Imperial (173 page)

Chapter 182

BETWEEN THE LINES (2003-2005)

The third, or Desert division [of San Diego County], lies east of the second, or San Jacinto range of mountains . . . Along the eastern base of this range extends the great Coahuila Valley, 50 miles in length by 10 in width, connecting southerly with the valley of the New River, which flows from the Colorado in times of freshets and fructifies the fertile lands along its bottoms. The Southern Pacific Railroad crosses this division . . .

—Douglas Gunn, 1887

“I CAN GET ACROSS WHENEVER I WANT”

This book supposes that the damage done to the former coherence of the entity called Imperial is now as sickeningly rich as the stench of the Río Nuevo, which on a summer night remains on one’s clothes and even on one’s tongue;
³⁴²
on the other hand, as the Río Nuevo crosses the line to become the New River, upon its black sewage and white clots of foam are projected the carnival-like reflections of the border lights—beautiful lights!—and each delineation, every nexus, truly does offer us its own beauty: the rich night-mirror of the Salton Sea, for instance, or the change from Calexico’s silent wide streets to Mexicali’s crowded wide streets. Meanwhile, considerable coherence remains. I see it in the photographs I’ve taken: This old man resembles that old man, not just in the face and pose but in the clothes he wears. I see it in the sky: Wherever I go, the solar disk remains as fiery red as the face of a drunken, sleepy Mexican rancher on a Sunday afternoon. Honoring coherence, my Mexican friends go on denying and defying the first line.—When you look at this wall, I asked a man in Tijuana, do you feel sad or angry, or don’t you care?—Proudly, he replied: I don’t feel blocked in. I can get across whenever I want.—This statement does bear some literal value. Go to Mexicali’s tapering silver-painted border stele number two hundred and twenty-one, and you’ll see an outright ladder of tires mounted on the wall. To aid the ascender, an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe has been painted nearby. Year by year, a rare sapling further obscures her; to deter him, a massive light, with a camera doubtless attached, stares down from Northside, directly opposite the ladder. Never mind: Read the
New York Times:
At Mexican Border, Tunnels, Vile River, Rusty Fence.
Perhaps nowhere is the inexorable nature of the northward migration of Mexicans—and the vulnerability of the United States to infiltration, whether by migrants or terrorists—more apparent than in Mexicali and its sister city, Calexico, Calif.
In other words,
I can get across whenever I want.

Here let me insert the supernatural trans-border adventures of the ex-policeman Francisco Cedeño, whom you may remember in connection with that immortal
narcocorrido
“The City of Hawaii.” He said:

When I went to meet my Dad in Fresno, he bought me some documents and taught me to speak a little English. I was living and working in Irwindale since my father’s family did not accept me. I had a birth certificate and a social security card. I made up a story and paid off some American policemen to get a driver’s license. So my name is Javier———, and he showed me the false documents.—My wife didn’t say much. She didn’t know anything about the documents. I wanted to be an artist. So when I paid all these policemen off, they started threatening me—big brown men—and I said: I’m an artist. So the Department of Motor Vehicles gave me the driver’s test and a policeman sold me the guide for the written test. It’s the same here and there. I can swear to that. So one day I was here alone and very sad, and I was praying and I heard a voice saying I had to ask for forgiveness from my wife, parents, everyone to whom I had done wrong. So I went to the U.S. Customs and told them I had false papers and was sorry. They took me upstairs to a little room and kept me there for two hours and then they said I was a liar. Who
was
I? they wanted to know. I showed them my Mexican papers, and they said that for all they knew I was a Central American. They told me to get out. So now I can come and go. I have my social security number memorized!

And he laughingly reeled it off.

Did this story contain any embellishments? Who am I to say? Whether or not it’s literally true, and it may well be (but if so, its climax must have occurred before the sea-change of September 11), it faithfully expresses a certain theme:
I can get across whenever I want.

Francisco Cedeño might or might not have crossed the line on his own. Meanwhile, the farmers of oranges, water and lettuce had shown us the way to conceptualize everything—as a commodity which could be artificially
flowed
from origin to market. To the coyotes and other hole-builders, human beings were simply another such commodity. Hurrah for the canny people-farmers! To the guardians of Northside, needless to say, that flow was an endless Salton Sea accident. If
la línea
is a sort of canal, then the Chinese tunnels and other border-piercings may as well be considered weep holes—that is, openings left in retaining walls and the like to allow drainage. But the hydraulic engineers of Northside didn’t buy that. Oh, if only they’d employed a double chamber sediment excluder! Ashford shutters, Bengal shutters, Fouracres shutters, automatic and counterweight, over- and under-counterweight, bear trap shutters of the European and non-European types, Whiting’s rising sill gate, they might already have tried those, I don’t know; for since the Patriot Act was passed, we’re not supposed to ask; but there must be
some
way to keep them out! (They’ll pop their heads up again in a minute.) All the same, had
I can get across whenever I want
been entirely true, the functionaries of Operation Gatekeeper with their handcuffs and Nightbusters
³⁴³
must have despaired. The wall itself, and the sad deported
pollos
who tell their stories in this book, prove the reverse.
Border deaths hit records
, my newspaper boasted.
A record 460 illegal migrants died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the last year, a toll pushed higher by the unusually hot temperatures and a shift of illegal migration routes through the remote desert . . . The dead were mostly Mexicans . . .
And yet the proud man’s conception of Imperial, which is Mexican America, asserted itself faithfully, irresistibly. Imperial continued to be herself. Imperial was Elvira, the much-loved and much-raped Mexicali street prostitute whose face had been scarred by car accidents. Delineate her into pieces, and she’d still be Elvira. I’m told that she was stabbed, or maybe strangled. I haven’t seen her in years, so chances are that she really has crossed the line, gone beneath the dirt. All the same, she’s still Elvira. Cherishing my photographs of her, I refuse to feel blocked in; I can remember Elvira whenever I want . . .

The ancient taxi driver Juan Rodríguez, who spoke
small English,
lived Monday through Friday in the city of Imperial, and weekends in Mexicali. He stayed in the United States solely for the sake of his children’s education, he said. I asked him about the wall and he said: It is an insult. But it means nothing.

Stella Mendoza lived in Brawley where she was born, but her orthodontist was in Mexicali, where Lupe Vásquez slept most nights, although his son, who had Down’s syndrome, attended “special school” in Heber. Unlike José López, who sat on the south side of the border wall year after year, Lupe could get across whenever he wanted; and in his honor I quote from an end-of-the-century Pancho Villa prayer card:
Beloved brother, you who knew how to conquer your fiercest enemies, cause me to triumph in my most difficult undertakings.
A portrait of that famous revolutionist is captioned
GENERAL PANCHO VILLA, THE MAN WHO DARED INVADE THE U.S.A.

On the Day of the Dead, the only live people in Pioneer Cemetery Number One, with the exception of the caretakers, were a couple in late middle age; they dwelled in Northside, up near Fresno, but since three of their fourteen children were buried here in Mexicali, they came each year, she with her broom, he with his wheelbarrow; they’d already bought a crypt for the two of them, and she pointed to the concrete slab and said: All they have to do is slide this out to put our bodies in. It’s very well made.—Over there was the grave of the son who’d died in an accident; here was the grave of the daughter who’d died of cancer. The parents had driven down the previous day, stopping in Indio to gamble at Casino Twenty-nine; then, crossing the line, they’d arrived in Mexicali at nine P.M. After their children’s tombs were put in order, they’d drive back to Northside to await the Mexican call of death.

In Mexicali, the parking lot attendant Lupita had crossed the line for twenty-nine years now, mainly to go to Las Vegas, which she loved. The year before I interviewed her, the handbag containing her passport got stolen while she was reading a magazine in a fast food restaurant in Calexico. She would have a new passport in two months, she thought; she was certain that she could get across whenever she wanted.
“The aim if reached or not, makes great the life.”

When the sun went down, wide Mónica began to work across the street from Lupita’s former spot. She’d come into this world in Fresno, California. Her mother and brothers remained there. She kept her three children with her in Mexicali, where she dwelled because she loved her grandmother so much and because being around her mother made her so sad. She apologized for being so dark; her grandfather had been a nigger, she said. She had to work hard for her children, she said; she worked especially hard on Friday and Saturday nights. She never carried condoms with her nor asked her customers to use any. Her fee was twenty dollars. Her answer to impotence was vitamins and reassurance. She thought that any woman who loved her man enough would always say yes to his desire, because she loved him. It was her
choice
to be here.

In 1916 the Imperial County Development Agent reported that
in Imperial Valley, besides the 39,028 bales ginned on the American side, 24,147 bales were ginned on the Mexican side, making a total valley production of
63,175
bales.
He too saw the valley as all one—at least as far as the Riverside County line.
Up to 1916, the Mexican cotton was ginned on the American side and the production included in the California statistics by the Census bureau.

Up in Riverside County, in a weird Mexican barrio on Indian land not far from Coachella (the place was called Duroville, and will receive its own chapter), I photographed four young men who leaned against or sat upon a car; and the right-handmost of these, whose name was Benito Ledesma, said to me: I consider myself Mexican. I was born in Riverside. My Mom was born in Mexico. That means I got Mexican blood.

He sometimes went to Mexicali for fun. (He considered the Thirteen Negro Bar too dangerous.) He was Mexican, and yet he said: When I grow up I wanna stay here.

It seemed that to him, too, the line was nearly irrelevant—a hindrance, perhaps, a distortion, certainly, but he was Mexican, emphatically not Mexican-American, it came out; the fact that he had neither been born in Mexico nor lived there, nor intended to do so, made scant difference.

The epigraph to this chapter transacts its narrative in coins of an obsolete currency: San Diego County no longer includes that long valley now dissected by abstraction’s knife into sub-valleys, of which neither the New River Valley nor “the great Coahuila Valley” retains its name (for that matter, the immense nation of Kumeyaay Indians out of which so much of San Diego and Imperial counties were violently carved has long since dried up into a very few reservation-puddles); meanwhile, the New River no longer fructifies; it is a horror; the Colorado neither waxes nor wanes, having been
smoothed out
by the Bureau of Reclamation and other agents of control; the Southern Pacific Railroad may still
cross this division,
but highways have robbed it of its prominence. So what? Delineations come and go; Imperial remains Imperial. Thoreau insisted that even when they put him in jail his thoughts could still fly in and out the window. For my part, I don’t feel blocked in. I can get across whenever I want, my fantasies adorned with twists of dates from the trees of Rancho Roa.

DIFFERENCES

Meanwhile, Imperial’s artificially created subzones, artifcially stimulated into mutual antipathy, insist upon their diffferences.

Desperately arguing against the reduction of its water allotment by the behemoth Interior, Imperial County claims that it has an entirely different soil type from Coachella. The Imperial Valley’s fields glisten on their low ends; Coachella’s don’t. But the Imperial Valley’s not wasteful—don’t ever think that!
Unlike CWD’s service area, where the sandy soil soaks up the water and the runoff to the Salton Sea is underground, the farmers in IID’s service area must work with soil that does not allow the water to seep in quickly. Tailwater is the natural result.
(Now to the point:
Interior has not limited IID’s tailwater use for over seven decades . . . all parties . . . were well aware of IID’s customary irrigation practices.
)

IMPERIAL REPRISE

All the same, I can get across whenever I want.

THE BROAD STREET WELL (1854)

If that’s so, what could be less relevant than any official borderline? It’s easy to say that Northside is richer than Southside; more graphically, that Northside is to Southside as San Diego is to Tijuana: foggy to smoggy, clean to dirty, spacious to crammed, gridded to mazed, silent to loud, expensive to cheap—all such oppositions being relative, of course, TJ being much more expensive than Mexicali and, in Centro, many of the prices nearly equal San Diego’s; but that raises up one more opposition: Southside, many things are negotiable; Northside, they often are not. I’ve stayed in that San Diego Travelodge half a dozen times now, and in both senses it stinks. The rooms are grubby and damaged; the doors don’t lock; flies drift over the courtyard, and now it costs me a hundred dollars. What can I do about it? A tip’s not going to make anybody fix my room. In sum, if we zoom in on Northside, we can see such gross variations in moneyscape topography as the following: Within Brawley’s zip code 92227, which would seem to be an awfully discrete location, the postal carrier route C003 (West Allen Street, De Anza Place and environs) boasts an average estimated income of $80,595, while carrier route COO2 (North First Street, North Imperial Avenue, and so on) in the very same zip code presents an income of $22,692. Where is the money-line? Couldn’t it be that Imperial is comprised of as many sub-shapes as that abandoned car’s windshield over there, shattered into powder? One prominent information designer would certainly expect this or any book to convey
a sense of
average
and of
variation
about that average—the two fundamental summary measures of statistical data.
I agree with him; I want to know whether the variation about the average is so great that aggregating Imperial into “Northside” and “Southside” is meaningless.