Imperial (159 page)

Had two million
ejidatario
families become landless yet? Why did I not yet smell in most of Mexican Imperial the overpowering reek of class hatred that makes Colombia so dangerous to rich and poor alike? The answer might simply have been that Mexican Imperial is unlike the rest of Mexico, a nation about which after all these years and pages I remain largely ignorant . . .

Or perhaps the progressing privatization of the
ejidos
was not much of a tragedy at all, because manufacturing was simply hitting another level of evolution.

THOUGHTS ABOUT A COTTONWOOD TREE

A young señora who had lived in Ejido Netzahualcóyotl for twenty years stood beside a younger man
³¹⁰
in the dust in front of their house; she did not invite us in. One pleasant aspect of her life was that
you don’t have to go all the way into Mexicali for food.
³¹¹
Her son and her husband both worked in the fields: wheat and cotton.

She said that most land in the vicinity had fallen into the possession of the United States. The
ejidos
were permitted to sell their land bit by bit and the American companies bought it. Her father-in-law still had his parcel, but it comprised less than eighty hectares.

To what patterns was the mind of this Alma Rosa Hernández inclined? I believe that she blamed Northside for the erosion of the
ejidos,
and there she was partially right. Perhaps President Salinas might also have borne a trifle of the responsibility. —Who else? By the time Article Twenty-seven got undone, the Revolution’s land reforms had redistributed forty-two percent of the nation’s surface, including three-fourths of all farmland. But crops paid less than they used to; the government no longer offered agricultural credit. The
ejidatarios
remained poor. Might some of them truly be “better off” as Northside’s field workers?

At the edge of Ejido Netzahualcóyotl, in a ditch, there is a single gracious cottonwood whose yellowing leaves catch the low sun which hangs like a glowing peach at the side of the white-dust road. Dust to the north, green crops to the south, thus this picture of delineation, moneyscape and waterscape. The new Zapatistas, who had risen up when NAFTA was signed, asserted in a communiqué of their Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee that
capitalism makes merchandise of people, of nature, of culture, of history, of conscience.
What about that cottonwood in the ditch? Who had planted it, on whose property? What would de-
ejido-
ization do to that tree, not to mention nature, culture, history and conscience? Suspicious as I am of the sentimentalism underlying the Zapatistas’ attack on capitalism’s merchandise-ification of those entities, I cannot help dreading the disappearance of the
ejidos.
Most
ejidatarios
plant shade trees around their homes. I wonder how many cottonwoods are in the Mexicali Valley’s future?

Chapter 162

ASSETS FORFEITURE (2003)

Offhand, I know of nothing more deleterious to my liver than being the useful, contributing member of society the Occupation seems bent on making of us all.

—Oliver Lange, 1971

A
nd while Southside was privatizing her
ejidos,
the trustworthy guardians of Northside were deprivatizing personal sovereignty in still other ways, always for the best of reasons, and expressed in phrases as smooth to the touch as the paint on Salvation Mountain.

The Imperial Idea, which was once the American Idea, cannot survive without private property. If my home is not my castle, if I cannot make my own mistakes, then I become merely one of what Imperialites refer to as
the urbans.

The Farm Water Quality Management Plan was now extended to
the urbans.
They might be called upon to report how much money they had in their wallets; they learned to show identification upon demand.

Northside’s authorities declared a War on Drugs. Volstead had failed, and they did not want the War on Drugs to fail, so they voted themselves the power to appropriate the cash and assets of enemy drug warriors. They liked that; it extended their budgets.

Some cities, including the one in which I live, declared a War on Prostitution and helped themselves to the cars of individuals who bought sex. They liked that recompense equally well.

The Border Patrol launched Operation Gatekeeper and awarded themselves the assets of certain people-smugglers, under certain conditions, always for the purpose of protecting you and me. I can’t help believing in people.

... And so today in Holtville’s
Imperial Valley Weekly
I’m informed by Kenneth R. Stitt, Chief Patrol Agent, that
because of the alleged use in commission of a violation of Section 274(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act,
forty-seven vehicles, each with its own asset identification number, stand
subject to forfeiture except as provided in 8 CFR 274.5(b) and 18 USC 983.
What is likely to happen to this 1997 Jeep Cherokee seized in Westmorland, that 1989 Mercury Sable snatched in Calexico, the 1982 Lincoln Town Car limo gleaned in Niland, the 1977 Dodge van (my God, twenty-six years old and still running!) appropriated near Seeley? I’ll tell you what!
Sale or other disposal if declared forfeited.

Why not? After all, we have to create a new world economy.

Chapter 163

WE SHOULD HAVE HAD A BETTER NEGOTIATING POSITION (2002-2003)

San Diego County sees such water transfers as part of the solution to potential future water shortages.

—The San Diego County Water Authority, 2003

This puts in place the basic building block of future agreements to meet water needs.

—Gale Norton, Secretary of the Interior, 2003

T
he taxi driver who used to be a babysitter, and before that, years and years before, when she was thirty-three, a field worker, would never forget how unpleasant tomato-picking had been, because everything she wore got indelibly stained, even her underwear; but she’d hated cantaloupes the most, their harvest being so hot and unprotected. When she told me this, I remembered an ancient Hetzel photo of a truckload of boxed cantaloupes, the driver inside the truck, his skin very dark against his white hat and white shorts; and the wheels, as crude as a wagon’s, had sunk deep in white dirt, with tall trees behind them. That must have been around 1920, I would guess. Had picking cantaloupes been better or worse in those days? I finished wondering and paid her, because we’d now arrived at the Imperial Irrigation District meeting in El Centro. It was the autumn of 2002.

The idea, and I scarcely mean Imperial’s, was to transfer two hundred thousand acre-feet per year (let’s be twenty-first century and call it
200 KAFY
; that way we don’t have to get tired counting all the zeroes) from the Imperial Irrigation District to San Diego, and possibly Los Angeles would get some, too. That might require the Imperial Valley to
conserve
here and there, I’m afraid. For instance, why couldn’t her water-wasters reduce tailwater on the fields?

One of Imperial’s consultants concluded that the
environmental mitigation cost
(I love that phrase) of, for instance, a three-hundred-thousand acre-foot reduction for 2003—after all, why should Imperial’s enemies stop with two hundred thousand?—would be a hundred and twelve dollars per acre-foot. In addition,
construction/ operation
would cost a hundred dollars per acre-foot. The farmers of Imperial County were currently paying sixteen dollars per acre-foot,
the highest per-acre foot charge of any irrigators receiving Colorado River [water] in the Lower Basin.
So tailwater reduction would increase their fees by a factor of thirteen. As Border Patrol Officer Gloria Chavez said: I think we all feel sorry for ’em.

Well, but the water transfer might pay fifty million dollars every year (
“ Moisture Means Millions”
)! And only thirty thousand acres (seven percent of the county’s farmland) would get fallowed. To be sure, fallowing would reduce the incomes of seed merchants, car and tractor dealerships, etcetera, not to mention effects on the businesses they patronized; but don’t worry; we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better for water farmers. One simply fallows low-value crops! (Andy Horne, Director of the Imperial Irrigation District, will now define low-value crops:
Those crops being grown with water someone else wants.
)

Let’s not be selfish, boys and girls! Los Angeles and San Diego
need
that water! Besides, they’ll use it responsibly. Look! They’ve even prepared an urban water-management plan! (Andy Horne defines “urban water management plan”:
Highly detailed and complex volumes of documents which, among other things, attempt to explain why it is considered perfectly acceptable to devote one-half of all water in cities to ornamental landscaping. In the middle of the desert. In the middle of a drought.
)

Andy Horne and Stella Mendoza will vote against the water transfer. Bruce Kuhn, Rudy Maldonado and Lloyd Allen will vote in favor.

Later that year, when she was no longer President, Stella Mendoza sat in her kitchen in Brawley and said to me: When they talked about conserving water through fallowing, that really hit me through what I understood. That would hurt the agricultural workers and the agricultural businesses. Who’s going to help those people? We were up in Sacramento talking to Senator Machada. He’s an arrogant little prick. I told him, what are those people going to do? He said,
they can just leave this valley.

You look at this valley. It’s so hot during the summer. What do we have of value? We have the water and we have the land. It’s like when you have a jar of pickles, it’s really hard to unscrew the lid, and once you do, all the pickles get eaten.

The other Board members said,
If we don’t sell the water, they’ll take the water.
I said: Hell no! These other Board members, I think they’re being extremely short-sighted. Rudy Maldonado said we’re spoiled; he’s out telling the world that that we have too much water. What an idiot.

THE ROOM

The room where these public meetings took place was in part bricked, and on the bricks were blue diamond-shaped tiles which I suppose were meant to remind us of water-drops’ preciousness. In the corner, a beautiful Latina in a miniskirt sometimes sat at her computer with her white cowboy hat on the table beside it. She must have been the stenographer. Behind the long high desk at which the Board sat hung a curtain as blue as water, on either side of which was a door bearing the following political caution:
WATCH YOUR STEP
.—This reminds me of a conversation between Hitler and his architect. The new Marble Gallery was so hyper-polished that Speer worried that some foreign Ambassador might fall down and break a leg.—All to the good, replied the Führer, diplomats need to be adept at traversing slippery surfaces.

Not every board member of the Imperial Irrigation District seemed adept at slipperiness. Stella Mendoza in particular seemed out of her depth, which is precisely why I admired her. I will never forget her love for the valley in which she was born. She never had a chance.

Small-town democracy must always have been in part a myth; nonetheless, to the extent that it existed at all, it might have existed in Imperial. Tamerlane’s warriors did not plan to let it get in their way. If need be, all their persuasions would become as cruel as the painted water on Salvation Mountain.

Imperial is bare dirt. Imperial is green fields. Imperial is the regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors in this same room, on Tuesday, 14 October 2003, in El Centro, a meeting which begins: At this time, please bow your heads and say a prayer for all those young people in harm’s way in Iraq. We lost three of ’em yesterday.

After that prayer, the pastor prayed that this county be considered pleasing in the sight of God, and that God rain down His blessings on it. Then came the Pledge of Allegiance; all rose. And the pastor said: The county is still in step when we say, one nation
under God.

I myself believe that our war against Iraq was and will always be an unjust war. I believe that public prayer at a civic function is appropriate and pleasing in, say, Iraq, but inappropriate and odious in the United States of America, which is supposed to be founded on freedom of religion, which in turn implies freedom
from
religion to all who wish it. At the same time, I was touched by the pastor’s expressions of concern and care. I was sorry about our soldiers who had been killed, and I truly wanted every possible blessing for Imperial. Finally—how can I best say this?—I preferred a community’s united expression of feeling, no matter that for some people present that expression might be
pro forma
or even hypocritical, to the absence of any expression of feeling. I preferred love for the home to love for money. I believed that Imperial was what she was because water was here. That was why I didn’t think that the cities of California had any right to her water.