Imperial (163 page)

He was offered a job here because
a long time ago the owner of this land had cows.—
I don’t do anything now. I was a cowboy before. I am from Jalisco, the man said, and she is from Michoacán. We own the land where the house is. We bought it from the owner.

How large is Colonia Borges?

It starts here and goes all the way to Algodones. You’ll see houses all over the place.

The wife said: Before, we lived in Colonia Santa Isabel, and he was my father’s neighbor. My parents told me not to marry him because he was much older than I was.

They laughed and laughed.

We’ve been married thirty-four years, she said, and they laughed again. They loved each other.

When you first moved here, were you happy that it was peaceful or did you feel lonely?

I didn’t like it at all, she said. I cried a lot. I had never lived in a place like this.

As for me, said the man, I grew up on a ranch, so I liked it.

How close were your neighbors?

We were the last people to arrive here, and we had three neighbors, over there and over there.

What did you do for the water?

We were here for a year before we had running water and light in the house, she said. (Now they owned a refrigerator and a small air conditioner.) He would take the milk from the dairy all the way to San Luis and he brought back the empty milk jars full of water for me. An hour there, and an hour back. It was from somebody’s faucet. The people who bought it would fill it with tap water for washing the clothes and dishes.

Once there were more than forty-eight milking cows, he said.
Muchos coyotes!
Lots of doves. Don’t think we’re talking about the coyotes who cross, although there are plenty of those. Neither one will ever go away.

You can eat the doves, and the ducks, said the wife, they’re both really good. A lot of people come to hunt.

It’s so tranquil, she said, such a good life. You raise your children without worrying about problems like addiction. And now in the pueblos, it’s a disaster. For drugs and addiction, and also because of robbery. I don’t cry anymore here! she laughed, showing one missing tooth.

The man said: We’ve got all our kids married and taken care of. Why
would
she cry?

What are the pros and cons of living in a
colonia
and not an
ejido
?

It is more solitary and more peaceful here in the
colonia,
she said. But the bad part is, even if you have money, you have to get into town to buy things.

Are there any subsistence farmers or family farmers in this area?

If you’re talking about people who plant just what they’re going to eat, she said, well, companies plant vegetables and things they eat.

There’s nobody in the valley that lives that way anymore, the husband added. It hasn’t been that long that people did, though. Maybe about twenty years. When we were married, there were people who lived that way and planted their own beans, their own tomatoes. But the father died and the family changed a lot. They did not want to follow the family traditions anymore.

Did you ever want to live that way? I asked the man.

Yeah, I wanted to live that way at one time, but why bother?

We could do it now, she said, but he is bad in the legs and also there is a problem with a lack of water. The people who own the parcels are always trying to get more water from the United States. That’s why we are already poor and this is going to leave us more poor, once they line the canal. It will leave us in ruins. Now you have to go sixty feet down or more to dig a well. I have a little well with water to wash clothes and dishes. It used to be only thirty feet down. Now even sixty feet down there is not much water. About six years ago the water really became scarce. Somebody started planting another field around here, and then our well water dropped. We used to just have a pump, but now you can’t get water that way anymore. We’ve only had our well for about three months. Six years ago that was how it was, with thirty feet only.

How does it look over there by the All-American Canal?

Well, it’s pretty.

Many Border Patrol people?

Oh,
la migra
? Oh,
muchas
! They say it’s really hard to cross now. We sometimes see helicopters. The
pollos,
we see them many times. We see men, women and children. They do not molest us. This is a good place to cross if you do it here. There are a lot of wells and you drink from the canal. If you go farther east, that’s where the problem is. You might wander far into the desert. Too many cars, cars, cars! And if they don’t have cars, they pass by foot! A hundred pass here each night! If it were a hundred people a week, it would be okay. So what they do is, they kind of watch for the police, and when they go, they cross. The only thing they might do is ask us for a little water when they cross.

The
pollos
come from the south; the coyotes are from here, the man said. You don’t see ’em around anywhere. If you see them once or twice, maybe they wave to you. These people have their own contact here. They exploit them.

Have you ever been across the line, into the United States?

I’ve done some contract work over there, the man said. He was merry-eyed and grey, with a squat, sunburned face.—My wife has a passport, so she’s been to Yuma, Los Angeles, Calexico. I go about once a year. My permission is for six months. I go mostly to Yuma.

It’s been awhile since I went, he said. They ran me out, he laughed.

With her sweet smile, the woman said: We will have some tamales and pozole for Christmas and we invite you . . .

Chapter 170

STILL A GREAT FARMING COUNTY (2004)

A thinly populated world of the type I describe either grows moribund and impoverished, falling off into an uncultured near-animal level—or it industrializes. It is standing on a narrow point and topples over in either direction and, as it just so happens, almost every other world in the Galaxy has fallen over into industrialization.

—Isaac Asimov, 1993

W
ell, it really has had several changes, said sprightly Mr. Claude Finnell, referring to Imperial County, of which he was a retired Agriculture Commissioner.
³²¹

Before I came, in the thirties, this was a large citrus area, lots of grapefruit and stuff like that. During the war that was the big thing, and then that began to go out since the San Joaquin Valley didn’t have the heat we did. So we slipped into cotton at the time; it was controlled by the government of course. And alfalfa has always been a crop. Wheat, oats and barley have always grown here. Wheat’s grown more important. When they had dairies they sold oats to the dairies. Cotton has been a crop in and out ever since the valley was farmed. Vegetables started here way before I came but in the early part of World War II they became a big crop. With vegetables it’s been sort of the same here over time, but more and more intense cultivation, and less and less labor. Better varieties.

Bermuda came in not too long ago in the last fifteen or twenty years as a major crop. Bermuda has always been a problem before it became a hay. I guess somebody thought, hey, it’s easy to grow, so why not? When I came here in ’54, we had some citrus, and doggone Bermuda grass was a pest! Actually you want it in your yard now, since it’s easy to take care of and difficult to get rid of.

What was the biggest challenge you faced as Ag Commissioner?

He laughed. Getting through the summer, I think! No, the biggest problem we had at that time was a new pest, a grain pest, and for some reason we’ve got it all over the place, and our biggest job was to eliminate that capra beetle. It took about four years. We had to cover the building that was infected and put cyanide in it. That was very difficult and very dangerous.

It was mostly family farms when I came, but there’s been a big change over the years, going from farmers living on the farms to the other kind. About in the fifties that began to change as the crops got bigger and you had to have more equipment as the cost began to increase. Most of the farms that were here then were farms that had been picked out and increased and made into a farm. Well, around in the fifties, a lot of those people were getting old and began to sell their farms, so the farms began to get bigger, which meant that with those new machines you either had enough money to farm or you didn’t.

It’s not the same self-contained farm that it used to be. Really, I’m serious about this. The counties around us, the coastal counties, have gone into manufacturing, building other things. San Diego at one time was one of the top farm counties. One of the top!

I lived in Corona before I met my wife, and my goodness! No farming
there
anymore.

As the farmers who came here and owned the farm and tilled it and so forth died, then, especially following World War II, prices for commodities were not very good, so great numbers of families quit farming and got out. I believe that there’s probably fifty or sixty percent of the farms owned by the farmers, but it used to be more like a hundred percent.
³²²

What was the average acreage here when you were Ag Commissioner?

Well, it was probably two hundred acres as an average, and now it’s probably three or four. We have some large ones, as you know, forty thousand acres.

Do you think anyone could live on a hundred and sixty acres nowadays?

Values were different, he said then. Being a farmer was a good thing in those days. Being a farmer now is the same as a businessman. You’d have a difficult time, I think, living here on a hundred and sixty acres, unless it’s beautiful vegetable ground.

Do you feel bad about that?

I think it’s a normal kind of thing. We breed cattle to get bigger and bigger—and better. So we do the same thing to farmers. I don’t think we can work on the hundred-and-sixty-acre farm anymore. I do think that we have probably come to an equilibrium in farm size. It’s not just a way of life anymore. It’s a business, and it does quite well. Now, as people come here over time, they’re gonna push out, do away with the land. That’s gonna happen with a lot of places.

As I think over Mr. Finnell’s implication, I remember a book I read, a small book published in a very limited printing; and there is a place in it when an interviewer asks an ancient rancher:
Have you ever thought about what the
Owens
Valley would be like if the City,
meaning of course Los Angeles,
hadn’t come in and bought up the land?
It is 1976, sixty-three years after Mulholland completed the aqueduct, and fifty-seven years after pumping of Owens Valley groundwater began. The rancher has seen it all; he is ninety-two. He blames local greed and factionalism if he blames anything at all; he himself sold out to Los Angeles for a fancy price (after which masked men took to driving past his house and other anonymous defenders of ditch democracy set off dynamite on his field), and he insists that the Owens Valley was never as green as it is remembered to be. He replies:
Well, I have thought about it, but it is a dream, and nobody knows.
And I wonder if people in the Imperial Valley will be uttering similar words about the family farm fifty years from now, or even ten.

This seemed like an appropriate time to ask Mr. Finnell about the water transfer, but he preferred not to be quoted on that because (and here he laughed)
they might shoot me.
He cheerfully informed me what Richard Brogan had already revealed; namely, that he was in the pay of the Metropolitan Water District, and indeed, the phone rang a couple of times from MWD as we sat there at the kitchen table in that unpretentious house in El Centro. (He was not registered by the California legislature as a lobbyist, but in 1988, when IID approached agreeing “in principle” to sell a hundred thousand acre-feet of water to MWD, the
Los Angeles Times
referred to him as the fellow who
advised the MWD during the negotiations.
) Since I respected his wish for me not to take notes at this point in the discussion, I cannot go too thoroughly into his views; I do remember telling him that I was against the water transfer and having him breezily reply that every farmer has a corner of his land, maybe ten percent, which he’s not getting much from and farms only out of inertia; it would do no harm to take that out of production, and market forces were going to make that happen anyway. He was probably right.

I was grateful to him for the interview and believed that I had already taken the measure of his opinions, so I let the water transfer go, overtly at least, and asked: Is there any factor which makes Imperial County unique?

Twelve months of growing,
he said solemnly. Twelve growing months! The second thing is water, of course.

I think our biggest problem is competition from other countries like Mexico, not water. When I came down here, we actually had a compound for ’em. We could only bring ’em up for ninety days.
³²³
Mexico was only making a living. During that time, several or many of the U.S. citizens began to farm down on the coast on the Mexican side, from Texas down. And they could grow all kind of things. And that’s just increased. And you cannot compete on this side. Just take lettuce for instance. Here you have to pay your employees seven dollars an hour. Down there they pay fifty cents an hour. Very hard to compete with that. There’s an awful lot of disappointed farmers right now.

If you were the Ag Commissioner right now, what would you do about that?

I’d retire! he laughed. It’s hard to fix. It’s hard to change history as we go along. But by the same token, Mexico is gonna increase their lifestyle and they’ll want more money and then some other island somewhere will take over.