay them fourteen dollars and they pay the workers six dollars and seventy-five cents. That money, where does it go? It seems to me like somebody’s taking the money. This valley produces
everything.
I’ve even heard of
mangoes.
It seems like the money is being taken by somebody.

Chapter 139

CHÁVEZ’S GRAPES (1962-2006)

So we went and stood tall outside the vineyards where we had stooped for years.

—Proclamation of the Delano Grape Workers, 1969

O
nce upon a time, Jim Holcomb still lived at Dead Man’s Hole, right on the edge of the Great Warner Ranch where Highway 79 crossed the cattleguard. He used to prove his mettle by shooting at the merchandise at “Bob” Gun’s saloon and store, after which he’d pay the bill. He arrested a Mexican fugitive at gunpoint and turned him over to the sheriff. Who knows exactly when these feats of Imperial valor took place?
Old-Timers of Southeastern California,
published in 1967, replies:
No doubt those were the good old days before we had Civil Rights Marches, riots, and the many other situations of which we find ourselves complaining so much of the time today.

But you and I remember that even in those good old days, the Wobblies were singing:

They’ll all be affrighted, when we stand united

And carry that Red, Red Card.
²³³

Never mind those freaks—the good old days remain! In 1975, I read in my
California Farmer
that
INDEPENDENT GROWERS KEEP WORKERS HAPPY
in Salinas.

“I WILL
NOT
FOLLOW IN MY MOTHER’S FOOTSTEPS”

How happy might workers feel within the entity I call Imperial?—Ecstatic, no doubt. In proof, I invite you to read the
California Farmer,
which reassures our publicthat the United Farm Workers’ lemon strike in Yuma drags on
without any notable success.
Moreover, the UFW has fallen out with the Confederation of Mexican Laborers! I can’t help believing in people.

All over California, growers, shippers and authorities stand resolutely affrighted and united against the United Farm Workers!

In Delano, home of the dangerous militant César Chávez, there’s now a reactivated South Central Farmers Committee and I pause to quote Mark Zainovich, Market Information Chairman of that organization:
We don’t have time to propagandize as the United Farm Workers of America are doing. All we have to do is tell the truth . . .
In other words,
INDEPENDENT GROWERS KEEP WORKERS HAPPY
. Why wouldn’t they be?

In Imperial County, a man is irrigating onions on Good Friday. He begins at six in the morning and his shift is supposed to last twenty-four hours. That night, winds eat away the levee, and, as the Agricultural Labor Relations Board hearing understates it, the man
had a very difficult night.
At six on Saturday morning, the foreman tells him to stay on the job a bit longer. At ten in the morning the foreman visits him again, still without anybody to replace him. The irrigator says that he is very tired, to which the foreman replies that if he sleeps he’ll be fired. The irrigator repeats that he is tired. In that case, says the foreman, he can come back on Monday for his final paycheck.

Paul S. Taylor, 1973:
Among the results of delay by Mexican-Americans in deciding to accept and affirm American citizenship, has been prolonged civic inaction to protect their own self-interest. A dramatic example has been the survival—under very dubious legality—of concentrated ownership in Imperial Valley, California.

In 2004, Edith Karpen looks back upon that time from her own point of view:
The farmers were the ones that got the Mercedeses and the ones like that. There was an emerging middle class. As the peon type became more educated and sophisticated, then the bilingual storekeepers and all came in. So starting in the sixties they started more bilingual speakers. Then, from being just very grateful for being included, they became very demanding.

How demanding, exactly? Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, a migrant child named Delmira Treviño promised herself: I will
not
follow in my mother’s footsteps. I swear that I will
not
marry a man who has dirt under his fingernails, and who drags me from field to field.

César Chávez stood on the horizon.

HINT

Years later, people would still be scarred by the memories.

On this subject Richard Brogan advised me: You need to talk to people who are extremely intelligent, because all you get is emotion. Hell, they don’t have a clue what hard work is all about. They don’t work the fields.

APRICOTS

He was right. In a museum folder labeled “Apricots,” which contains images of many things other than apricots, the first photograph depicts a space between many parallel beams to which a single line of lightbulbs is perpendicularly oriented. Beyond all this lie two railroad cars, one of which says CENTRAL PACIFIC and EXPRESS, while the other says FRUIT, for this zone has been consecrated to fruit! These ovoid globes of it as pale as onions, what are they? The folder says “Apricots,” but . . .

Mexican-looking men in caps and brimmed hats stand along the long sorting troughs, which are rollered like the filing shelves of the County Recorder’s office in El Centro (this allows the heavy death index ledgers to be more easily slid out); the men reach for the pale fruits with their dark hands; they seem as if they are concentrating each and every one on choosing the single apricot or whatever it is which will ensure their happiness; they look bemused and relaxed, yet grave; are they going slowly at the orders of
Hetzel the Photographer
, so that they won’t be degraded into blurs; or does Imperial’s heat require of them the dreamy care and slowness licensed to the inhabitants of other tropical regions? In Thailand I knew a woman who hated Caucasians; she particularly liked to tell the story of the German lady who sneered at how sluggishly southeast Asians worked; after a few days in Thailand this foreigner, trying to do as she would have done in Germany, overexerted herself and nearly died; after that, she learned to move slowly. In Imperial, where every shadow in every footprint is bordered by glaring light, campesinos and field workers must work with analogous caution. So they work longer to make their quota. (Lupe Vásquez:
They don’t care how long we work.
)

Because I was studying this Hetzel photograph in an air-conditioned archive (anyhow, it wasn’t hot outside that day, only ninety-two or -three), I remained free to imagine that its subjects were also cool, in which case their pondering and musing over perfect fruits might have been as pleasant as a woman’s browsing through her jeweler’s emeralds and rubies, each of which could be bought at a fancy price.

The pretty young Mexican-American intern, who from the look of her hands and long painted fingernails had passed few of her days in agricultural work, knew that those white fruits had to be apricots because they were in a folder labeled “Apricots.”—Oh, those are definitely onions, said the archivist, who actually knew something.