Imperial (158 page)

In 1998 they caught two hundred thousand.

Well, if a merely upgraded fence failed to stop them, we might require a
militarized
fence! Accordingly, our eager, grateful and well-informed taxpayers rushed to fund the next phase of Operation Gatekeeper.

Over its first decade, more than three thousand illegals would perish
since,
as a Mexican source explains it,
Operation Gatekeeper . . . increased the vulnerability and mortality of undocumented immigrants.
One newspaper calculates that these deaths constituted a five-hundred-percent increase, although whether that is a per capita or absolute figure I cannot tell. We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

There were more than two hundred and fifty illegal-alien deaths along the border from October 2002 until October 2003—a record. Seventy of those corpses were found in the Imperial Valley. That was what the newspaper said.
³⁰⁷
On the same page, I read that a dead illegal alien had been found in Ash Canal; a second body was found an hour later. On the next page, a woman in Los Angeles got sentenced to nine years for imprisoning and beating illegal immigrants who couldn’t pay her coyote fee.

In 2003 about twenty-five thousand people were apprehended hidden in vehicles crossing from Mexico to California.

In 2004, it was almost fifty thousand.

But do you remember what Border Patrolwoman Gloria Chavez said to me?
Before Gatekeeper, we were arresting half a million people a year. In 1998 there were only two hundred and forty-eight thousand in detention.
So please help yourself to whichever numbers suit your agenda.

FOLK WISDOM FROM THE HUNGRIEST STATE

Up in Oregon, which of course was never in Old Mexico, a teacher sought to help his students understand what he called
The Line Between Us.
Operation Gatekeeper then was a decade old. (North of Ciudad Juárez, Operation Hold the Line was making splendid progress; Operation Safeguard was improving the world in Nogales.) The teacher asked his pupils what they made of it all.

One student said: If we treat them good, there’ll be more of them who want to come.

Oregon is the hungriest state, said another. People here are dying of starvation. Why should we support people who don’t belong here?

MORE DEPRAVITY

Lamentably for these supporters of Operation Gatekeeper, the
pollos
were going to keep right on coming no matter how badly they got treated, no matter how hungry Oregonians might be.

José López once said to me: This summer I’m gonna try to get as much work as I can, guiding tourists. I’ll try to pay a coyote. That’s my surest shot. Just to jump, since I cannot save eighteen hundred dollars, so I’m praying to God I can at least pay four hundred, four-fifty, just to jump the fence. Thank God, I know a little bit of English.

Then he said what would have gladdened the patriotic guardians of
the hungriest state:
If by summer’s end I don’t have any success, I’m gonna have to go back home, Bill. Save money and try again. It’s just a constant goal.

Why not bring your family here?

Because, Bill, sometimes I suffer too much, Bill. At least they have a roof over their heads. I mean, there are two young kids, man.

He had no success that summer, which was 2003. All the same, he stayed put in 2004 and 2005. In 2006 I didn’t see him.
Why should we support people who don’t belong here?

At the beginning of President Zedillo’s term, which approximated the commencement of Gatekeeper, Subcomandante Marcos and the insurgents of Chiapas constituted a continuing embarrassment to a government which had swung far rightwards of the Revolution, weakening its power to coax in foreign capital. The peso lost nearly half its value between December 1994 and January 1995; then it continued dropping. Northside loaned Mexico twenty billion dollars; improvements in the economy resulted; and those solved everything.

Thirteen years into Operation Gatekeeper, it seemed to me that Mexican Imperial was more Americanized, which meant among other things more materially prosperous. Much of rural Mexico, however, had grown poorer. In brief,
it all comes down to desperation, and the smugglers—being as depraved as they are—they prey on people’s desperation and human misery,

I asked a woman in Ejido Netzahualcóyotl whether many people jumped the border near her home, and she said: Right now not really, but four or five years ago, tons of people used to cross here. They used to ask us for water and I would give it to them, with their little kids in the heat . . .

What a depraved smuggler she was!

In a photograph, three young Mexicans, two women and a man, nestle helplessly in a trunk into which a Border Patrolman peers with calm alertness.
If we treat them good, there’ll be more of them who want to come.
So raise a toast to Operation Gatekeeper, now serving you at the gas station in Winterhaven whose proprietor had been there since the seventies but was originally from Michigan; he said that we had just caught eight more illegals right
here
this morning (May 2003); he came out, portly and sweating, to stand beside me and watch three more getting frisked up against the side of a white jail-on-wheels, three submissive darkskinned men in dusty clothes.

Chapter 160

THE FARM WATER QUALITY MANAGEMENT PLAN (2003)

G
atekeeper’s surveillance and control exemplified a fashion in Northside, where we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by; and to prove it, the newspaper now informed our loyal citizens that by 1 September 2003, every field in Imperial County
(this includes duck ponds and fields that don’t drain on a regular basis)
would require its own written Farm Water Quality Management Plan, including
Best Management Practices (BMPs): existing and planned
and
Sediment Control Goals,
not to mention other required data. And in material advantages they were already well supplied.
If the Regional Water Quality Control Board . . . catches a farmer who has not turned in these forms by the deadline . . . the RWQCB may fine that person $1000 per day per drain.
I can’t help believing in people.

Chapter 161

PRIVATIZING THE
EJIDOS
(1992-2006)

We have to create a new world economy.

—President Bill Clinton, 1993

A
nd when did Mexico stop creating
ejidos
? I asked Yolanda Sánchez Ogás.

You can still do it, she said. But now they’d give you an ejido with just rocks ... You can still do it, she said. But now they’d give you an
ejido
with just

As a matter of fact, in 1992, when the North American Free Trade Agreement partially undid Imperial’s original subdelineation of 1848 by creating a common market between the United States and Mexico, Presidente Salinas, ever the ally of easy financial liquidity, gave a speech saying that the revolutionary land redistribution of the Cárdenas era had
brought justice to the countryside,
but
today it is unproductive and impoverishing.
Who am I to judge him incorrect? A book about the Revolution’s formation of a campesino identity winds up the twentieth century with this bitter conclusion:
The persistent impoverishment of the countryside in Mexico has in fact homogenized rural people in economic terms, diminishing some of the material differences that once distinguished
the various subcategories of those who lived on and worked the land with varyingly small degrees of fortune and entitlement. Indeed, our historian bluntly says:
Many ejidos today do not possess enough agricultural land to sustain their members.

Salinas’s solution: Let the campesinos sell or mortgage their
ejido
shares as they saw fit. An
ejido
could also vote to disband itself. And why not bring back sharecropping? All these improvements were duly enacted, to the benefit of new Chandler Syndicates.

Imperial is the Rothkoscapes of agribusiness, the sandy acres of water farmers; Imperial is horizon-crowding plains of monoculture-for-export; but once upon a time, Imperial was also the homestead of Wilber Clark, no matter that Wilber Clark failed; and ever since Cárdenas, and almost certainly long before him, Imperial was subsistence hectares in the Mexicali Valley, not to mention the ranchos of Tecate and the former ranchos around the capricious streams of Tijuana. How can I imagine Mexican Imperial without
ejidos
? Never mind; Article Twenty-seven of the Mexican Constitution is no longer in force.

Before 1992, said an official of Mexicali’s Tribunal Unitario Agrario Distrito Dos, the law stipulated that you could leave the land to whomever you wanted but it had to be someone whose existence would depend on the land, since otherwise the
ejidos
would fold. But that’s no longer true.

I asked him how he felt about this, but he never answered; perhaps he did not wish to say.

It was predicted that two million rural families would become landless once the
ejidos
became alienable; but, after all, you can’t produce things the way you used to. Besides, privatization is most appealing precisely for those who intend to sell their land for nonagricultural purposes; and why shouldn’t Mexico “develop” just as much as Northside? Jaime Serra Puche, the Mexican Secretary of Commerce, helped us all comprehend that one of NAFTA’s intentions was to replace subsistence farming with export crops, so why should we cry in our beer?
Manufacturing is hitting another level of evolution.
Hurrah for Southside’s prospective water farmers!

In the
ejidos
of the Mexicali Valley nobody had much to say about privatization.

How about the life for you, Don Carlos? I asked a rancher in Morelos.—Is it getting better or worse?

Worse, said the sleepy
ejidatario.

Why?

All of the funding and the loans from the government come from Mexico City and sometimes it takes months and months.

Was it better under the PRI?
³⁰⁸

No. The political parties back then, they didn’t help the people.

I took these replies to mean that his life, like mine, was simply continuing in its customary state of imperfection. When I asked whether NAFTA had affected his family—this was a decade after that agreement had been enacted—he had nothing to say, so his wife replied: The only people who know about those things are the people who make them up, the lawyers.

I don’t think the valley will change, a restaurant proprietress in the Mexicali Valley said bravely. Yes, there are many American companies who are coming and renting the land, but I think that’s okay since the parcels will stay active as farmland. Many factories around here have something to do with agriculture, for instance something to do with carrots. The countryside will stay the same, since the river is here (she meant the Colorado) and the people are dedicated to agriculture. Another reason that agriculture will remain here is that it’s not like before when they used to just kind of guess what to grow; now they use a lot of technology and export our produce all over the world, crops like pumpkins and carrots.

Many American companies are leasing the land from Mexicans and using it to grow crops, said a rancher lady in nearby Colonia Sieto de Cierro Prieto.
³⁰⁹
—Yes, they harvest asparagus right over here, some American company. I don’t see it’s a bad thing because this gives the people money. It takes a lot of people to harvest asparagus. Because of that, it gives a lot of jobs, although only for a couple of months. Before, we planted the pumpkins and watermelons only for ourselves.

Why did
you
stop planting for yourselves?

Well, we started getting married, and we started planting a lot of cardamom for the oil, and
cevada,
which is like wheat for the cattle. And right now we don’t have the tools for the watermelons. Before, we had the tractors, Caterpillars, all the machinery.

What happened to them?

She laughed.—I got married. My brothers were left in charge of it.

“THEY KEEP THE PEOPLE IN SLAVE CONDITIONS”

What patterns does analysis incline us to? In the spring of 2003 I rode down Highway 2 past Desierto Industrial Park and Parque Industrial Nelson; the signs offered one and a half hectares for sale or sometimes more; were these bits of privatized
ejidos
or previously forgotten scraps of desert that had never belonged to any subsistence farmer? And had Señora García gotten squeezed by cruel market forces until it no longer benefited her to grow her own watermelons, or was it simply that her brothers had manhandled the tractors?

Following her own tendency for dramatization, Yolanda Sánchez Ogás described Colonia Carranza in the center of the valley, and by extension much of the area around the Río Colorado, as follows: Foreign companies rent it. They keep the people in slave conditions. They bring the people to work from Sinaloa and Oaxaca. They bring the people into rooms where there aren’t even any beds. They just sleep on the floor. Sometimes the people die. Two weeks ago a little boy died from heat exposure here. The women put their babies in fruit baskets when they work in the fields. This happened in Ejido Tabasco.

As already told, we went to Ejido Tabasco to look at the place where the workers had been kept
in slave conditions
and where the little boy had died, but the barracks, hot and grim though they certainly were, were empty; and the newlywed
maquila
workers next door, who were very open and friendly, knew nothing about the barracks, nothing that they could say.