Imperial (143 page)

Mr. Raskin also informs us of two interviews he made with
Jaime Cota, a founder and director at the CENTRO DE INFORMACIÓN PARA TRABAJADORAS Y TRABAJADORES ASOCIACIÓN CIVIL [“CITTAC”] . . . CITTAC is an information gathering, advocacy, and independent association that dealt with individual workers at Maquiladoras,
a word Mr. Raskin capitalizes just for me,
as well as various general political, social, and economic groups in Tijuana and Mexico.

... One of the main activities that CITTAC, and Cota, have undertaken is the presenting of labor “demands [complaints]” against employers at Maquiladoras in the setting of the Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje. . . . Cota has interviewed hundreds of Maquiladora workers, in some instances formulated their written demands, and appeared at the labor board hearings advocating for those individuals. In the slightly less than 20 years of its existence CITTAC has dealt with above 15,000 workers on different issues.

... Cota categorized most labor disputes as related to “unfair termination, low wages,” but occasionally for “environmental” reasons. In my follow-up interview with Cota he stated that of our subject group Matsushita, Tompson
[
sic
]
and Óptica Sola had most of the labor complaints he handled.

... Cota corrected that ÓPTICA SOLA was now KARL
[
sic
]
ZEISS VISION, a German firm. He called that Maquiladora one of the “dirtiest in the city.” Ten years ago, the El Mexicano newspaper published a list of the most polluting Maquiladoras in Tijuana, and Óptica Sola was on that list.

In a 2006 issue of the
Boletín Maquilero,
published by and for the workers of Tijuana (the masthead depicts on a blood-red background a blond tophatted Yankee in retreat from a family of brownskinned militants who are shouting at him with doubled fists), under the heading “Chemicals affecting our sexuality and reproduction”—to wit:
KOH, Cellosolve, Metanol, Acetona
and
Ácido Acético
—we read:
There is a great variety of these chemicals utilized in great quantities in maquiladoras such as Óptica Sola . . .
This article comes to you courtesy of Toña, CITTAC, Colectiva Feminista. Might she possibly hold the reputation of Óptica Sola in poor regard? Reader, that’s not for me to say. I’m simply a drudge who notes down other people’s words.

Back to Mr. D.’s report:
You will need a good pretext to get in, and as we didn’t have anything ready, we were unsuccessful.

Evidently their security was better than Mr. D. had thought. (He later assured me on the phone: I was trying my best bullshit. I kept asking them: Don’t you sell
anything
here?)

Well, well. Getting in might have to be my new toy’s job.

THE PERFECT SPY

The first time I wore the button camera, my dear friend Shannon helped me duct-tape the button’s secret square base to the underside of my shirt, with the real button duct-taped beneath that; we duct-taped the wire to my shirt in a few more places and I then attached the camera input unit to the digital video recorder, plugged in the power pack to both the input unit and the wire, dropped both of these latter modules into my underpants, turned everything on, zipped up my fly, buttoned my shirt, and marched grandly off to Mexicali, with Shannon fussing lovingly over that lone black button like a darling girlfriend. So we came to the border turnstiles, passed through them into Mexico, and I stared sternly at the throngs, confident that I was capturing every face forever. With a
con permiso, señor
to the Mexican officer, I invited myself through the special handicapped entrance to the benches by the border wall where José López from Jalisco awaited me; of course I was so distracted by the button camera that I could hardly understand anything he said. A living skeleton grimaced at me, and I outhrust my chest like a prize turkey, thereby recording him forever with the button camera. Then it was off to the Thirteen Negro Bar and the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico, Shannon smooching me and tenderly mussing up my shirt to make sure that the precious button camera wasn’t getting too cockeyed. Outside the Thirteen Negro, she reached passionately into my pants, making a darling little adjustment. That was her role; mine was to move as stiffly as if I were made of glass, choosing to interpret conservatively Mr. W.’s remark that
the video should be stable if the camera is still or slow.
The security guard patted down José, and I got anxious, but that time both Shannon and I, being harmless gringos, were permitted to pass freely through the turnstile into that loud red darkness decades old where men sat glaring balefully at the old cowboys dancing with fat middle-aged women and longhaired young women, some of the women laughing and loving it, or else pretending, the rest grumpily fending off crotch-grabs and butt-pinches, while I sat drinking my
cerveza
like a lord, aiming the center of my chest at the old, old man who nestled his head dreamily between a pockmarked woman’s breasts while they slowly trudged out a great circle and she smiled and stroked his hair. How poignant that footage would be! Maybe I should start making art films. There’s no feeling quite like discovering that one is far more talented than one thought. In brief, I was so enraptured with my button camera that I stared as crazily as the drunk beside me.

Two hours went by. Mr. W. had advised me that the digital video recorder would last for three. Or was it eight? And hadn’t he said that the button camera itself would last for only one? Rushing Shannon back across the border, I found that the poignant art film existed only behind my eyelids. Apparently when Shannon had reached into my pants, she, not knowing that I had turned the power pack on in the United States, turned it
off;
but there wasn’t even any footage before that; the living skeleton whom my documentary greed had sought to appropriate would have to remain immortal only to his own circle; I never saw him before or since. It seemed as if the digital video recorder had separated from the input, and I now remembered one moment, ominous in retrospect, when that metal brick, which had been transmitting reassurance of its continued operation by means of a simple yet effective heatwave cipher (translation: it kept scorching my penis), began a slow and searing slide down my left thigh; and I rushed to fortify the elastic in my underwear with a hunk of toilet paper. (See, I’m as good as any
maquiladora
guard at protecting my trade secrets.) Had something gotten disconnected or what? Might I have pushed the record button only once instead of twice? Dazzled but undefeated by these various explanations for my failure, I coolly prepared my second attempt.

This time, in spite of Shannon’s objections, I taped the button camera to a long narrow rectangle of cardboard to which I also attached the wire. I duct-taped the recorder, the input module and the power pack into a glorious bomblike affair of sticky silver mummy-wrappings, plopped it into my pants (sizzle, sizzle), zipped myself up and then immediately back down to check on things, discovered that I had just nudged the digital video recorder’s power button into the off position, undid the whole apparatus, bought index cards, duct-taped those over the duct tape on either side, wired myself back up, proved once and for all that the power pack’s four AAA batteries were now dead, took everything off again while Shannon sighed and set down her purse, replaced the batteries, rewired myself, activated the mess to a setting somewhere between BAKE and TOAST, zipped my fly, gingerly unzipped it again just to admire the glow of the digital video recorder’s little square screen through my underpants, rezipped up to zero, took Shannon by the hand, and glided back to Mexico as stiffly as a cardboard cutout, because no untoward bodily kink would disconnect
this
episode! An hour and six minutes later, in the bathroom of the Restaurant Dong Cheng, I verified that the video was still running, then powered off and broke everything down, in order to avoid foreseeable awkwardness with United States Customs and Immigration. Now I was walking on air; I was James Bond! At least, I was Bondish or Bondian.
²⁶⁹
Pulling the reluctant Shannon back to Calexico (she couldn’t see why we couldn’t drink one more beer at the Thirteen Negro), I lay down on the bed, played back the video, and watched an hour and six minutes of skies and roofs—did I tell you that the digital video recorder lacked a fast forward? This perfect spy could hardly believe it. Shannon advised me to record the universe from a lower buttonhole next time . . .

Half a week and many batteries later, I had become a reliable videographer of ceiling fans, streetlamps, and the occasional crown of an extremely tall Mexican’s head. Every time I was on the American side, I dropped more money and hours at another electronics store, a promising computer repair shop, but I could never transfer even these useless images to my computer, which meant that I had no idea what the actual resolution of my videos might be; moreover, the digital video recorder provided no indication as to how much disk space these videos took up. Was I out of room? I hated to delete everything, especially that first practice video of Shannon dancing for me in the doorway of the Motel Camino Real in Calexico; as for my Mexican movies, I just couldn’t believe that there might not somewhere be one good frame, as seemed even more apodictically the case on that stifling July Saturday night when after two long strolls of flirting and communion with Mexicali prostitutes both of the street and of the hotel variety, each walk suitably adorned with romantic button’s-eye views of cleavage and streetlit faces (spectacular blue eyeshadow, spiderlike eyelashes and firehouse-red lips which might touch the penis but never the mouth of the client), I came back filled not only with certainty but with pride in a covert job well done, only to find myself the possessor of yet more video clips of awnings, flying birds and the undersides of archways. To be sure, every hotel sign, every
tortillería
advertisement was there as proof that I had truly walked the walk; but first prize at the Cannes Film Festival could not be guaranteed, since my Mexico remained devoid of people, and not incidentally tilted sixty degrees off level. By now the button camera’s trial position had descended nearly to my navel; moreover, I had spent half a day in San Diego, pacing the computer specialist’s office; the technician failed, sweet-temperedly, to transfer my videos of nothing onto my hard drive. So I was in a fine sulk by midnight, although Sandra at the Hotel 16 de Septiembre had taken the edge off. I erased every last video and took the soldierly resolve to lower the button camera all the way to my bellybutton tomorrow. What else could a perfect spy do?

Sunday was warmer than Saturday, which is to say that it crossed the hundred-and-ten-degree mark, and I could easily have blamed the heat, which has destabilized various of my electronic appliances in Cambodia and the Philippines, for the fact that after a dutiful forty-five-minute trudge first to the doorway of the Hotel Nuevo Pacífico for some closeup flirting with the three prostitutes who held down the fort on that slow afternoon, then to the Thirteen Negro, where the security man
almost
patted me down, I discovered that my digital videographic masterpiece consisted of a pulsing cockeyed image of the inside of my hotel room door, with a shimmering line across it; that was my movie, for forty-five minutes. Honest spy that I was, I confess that on that occasion, four AAA batteries died in vain. But it probably wasn’t the heat’s fault. I think those rickety connecting pins had come undone again.

Grimly I taped everything up better than ever, threw the old batteries onto the hotel room floor, inserted new ones, recharged the digital video recorder, positioned the button camera one loop above the navel, and this time I actually became the proud possessor of covert footage of my fellow human beings, no matter that my lovely movie remained about forty-seven degrees off from the horizontal. Next time I’d tape the top and bottom of that strip of cardboard to the inside of my shirt; that would keep the button perspective to the straight and narrow. Oh, yes, my fellow private eyes; this is how we learn.

“HERE THERE’S LIFE”

In between these experiments, I interviewed
maquiladora
workers.

We were assigned to conduct an investigation in order to locate maquiladoras in the Tjuana, Mexico region that were abusive to both people and nature.
But this project likewise proved more difficult than I had expected. To be human is to complain, so I had anticipated an infinity of criticisms, sob stories and denunciations; but far more emblematic was the old man in the cowboy hat who had once assembled electronic components for a
maquiladora
down on Insurgentes, which lay below us in the smog.

I am sure that you’ve had many experiences in your life, I began.

Well, naturally. We’re old, he said, nodding at his amigo.

The private detective Señor A., whom you will meet in due course, once told me that some factories begin illegally in the basements of large houses, in order to avoid taxes; if they last long enough, the owners build overt factories. And I wondered whether the tale of the
maquiladoras
had begun in this stealthy way, or whether they came heralded by trumpets. That was why I asked the man in the cowboy hat: Do you remember what it was like before the
maquiladoras
?

His reply disappointed me: When we got here, there were already a lot of them in Tijuana.

Where do you come from?

Durango, twenty years ago.

Well, here there’s life, he kept saying. There’s work! There are lots of
maquiladoras.

Since he had come twenty years ago, all that he knew about the age of his own neighborhood, which already had concrete sidewalks and shade trees and was called Colonia Azteca, was that it must be at least twenty years old.
Maquiladoras
brought life, he repeated, smiling with his big false teeth.