Imperial (154 page)

She was now working at another
maquiladora,
from ten at night until six in the morning.—The schedule is the only thing I don’t like, she said. I make air-conditioning ducts at AMP Industrial Mexicana, which is owned by Americans. The wages are about the same.

Suddenly she said: You can’t demand your rights. They demand a lot of work from you. They’ll just step on you and fire you. You can’t form a union or they’ll fire you quick. I know organizers who are blackballed to the point where they have to do construction work just to survive although they have degrees. One man (and she named him) applied for a job just at the assembly line so they wouldn’t investigate him, but the second day he came, they found out and they fired him.

You know for a fact that they fired him for being a union organizer, or you just heard that that was the reason?

I just heard . . .

Why not end here, with one more instance of disputed fact? We’ll each believe what we wish. This almost perfectly incomplete portrait of the
maquiladoras
ends, as every honest investigation should, in midair.
(Let’s face it, Bill. Investigative reporting is not really your strong suit.)
It is ever so difficult to begin to comprehend
maquiladoras
as they are, with their chemicals, fences and secrets; as for the future, well, from Tijuana I remember a tiny square of mostly unbuilt freeway, high in the air, souvenir of a broken bridge; and at the very end of it, lording it over empty space, a huge handmade cross with scraps of white plastic bag fluttering in the brown wind.

Chapter 156

SUBDELINEATIONS: WATERSCAPES (1975-2005)

Thriving young towns will be born between Holtville and Yuma. That newer region will be dotted with happy farm homes, traversed by gleaming canals, crossed with busy highways.

—Robert Hays, 1930

To all to whom these presents shall come:

WATER IS HERE
.
WATER IS HERE
. At least, they promised me that
WATER IS HERE
. How could I doubt it? Back in 1920, Mr. Leonard Coates from Fresno revealed the secret to make water last forever: Stir the soil frequently; then it will conserve moisture! That’s all. Mr. Coates advised us to consider the following analogy: Powdered sugar on top of a sugar cube will hold water better than will a sugar cube on top of a sugar cube . . .

Gee whiz, somebody must not have been kicking enough dirt around, because Imperial’s waterscape was beginning to look as patchily arid as ever!

“IMPERIAL ATTITUDE”

How should I put this? For a little longer, American Imperial continued to dream her watermelon dreams, secure in her bed of perpetual entitlements.
His farm has been highly improved. He made a success through his own efforts.
In 1999 Imperial County’s average yield was four hundred and thirty-two honeydews and miscellaneous melons per acre; we’ll ignore the dip one year later to three hundred eighty, because the year after
that
it was seven hundred and seventy-seven.
²⁹⁵
Just think what Otis P. Tout and the other dead boosters would have made of her triumph! The rest of southern California might be thirsty and thirstier for Colorado River water, but do you know what? American Imperial (we’ll ignore her Mexican sister) had been here first! Other water districts are, in the Imperial Irrigation District’s considered legal opinion,
junior rightholders.
The pioneers, from Wilber Clark to the Colorado River Land Company, had bought their rectangles of desert in good faith and irrigated them in hope and trust.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

I sit in Sacramento alone on a hot August night, with Wilber Clark’s land patent before me, and its words are as benevolently steadfast as anything in the Four Gospels.

The United States of Ameríca,
To all to whom these presents
shall come,
Greeting.
That is how the document begins.

If only I could express to you how those words make me feel! Earlier this evening I was reading a message sent from a despairing man in Senegal to an uneasy observer in my own country who in turn posted it on an electronic bulletin board where a friend of mine in Japan discovered it, sadly printed it out, and mailed it to me. The message was about my President, and it informed me, among other things, that
more than fifteen hundred persons have been arrested and put in jail between Thursday and Monday. Hopefully they will be released now that the Big Man is gone . . . All trees in places where Bush would pass have been cut. Some of them are more than a hundred years old.
On Goree Island,
for “security reasons” . . . the local population was chased out of their houses from five to twelve a.m. They were forced by the American security to leave their houses and leave everything open, including their wardrobes, to be searched by special dogs brought from the U.S.
This is the President I have now. This is my country.
There are now thousands of Senegalese who believe that for all Americans the world is their territory.
How much of this is true? Maybe none; I’d rather not know. What I read in the morning newspaper is bad enough. Well, so what? I prefer to imagine that I live in Wilber Clark’s America, which is to say, The United States of America, ornate and proud—and archaic, to be sure; we need not say obsolete. Maybe I am obsolete, too. The United States of America,
To all to whom these presents
shall come,
Greeting.
And I seem to see America herself, personified by the Statue of Liberty, greeting all to whom these presents shall come.

Whereas
,
a Certificate of the Register of the Land Of fice at
Los Angeles,
California, has been deposited in the General Land Of fice, whereby it appears that full payment has been made by the claimant
Wilber Clark
according to the provisions of the Act of Congress of April 24, 1820 . . .
NOW KNOW YE,
That the
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
in consideration of the premises, and in conformity with the several Acts of Congress in such case made and provided,
HAS GIVEN AND GRANTED,
and by these presents
DOES GIVE AND GRANT,
unto the said claimant and to the heirs of the said claimant the Tract above described;
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD
the same, together with all the rights, privileges, immunities, and appurtenances, of whatsoever nature, thereunto belonging, unto the said claimant and to the heirs and assigns of the said claimant forever.
To have and to hold forever; this I like very much and wish to believe in even though I’m aware that forever is an illusion. Moreover, now come the qualifications:
And to the heirs and assigns of the said claimant forever;
subject to any vested or accrued water rights
for mining, agricultural, manufacturing, or other purposes, and
rights to ditches and reservoirs used in connection with such water rights,
as may be recognized and acknowledged by the local customs, laws, and decisions of courts; and there is reserved from the lands hereby granted,
a right thereon for ditches or canals
constructed by the authority of the United States.

In short, Northside can do as she pleases; other interests can try to get what
they
want. All the same, the lands have been hereby granted, to have and to hold, forever, and the United States of America greets all to whom these presents shall come. (Taft was President then, in the year of our Lord 1911, and of the independence of the United States the one hundred and thirty-fifth.) And the farms of Imperial had likewise been granted, to have and hold forever, together with all the rights, privileges, immunities, and appurtenances, of whatsoever nature, which is why during the drought of 1987, the Colorado River Project suffered
no reductions in deliveries.

Not every water agency forgave that. By 1989, one out of every four Californians had fallen subject to mandatory water rationing; by 1991 it was three out of four, but the Colorado River Project suffered
no reductions in deliveries,
no matter that the years 1987-91 were drier than the previous five! Imperial County found that state of affairs convenient, especially in regard to lettuce.—Field crops are cheap to grow, said Richard Brogan. You can miss a day of water. You don’t do that in lettuce. You work with laptop computers in the field making decisions, and if you don’t apply chemicals in a twelve-hour period, they’ll fire you. So they know in the hothouse, the broccoli is going to grow. They order water in advance. It’s very time-sensitive. On the other hand, your flat crops, your Bermuda grass or wheat, tomorrow doesn’t matter . . .

You want your broccoli year-round, don’t you? Imperial asked the world. And you want it at a low price, right? Well, then no reductions in water deliveries for us, please, not ever!

WATER IS HERE
.
In fact, earlier this year the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies half the water delivered on the coastal plain from Ventura south to the Mexican border, received approval to run its Colorado River Aqueduct at full capacity. This will provide Southern California with a much-needed 1.2 million acre-feet of water supplies.

These words appear in a book whose authorship is appropriate: the Association of California Water Agencies. Which agencies, I wonder? The next sentence, written, so I suspect, in sentiments of spite and rage, gives a hint as to one of them:
MWD is entitled to only half that amount.
Who gets the other half, I wonder? They are the people who happened to get there first, and became entitled, so their patents imply, to have and hold forever their local waterscapes.

I sit in Sacramento, and read in my newspaper that these individuals are guilty of an
Imperial attitude.

Imperial is a long, wide ditch with grass and trees on either side; I see a man and child fishing—no, I don’t; this is not Imperial, not anymore.

Or is it? Kay Brockman Bishop said to me in 2006: You can still fish in the cement ditches. I must have seen four hundred little fish in there, from catfish to little bass . . .

“A TOTALLY OBSOLETE AND WASTEFUL ACTIVITY”

What should a waterscape be—a perfect checkerboard of sugarcube-fields in water, or a slurry of sugar-water? Instead, it’s a sugary desert straining to suck up a pool of water.

In 1984, the State Water Resource Board decides a lawsuit against the Imperial Irrigation District, determining that it has
wasted
four hundred thousand acre-feet per year.

American Imperial wakes up anxious. All this time, she’d been dreaming that the Mexicans were the enemy! Now she can hear Tamerlane’s warriors coming. Who will rescue her? She cannot trust even the empty round blue eye-sockets filled with darkness, the empty blue stone lips and red fangs of the darkness-filled mouth: Tlaloc the Aztec rain god. How many inches of rain did Brawley get last year?

Slowly, slowly, she falls back asleep. And in 1986 a longtime resident of Ocotillo complains about how
our life’s blood, our water, was being hemorrhaged away as the noisy diesel trucks from Mexicali ground through the main street of our small hamlet, on their way to pick up water
from the Clifford Well, which had been
selling water to Mexicali businessmen
since sometime after 1958. Why did no Northsiders absent themselves from Ocotillo’s nightmares?

By the middle of the 1990s, sixty percent of the Imperial Valley enjoys the wonders of absentee ownership. Two of those absentee owners, the infamous Bass brothers, construct a corporation called Western Farms. Their greed is as bare as the dirt of a Mexican cemetery. Promising that they have all but one of the Imperial Irrigation District’s directors in their pocket, they offer
half a million annual acre-feet of water
to San Diego, taken from the water rights of their idled land.

San Diego hesitates, perhaps because Western Farms may not actually be able to sell those water rights. She decides to approach the Imperial Irrigation District directly. Meanwhile, Western Farms accepts suitable compensation to convey its forty-two thousand acres to the company called U.S. Filter, which gloats:
The water we have is 81 billion gallons a year in perpetuity.

Are the Bass brothers villains or not?—You know, said Richard Brogan, when the Bass brothers came in, that was marginal, field crop ground. Bermuda grass.

And I remember how the same accusation once got leveled against the sellouts of the Owens Valley:
If the city did wrong in buying, they did wrong in selling.

(Back at the beginning of the twentieth century, George Chaffey and the California Development Company were the first water farmers in the region. A historian writes:
The company was not planning to farm, but to sell water.
)

So which of Imperial’s great and powerful was never a water farmer?

Tamerlane’s warriors approach. In 2003, Andy Horne, the Director of Imperial Irrigation District One, coins a bitter definition:
Agriculture: Once thought to be an essential means of providing food and fiber for the nation, now a totally obsolete and wasteful activity engaged in by greedy farmers for the sole purpose of selfishly depriving cities and fish of their rightful share of water.

Across the county line, Eleanor Shimeall, President of the Borrego Water District’s Board of Directors, warns the San Diego County Board of Supervisors that her aquifer is becoming “fatally” overdrafted. A decade ago, groundwater was receding by one to two feet per year. Now it falls by two to five feet per year. What will save Borrego Springs? All the editors of the local newspaper can propose is to
give local farmers an equity mechanism for selling their land.
The citrus plantations on the north end are the worst water-wasters. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could tear them out and replace them with golf courses and trailer parks?