Imperial (165 page)

Back in 2004, I was sitting beside Jared in his car in Santa Monica, on a street called Centinela.

It would probably be easier to take the 10, he said. Let’s see, what time is it? Three-seventeen; yeah, better take the freeway.

Later we were going east on Pico with this green park and that green golf course, those white building-cubes whose windows were partially overprinted by rocket-shaped shadows, and now already we had crossed Motor Avenue. This must be Los Angeles, of course, for I spied the Avenue of the Stars!

Then it was a wide and soothing ride all the way up to Fairfax. The Boulevard Vacuum Company was an old white building like an ancient dowager’s frilly underpants.

(In Valencia you’re in the evening brightness, towers glowing white, orange, grey-blue, dark grey-blue. Suddenly, gold light seethes bitterly in an infinity of searing square jewels. You’ve reached the office tower on Wilshire and Figueroa.)

On the freeway, swiveling around dusted treescapes and graffiti’d freeway walls, we came successfully to Lakewood-Bellflower, where Jared’s father had gotten clean and sober.

It was always so boring, said Jared.

Bellflower was renowned for its churches and car dealerships.

It actually kind of feels like a No Man’s Land, he said, because it’s definitely not Orange County but it’s definitely not L.A., because nobody’s concerned with entertainment out here for their livelihood. It’s definitely working-class.

Suddenly, we passed a Disneyland-like island spilling with water.

Buena Park peered down over the freeway at a green world of flat roofs and treetops, a few trees quite grand and gracious, and then we began to ride Highway 91, penetrating the Inland Empire, driving deep toward Riverside. Tyco Flow Control welcomed us with a white cube leering over the freeway on the outskirts of Tustin. Even I could tell the difference between this and the lovely shiny black shoes of businessmen on Downtown’s pale sidewalks.

I noted Lakeview Avenue, then the Imperial Highway, Highway 90, dryish mountains ahead. Now we had come into Yorba Linda.

Is this still Los Angeles to you?

I always equate Yorba Linda and Fullerton, said Jared.

They’re both Orange County, his girlfriend Caroline explained, which meant that we were definitely out of Los Angeles.

I think Imperial Highway would be a good demarcation, Jared said. That way is all Mission Viejo and Newport Beach . . .

The freeway led us into California’s dry and hilly interior.

The red-white-and-blue announcement on the Feather River dam advised us that we had already experienced
200 YEARS OF FREEDOM
; then we were in Riverside County.

It looks a lot newer, said Caroline, like a lot of pink stucco.

And a lot more of these commercial plazas, said Jared, with homogenized aesthetics, all adobe style or faux modern. A lot of RV dealers. Looks like it’s just more recreational. I mean, you don’t have the beach all that close at hand. I mean, you do; it’s only about forty-five minutes; but most people here are more into dirt play than they are into water play. Everything seems less landscaped, more desert.

Now for the Tyler Mall and mile-long Ontario Mills!

We desired to visit Magnolia and Golden in the eleven thousands, so we kept driving east toward the mountains, with palms and shrubs keeping us company in the median strip.

They’re not making much use of the vertical space, said Jared. They just keep everything spread out and low.

We rode past a giant corporate hospital, followed by the Magnolia Surgery Center and more palm trees and grassy corporate lawns, America’s Tire Co., a coffee chain, a submarine sandwich chain, a boarded-up Victorian in the nine thousands, strip malls now retiring in favor of smaller detached older structures such the public library (white, 1908); whereupon Cindy’s Cafe yielded to the carwash and video store.

Caroline said: It’s hotter here than in Los Angeles. Also, there are no parking meters; here you can park at the side of the street.

Then here we were at the shaded Heritage House, which I have written about in
Imperial
and which went on sleeping its sleep.

Chapter 174

MEXICANS AND AMERICANS (1901-2007)

Gringo,
in its literal signification, means
ignoramus.
For instance: An
American who had not learned to eat chili peppers stewed in grease, throw
the lasso, contemplate the beauties of nature from the sunny side of an
adobe wall, make a first class cigar out of a corn husk, wear open-legged
pantaloons, with bell buttons, dance on one leg, and live on one meal a
week. Now the reader knows what a terrible thing it was in early days to be
a
gringo.

—Horace Bell, 1881

C
hung Lee’s store was burned during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Richard Kim was shot at, and shot back. At a stoplight, Walter Park was shot in the temple, the bullet passing through his left eye and partially lobotomizing him. His stepson tells us that a black man did this. Many in the mobs who attacked Chung Lee and Richard Kim were black. When my Korean-American in-laws told me about that time, they always emphasized the blackness of the people who had threatened them. But hear a bookkeeper-accountant from South Central tell the story:
Now, they talk about the looting in Koreatown . . . Those wasn’t blacks, those wasn’t blacks, those was Mexicans . . . We wasn’t over there lootin’ over there, but here, in this right here.
Who were Mexicans to her? I wonder.

One zoot-suiter whose eardrum got fractured by the police back in 1943 (they must have been white, context tells me)
had a hate in me, even now,
now being the 1990s, and he liked it whenever whites looked afraid of people of color. Who was he? Aside from his negatively defined existence in relation to whites, how did he see himself? Was he American, Latino, Mexican, Chicano?

A muralist in San Diego said:
I think I’ve considered myself Chicano ever since the late sixties . . . I hate the word
American
because it’s such a weird statement for me.

And here I ought to mention what one Northsider biographer of César Chávez describes as the Mexican perception that
Chicanos are traitors: they are the Mexicans who left and never looked back . . .

I hate the word
Hispanic,
said Stella Mendoza, the former President of the Imperial Irrigation District. Hispanic to me is a label they put on anyone who is of a Latin background. I’ve always considered myself to be Mexican-American. I’m proud to be of Mexican descent, but I’m an American citizen. But these terms,
Chicana, Latina, Hispanic,
I hate those.

Who are we to each other—what we do to each other or what we expect from each other? Most so-called knowledge of the other is as empty as the white concrete benches of the Park of the Child Heroes on that cool night (actually chilly for Mexicali) which happened to follow the Day of the Little Angels: All the couples who usually sat there on summer nights, the women on the men’s laps, were gone. The white benches made me feel as if I were in the cemetery. Then up from the ground rose handsome young Carlos from Honduras, deported from Arizona just today for trying to get an honest job. Well, actually, to tell you the truth, brother, he had been caught in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, selling meth. He wanted a place for the night; he explained to me very gently and cordially that he would do anything to get a place, not that he was a bad person, bro, but in this world you gotta do what you gotta do; and no matter how quickly I walked, he remained at my side, with his huge cousin in the red shirt, another graveyard child, now half a block behind. We passed the doorway of the Nuevo Pacífico, and the girls within looked pale enough to be dead. I remarked to my new friend that since I was a gringo, if anything happened to me, no one would help me; and because I said it simply and without bitterness, he liked me then; he laughed, and for half an hour we talked about women, God, money, broken hearts, standing on the darkish sidewalk in front of the Hotel Chinesca; he had no suspicion that I was staying there. He would much rather have wheedled than robbed me. Finally I put a ten-peso piece into his hand, because I truly did feel sorry for him, preferring not to sleep in parks myself. Carlos wanted five dollars. I said I was sorry. He wanted ten dollars and I said I was really sorry; then I shook his hand and he understood that I stayed here, and his cousin, who had been preparing to loom over me like a mountain on the verge of avalanche, dropped despondently back and then Carlos pretended again that he liked me.

To him, I would say, I was neither more nor less than a gringo: rich as he was not, representative and beneficiary of the system of delineation that excluded him; accordingly, fair prey whenever he could catch me. I could have been Canadian or British and his definition of me would have been the same. And what was he to me? What I had said to him about my vulnerability in Southside was so true that perhaps his non-Mexican-ness was irrelevant, in which case why not extend Southside all the way to Patagonia?

A history of such transnational perceptions characterizes Latin Americans’ stereotype of the Northsider soul as the
calculating, cold-hearted materialism of the Caucasian Other.

In perfect counterpoint, an American observer of Mexican California concluded:
The men are thriftless, proud, extravagant, and very much given to gaming; and the women have but little education, and a good deal of beauty, and their morality, of course, is none of the best . . .

Another foreign adventurer of that period wrote:
In person, the Californian
caballero
is generally tall and graceful, with jet black hair, having a slight tendency to curl, a brown complexion, expressive black eyes, and features decidedly Roman in their cast . . . I cannot conceive a more perfect type of manly beauty and chivalrous bearing.
Like his colleague, he was extremely aware of Mexicans’ pride.

My own summation—or stereotype, if you will—of a Mexican would be someone who is suspicious of outsiders, cynical of authority and distrustful of power, because he has been robbed so many times; someone who desires, perhaps more fiercely than I, to keep and enlarge whatever he has. And, yes, he is proud, so much so that liberty may be more valuable to him than wealth. In every sense he can be harder than I; probably he works harder.

What about me? Am I a calculating, cold-hearted materialist? Naturally, I cannot step far enough back out of my own shadow to see myself as I am. I am methodical because I am less robust than many Southsiders, more easily defeated by sickness or accident. My national inclination, which I mistake for personal, is to see Americans as idealistic, accustomed to believing that problems can be solved, that the pie can be made large enough for all, because we have not suffered as much as Mexicans; thus we are naive and complacent, but also in some ways more generous and optimistic.—What about the Mexican War, and Chinese Exclusion, slavery, the Indian genocide, Operation Gatekeeper and the broccoli days and years of Lupe Vásquez? In each case I excuse myself, my friends and almost everybody I know, thinking something like: Well, of course such things have happened, but the ones that happened a long time ago were possible only because at that time people were “different,” and the ones that take place today are the work of politicians and corporations; so I excuse myself.

I remember one time when Lupe Vásquez was complaining to me about the unfairness of Americans to Mexicans; finally, he grew so intemperate as to say, of
all
Americans, and, feeling injured, I said: Well, what about me? If I haven’t been fair to you, I’d like to know about it.—After a silence, during which he regarded me with his black eyes sparkling with rage, he finally grudgingly said: You been fair, Bill . . .—a statement which satisfied neither of us, because he felt, I could tell, that I had dragged it out of him, whereas I naturally had hoped to hear him say that I was more than fair:
generous,
a true friend, etcetera.

I know Americans who regard illegal immigration, and the so-called border problem, with outright fear.
If we treat them good, there’ll be more of them who want to come.
Most of my neighbors, although they would deny it now, expressed support for the Iraq wars, which appeared as easy and advantageous as raping away half of Mexico.—But I believe in the United States of Northside, and I always will; I couldn’t bear it if we weren’t good—

And how did Lupe perceive the difference between Northside and Southside?

Well, right here in Calexico and Mexicali the people are actually the same:
Mexican,
he once said. The buildings are different and everything is more organized in the States. In Mexicali you still have a lot of
colonias
where you have unpaved streets. There’s more poverty in Mexicali. But on the Mexican side you have more freedom. You can do things that a poor person can’t do over here. You can buy a cheap plot of land and build your own house. You can build it starting with one little room. You don’t have inspectors coming to see your license.

Although I have been spied on and detained in my own country, I have also been extorted by Mexican officials. They have assessed me fees for nonexistent permits, written my various drivers tickets for the misedemeanor of stopping to ask them directions, and openly charged me protection money. I eternally smile and pay, so we get along famously. And how “free” is Mexico for people such as José López from Jalisco, who cannot pay?

For one survivor of “the movement” of 1968, the forces of the state were personified by
the president’s perverse monkey features
and the riot police.
All those guys who lied, who kept us down, who kissed ass, who threatened us—they were the real Mexico,
he decided.
But then we, the new we, made from the many that had been, decided that, fuck it, we were also the real Mexico.