Imperial (13 page)

Day after day I went there, hoping to invade their thoughts and steal their stories,but most refused to talk to me, eyeing me with a hatred as lushly soft as a smoke tree sweeping its hair against a sand dune. In July their watchfulness might perhaps have been diluted by the presence of all the migrant workers, the men sitting or squatting under trees, drinking out of bottles, the boys in sweaty white T-shirts sleeping in the grass whom I remembered from the previous summer, but it was not summer now. The shadowy men glared at me, their Spanish insults and obscenities also glaring like the glancing glints of sunlight on cars, which in Imperial are themselves as bright as suns; and then they looked away, far away at a long vertebral column of boxcars ghosting across the desert like a procession of hay bales. On the first afternoon one hard man strolled over, making a sexual proposition which involved himself, myself, his wife and the woman who had driven me to the park and who now sat in her car with the windows rolled up. I could see that my sweetheart was anxious, and I felt a trifle anxious about her, but my intention that day was to stay only for a quarter-hour and learn what if anything might be possible here, and since it was daylight and she was in the car, I decided not to worry. The man’s face was as wrinkled as the cracked rows of earth in a sugarbeet field in high summer. Later, when I was photographing another man with the big camera, two others suddenly called that I’d better look out, and I saw him over there importuning her. (She’d rolled the window down; it was getting hot in the car.) The man was willing to tell me all about Mecca, but he required a thousand dollars, because it was “a deep story, the secret kind.” By the end, he’d adjusted his demand to a dollar and twenty-five cents. He was ecstatic when I gave him five. In case I might keep my promise to send a copy of his photograph, he wrote down the number of a P.O. box in Mecca, but on subsequent days and nights, when I was hoping to find him, the other men all insisted that he lived in Palm Desert. I never saw him again.

In fact he’d been worth his five dollars, for when a tall, gentle-looking old cyclist came by to inspect me, the man of the sexual proposition had interpreted for the two of us. The cyclist allowed that he was a coyote. He was willing to tell me “everything,” he said, and smilingly wrote down his address, which turned out to be right across from the railroad tracks. What location could be more strategic? An old lady laughingly told me that right there, where there’d formerly been bushes around the tracks, some clever Mecca boys had made a hole and hidden, waiting for the train to stop. Then they’d blowtorched their way through the train’s underbelly and stolen microwaves, stereos and other appliances. After that, the train company had cut down all the bushes. This old lady had often seen
pollos
leap off the freight train from Algodones. That was how the tall cyclist had come. Now for a fee he helped others do the same. The old lady said that sometimes the train didn’t slow, and then the
bodies
had to ride all the way to Palm Springs, which was considerably more dangerous. Whenever that happened, the tall cyclist lost his investment. All this, of course, was hearsay. The cyclist and I agreed that I’d come the following night at eight-o’-clock. But when the taxi pulled up on that dark dirt street at the appointed time, the cyclist refused to show, although the neighbors assured me that he was inside his fence watching me; and so it went the next day and the next night and the following day. The men in the park said that they hadn’t seen him. I never saw him again, either. His property was studded with bottles of water on sticks as a protection against witchcraft.

Another Mexican-American taxi driver, the son of an illegal field worker who’d died amnestied, had once tried his hand as a salesman in Mecca. He explained to me: Sometimes they tell you come and they don’t show. They hide. They’re humble people. Once they open the door to you, they’re very happy to make a friend, once they trust you.

I guess they don’t trust me.

Mecca, Mecca, he sighed. Mostly farm people. People who work the fields. Sometimes they get to fighting. I heard somebody got killed . . .

He was a first-generation immigrant, still Mexican, and so he defined himself in relation to the Mexican-Americans, saying: We care about our families and the place where we come from. We don’t forget what made us.
¹⁸
And we care about our religion. The Chicanos, the people who’ve been here more, they lose it. Some of them are
cholos,
you know, gangsters, low riders. They like to call us wetbacks . . .

The Mecca people of whom he had spoken were first generation like him. And yet a difference as sharp as the wicker-points of a fan-palm’s skin had already arisen between himself and them, those “humble people,” most of whom were living on unemployment right now, waiting for grape-pruning to begin the following month. He was not a humble person. He drove a cab. Perhaps he looked down on them a little. What then must they have thought about successes like him? A first-generation man in Calexico once remarked about three brothers whom we both knew: They’re the kind of guys in Mexico you know we call strawberries, since they think they don’t stink. Red on the outside, white on the inside. Fairskinned guys, not too dark . . .

Many of the Mecca people came from Michoacán, which of course lies far to the southeast of Imperial’s lowest bound, the Sea of Cortés. In one palm orchard in Thermal, the other laborers pointed out to me a fullblooded Indian from there who could not speak either Spanish or English; they said that he was a very good worker, but I don’t know how they told him what tasks to do; nobody spoke his language except other Indians from Michoacán. There were also Spanish-tongued immigrants and
pollos
from that place who said that they were Mexicans, not Indians. Others came from Guanajuato, that arid “mummy capital” made famous by one cemetery’s practice of digging up and exhibiting to admission-paying ghouls certain dead people whose relatives have defaulted in grave-rent. On the west side of Highway 111, in a dirt-paved Mecca cul-de-sac called Saint Anthony Trailer Park, where trailers and raised, graffiti’d houses lurked among the palm trees, some properties with fences around them and laundry on the fences, some fences made of metal and others of salvaged boards, I met an unmarried old couple from Guanajuato who agreed to speak with me only because my interpreter of that day also hailed from there. It was morning, the sandy ground just commencing to grow warm to the touch. I’d thought it better to try then than at the Mecca sunset, when Mexicans and Mexican-Americans leaned in the shade, and beside their small houses the people were sitting in their shaded yards; for sometimes a person might not wish to talk when the eyes of his neighbors are on him. I’m still not sure whether in this case it would have mattered. Openheartedly the couple gave me their names and even obligingly, pitifully presented their identity cards, I suppose in case I were some Immigration spy sent to entrap illegals. Both had come to Northside as
pollos
before they met. She came alone in 1980, “jumping onto a bus” as she casually told it, and eventually got amnestied. He paid a coyote two hundred and fifty dollars in Mexicali. That was back in 1972. He, too, was legal now. (Telling me this, he slowly interlocked his hands as if he were praying.) All the same, it seemed better not to write their names, for as I was speaking with them their Arab landlord, who told me with proud contempt that he couldn’t speak Spanish, drove up and interrogated me while the two Guanajuato people smiled fixedly, waiting to get into trouble. To me it was extremely painful to see how anxious and helpless they immediately became. At last he was satisfied, having copied down my address in Indio, and off he went. The Guanajuato woman smiled in relief this time, wiping her forehead. The man said that I had been very lucky, since Saint Anthony Trailer Park was private property, and so the owner could have expelled me. The owner’s concern, the man thought, was that I might be a building inspector, which may lead you to certain inferences about Saint Anthony Trailer Park.

How is the life here in Mecca? I asked.

Little work. Very sad. We work only on grapes. Waiting for the pruning. It would be good if assembly or other jobs came here.

Why can’t you work on other crops such as watermelons?

The man said that the watermelons were the preserve of Central Americans, especially Salvadorans.—They push them very hard, he said. Salvador
pollos
working here, no legals, so they push them harder. Too hard, so they don’t want us Mexicans. Discrimination.

These words now remind me of a sad man I met not long after, not a Mecca man but a city man, a pale yellow chunky man with curly hair and a faint moustache—he proudly showed me the map he’d drawn some weeks before so that he could find the Indio courthouse in sufficient time to be present for his arraignment on charges of driving while intoxicated—who seemed almost to be defending himself against the example of the inhabitants of Mecca, the ones from Michoacán and from Guanajuato (he himself was from Mexico City), the silent ones who were now harvesting far away near the horizon beneath the late afternoon moon which had already risen high above that cantaloupe field with its NO TRESPASSING signs (and yes, despite what the man from Guanajuato had said, a few of them were Mexicans) when the sad man explained: We U.S. born, new immigrants call us lazy, because we’re not really willing to work our best for five dollars an hour. When I was a teenager, I didn’t wanna work too hard for four dollars an hour . . .

How hard must somebody be willing to work to survive and prosper in Imperial? The couple from Guanajuato followed the harvest all the way to Bakersfield in their car. When the harvest came to Indio, ladies were allowed a little cart with an awning to shade them. The Guanajuato woman was grateful for that. Moreover, the family could work together. They
made a little group,
as they called it. He and his son did the picking, while she packed. In Bakersfield it was different.—That company is really racist, the man said. They want everything really strict. They can fire you just like that.—It was a vineyard with an Italian name, and this remark of his was the second reason I keep back his name. Both of them carried laminated identification cards bearing their photograph and the insignia of the winery. When they worked there, they had to stay in a camp where the field owner charged them seventy-six dollars per person per week for shelter, lunch included. The wage was six dollars and ten cents an hour,
but the small plants are piecework.
Perhaps the company could have everything its own way because in Bakersfield, only ten people that the Guanajuato couple knew of were legal. (Right here in Mecca, they said, the grape workers were
fifty-fifty legal and illegal.
)

After that, if they were lucky, they went on to Porterville. They worked from 25 May to 20 October, then they were laid off until December, when for a month and a half they could prune for piecework wages, thirty cents per plant. After that they were out of work again until the middle of March when the leaves came in, at which point it was culling time for another one and a half months.

We gotta stretch the money all our life, they said.

You want to stay here for good?

The woman, smiling and shaking her head, replied: When we retire, we plan to go back to Mexico, because here we can’t survive on an income of four-sixty to five hundred a month.

They owned their mobile home. But the rent at Saint Anthony was a hundred and ninety dollars, and the utilities about two hundred thirty, so there went four hundred and twenty right there, and they needed food and gas. They had to pay rent whether they slept in Mecca or not.

In your hearts, do you consider yourselves to be Mexicans or Americans?

They say, they feel the same, returned the interpreter. They will give their lives for U.S.A. or for Mexico. Here, even though there’s not always good pay, at least you can work. But when you get old, you can’t get hired no more.

How soon would that day come? He was already sixty-five and still working because he couldn’t afford to quit. She was forty-two. He looked much younger than his age, but she looked older.

If that Guanajuato couple were to emblematize Mecca, we’d have to call it a town of anxious, run-down lives—I don’t know if the word “exploited” would be fair, since those people voluntarily came a long, long way north to work; let’s consider this in another chapter, for I don’t envy them. But across the highway where the big trucks exhaled a metal-sweating breeze, and behind another of those Mecca fences (orchard-jungle and barking dogs within, silent people behind those), there lived a round-faced, round-spectacled old woman named Señora Alice Solario, whom I met on one of those fruitless night visits to the cyclist-coyote who was never at home, and her joy in the town was as miraculous as dark citrus orchards springing out of chalky dirt. Born in the Philippines, lucky, she said, to get one bowl of rice a day, she’d married a Mexican and found herself here, living behind her tall fence with the moon above her and crickets all around her. She and her husband had dwelled in Mecca ever since 1986. For fourteen years she’d worked at the nearby factory manufacturing bomb-casings. Some of them had been used in Operation Desert Storm, she said proudly. I was a little saddened by the thought of Filipinos and Mexicans harming Iraqis whom they’d never seen for the sake of a bad cause, but at least one of poverty’s graduates now possessed a stable job which was not as hard on her ageing body as picking grapes.

She said to me: This place, if you come here, for a family that’s poor, there’s always a place to get free food. There’s watermelon and cantaloupe after the first picking. There’s broccoli, tomatoes, bok choy, and over there is cilantro, cucumbers, lemons, zucchini . . .

She pointed into the darkness, showing where each field was. She knew where everything was. She said that the crops didn’t much change in each field from year to year. The growers were kind to gleaners, she also said.