Imperial (174 page)

Our information designer, whose name is Edward Tufte, devotes several illustrated pages to the London cholera epidemic of 1854. Although the bacteriological agency of this then extremely lethal disease remained unknown, Dr. John Snow succeeded in isolating what we might call its proximate agency: the well at Broad Street. Ticking off the locations of the deaths on a map which also showed all eleven wells in the affected quarter, Snow was able to literally
see
where the deaths were clustered. Proceeding to the Board of Guardians of Saint James’s Parish, he persuaded them to remove the pump handle of the Broad Street well. The cholera deaths ran their course. What Snow did might be supposed to be a crude sort of aggregation. Tufte, however, points out that
aggregations by area can sometimes mask and even distort the true story of the data.
And Tufte draws three specimen maps with the Broad Street well at the center. In the first, one of the six aggregated zones, a trapezoid-like figure with a square notch taken out of the western edge, happens to be centered on the well, and so it is the darkest, most ominous grey. In the second map, five zones comprise the same area, the well touches one boundary of three of them, and they are all, not to mention an adjacent fourth zone, equally grey. In the third map, there are also five zones, but the two smallest ones on either side of the well, and some distance from it, are darkest, while the two larger zones whose joint boundary runs east-west across the well are only mid-grey.

This parable is inspiring, but at the same time cautionary. Should I subdelineate Imperial ignorantly (or, worse yet, misdefine its perimeters), the Broad Street well might remain invisible to me.

“NEARLY EVERYONE YOU MEET HERE IS FROM THE EAST”

Imperial is ghettoization; Imperial is mobility, migration, permanent temporariness. In these border towns, people come from somewhere else. Travelling around San Diego, Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, G. Harold Powell writes home in 1904:
Nearly everyone you meet here is from the east, and a large proportion from New York.
Ninety-nine years later, everybody is still from somewhere else. In Tijuana where
don’t
they come from? In Mexicali it’s the same. Calexico is growing like crazy, which must mean that people are arriving from somewhere else; it’s not just the birthrate.

Since there’s no school for his children in Sonora, one paterfamilias moves house to Tecate. Now his daughter has already married here. In fact, all his daughters are married; he has grandchildren; his sons sell furniture. He’s been to Northside; he used to work in Los Angeles. Smiling on his park bench, he boasts: I used to have a lot of luck since
la migra
never threw me out.

(In other words, I can get across whenever I want.)

He used to pick oranges, pick lemons, pick all kinds of fruit.—It was really easy back then, he says. I had a passport that let me go and come back. It allowed me to cross; then I could come right back. But I stayed. I worked for fifteen years, in the seventies and eighties. I picked Valencia oranges. I used to climb up into the trees; I had to snip them with little scissors. I used to pick lemons in Santa Paula; that’s three hours from Los Angeles to the west (which would have made it another Atlantis, and the interpreter said that he didn’t know the word “west”; he’d actually said
where the sun sets
). Oh, he said, there are lots of oranges and lemons and grapefruits in that valley! There was a lot of work, contracted work, ten or twelve hours a day.

And how long have you been in Tecate?

Many years.

The buttery smell of fresh pastries from the bakery at the edge of the park, the other old men on their benches, pensioned—
waiting to die,
as they put it—the palm shadows, the coolness which Tecate enjoys as a result of its elevation, the birds and the statues make me feel that this would not be a bad sector of Imperial in which to end my days, so I ask him if he likes it. He has already told me that he misses his little house in Sonora, and I half expect him to say that he would rather die there, but instead he replies: I live here because I can’t live in the U.S. The rent was so high . . .

SURRENDER

And do you recall that indefatiguable
pollo,
hoper and guide, José López from Jalisco? Do you remember his striving and struggling to cross the line? Two and a half years after I first met him just outside the handicapped gate of the entrance into Mexico, with the border wall five paces in front of him and Calexico’s taxi stand visible, audible and unattainable beyond, he said this to me:

I mean, at first I didn’t wanna do it because I thought I was just passing through. But I seen it was hard.
Hard,
Bill, to pass to the other side! And I would get a pretty good grip of money and spend it on hotels, with the hope of getting to the other side. But this was back in the old days. Thank God, I got about two-three days’ work with some white folks. They told me they were gonna pay me good, guiding and translating. The first day, sightseeing and barhopping and checking out the girls. The second day, they said, we want you to go with us to San Felipe, but we only got as far as the Río Hardy. We stopped there. They got new bamboo roofs and four posts and you can put lawn chairs. We stayed there and we started drinking a couple beers and that afternoon we just came to Mexicali. As a matter of fact, we ate around the corner from here, right at that new Chinese restaurant. At the third day, they said, okay, have something planned for us. Earn your money. I thought, man, I ran out of watering spots! Then I said, no problem! At the Caliente, I saw some older guys that I know and they were gambling. They were betting on the pit bull fights. I said, man! Where is that? At Ejido T——on the way to San Luis! It’s not like legal. It’s not registered. We might have been raided and shit. So I said, gimme the address. It was at a ranch. So we went there, spent around four or five hours over there, and we saw it all. Each fight went on not till one dropped, just until one cried. Put a pole in to separate them. Then I took ’em to the Miau-Miau. It was four guys. I think I earned my money. Each of ’em have a girl. The girls’ drinks are seven bucks. The men’s drinks are three-fifty. For me it was like a green light, too. But I wasn’t like getting drunk. I had to pay attention. They gave me a hundred-dollar bill, but I really earned my money because it was four guys, four girls. I told them, look, I’m gonna translate for you, but I’m not gonna translate everything the girls say, because my throat was already sore. So they give me another hundred bucks, and another, and then two hundred bonus. And that’s when I thought, Bill, since I haven’t been able to come across, and then I always used to go to the Hotel Capri instead of blowing air with a piece of newspaper at the Nuevo Pacífico, why not? When I had that money, Bill, and I sent some home, but still I had two hundred bills and I said I’m not gonna do the same mistake with the Hotel Capri.

I walked for about four or five hours. If you see a lady or a man outside, you ask them, are there any
cuartos
? Anyway, I see a sign. So I stopped there. I liked the place. It’s just a little room, but usually you’re gonna have to use your shower and restroom with the rest, and this one has it all inside. And I think this is the only one. I asked him how much and he tells me it’s about six hundred. I thought it was a little steep. But then I see the shower inside and I think it’s worth it. It’s six hundred pesos plus the electric bill plus five bucks a month for water. I could have only stayed three or four nights at the Capri, so I think I invested my money good.

And it’s just way better. I can do my laundry there. And that’s why I got my place, Bill. But I don’t wanna get too comfy. I gotta start making my decision. Since this happened with my Mom, I don’t even think I wanna go again to the other side. First because it’s so damn hard. I dunno. That event changed a lot of things. Changed my mind. I guess I’ve given more thought to things I didn’t think of much before my Mom’s death. Man, here I am. It’s been so many months I haven’t been over there. And maybe I can’t do it.

Sometimes I do good, man. I have a little to send home, a little for me. I’m thinking, I’m either going to get to the other side or bring my family over here. If I dedicate myself to what I do, I can live pretty good. Come September, October, it picks up. It picks up. ’Course it’s pretty hot now, but . . .

He was silent for an instant, then said in a lower voice: I don’t wanna spend too much time like
this,
you know. I don’t know if I’m not trying hard enough or what.

Throughout this book I have called him José López from Jalisco, and although he suffered the accident of being born in Mexicali he really
was
from there.—Jalisco, it has beach, he said to me once. That’s where Puerto Vallarta is. There’s big mountain range. The Sierra Madre runs like through five states! My Dad would drive. There’s like cliffs. And I mean, oh, man, it’s so nice. We would go at different times of the year. Like, the cliffs, you would see down, and all green! I would always get nervous in that part of the road because the traffic would be like passing in curves. You could see down, and like that way, going towards Guadalajara, you were on the edge of the cliff and you could see houses in the side of the cliff and you could see everything being harvested and you could see banana plantations. My father would go down and he would buy like an arm of bananas. That’s what they call it, an arm. We’d be eating bananas all the way to Guadalajara. Well, it’s been awhile since then.

Which do like better, Mexicali or Jalisco?

I can survive better here, Bill. Jalisco may be the place where I grew up, sure, but it’s not about that; it’s about survival. And it’s not wild here, like Tijuana. I been to Juárez, too, and Nuevo Laredo. And this is the border where I would like to be doing what I am doing when I have a choice. Tijuana, besides, there’s a lot of competition around there, a lot of guys who get deported and stay there in Tijuana. It’s been awhile since I been in Tijuana, maybe eight or ten years, and back in that time, you know they deport you right at the border. And I could hear a lot of locals talking English. So this is the place I think I would be. In Jalisco there’s hardly any jobs. You would have to own land, and then you would have to work at something.

Why not be a campesino here?

Because of the salary. Even what they pay over there—and he pointed quickly at the wall without looking at it—it’s underpaid. Because I knew Bud Antle, and Dole, which took them over; they planted lettuce, and broccoli, cauliflower in the Mexicali Valley, and they were getting more than in the
maquiladora,
but it still wasn’t really good.

How much can you make in a day, compared to what you would make in a
maquiladora
?

Well, if it’s just like, if I was there all the way to noon and then I seen that I wasn’t gonna get nobody to guide, what I do is dedicate myself to helping people with groceries. It depends on how far you take ’em. But on the average, just helping people with groceries, if I stay from eleven until they close the gate at eight P.M., and that don’t mean I’ll be working all these hours, I can probably make twenty-five or twenty dollars. I’ll tell you, Bill, most people will give you ten pesos if you just take ’em to the Hotel del Norte. It’s a sure thing.

And how often can you . . . ?

Hook somebody up? Well, then my job is like seasonal, since not a lot of people like this weather. Right now in summertime I would say, to guide, I would say, twice a week. In guiding, it’s a cinch. I’m gonna get at least fifty. Then when I escort them just to a cab, I get just a couple dollars. They’ll tip me out of their heart.

So how much do you make in a month?

Oh, it varies a lot. It’s got to be two hundred, two hundred and fifty a month.

So that was twice what a
maquiladora
worker made. I wanted to ask him how much he sent home to his family in Jalisco, but I didn’t.

Like this is one of the times I spent more time here in Mexicali, he remarked. I’m liking it. I don’t know if it got so hard to cross the border illegally, but I’m thinking, maybe I don’t really have to go to the border side to make a living. They’re forcing you to try your luck in the desert and the mountains and I won’t try that. Like there, every month there’ll be new posters, posters for missing people. Most of the posters, they have a note that says they got a mental illness. If not elderlies, it’s real young girls. Oh, man, a lot of things can happen.

A moment later two of the bicycle policemen who had been persecuting him (he especially feared the one in the dark shirt) appeared on the edge of Niños Héroes Park where we sat on that hundred-and-ten-degree morning with sweat slowly sliding down our chests, and they summoned him with a finger-jerk. A moment after he had come up to them and they had patted him down, he was walking away from them and me without looking back. He walked quite rapidly. When I caught up with him, they already had him up against the wall. They assured me that he had been arrested for three robberies. Eventually they let him go, and I thanked them for their attention to security. I wondered whether they would arrest him again when I was gone. But that had not quite happened yet. I took him to the Hotel Chinesca so that he could have a shower. He washed his clothes when he washed himself. Then he said: Like at night time, in that abandoned clinic, I wondered, what am I doing over here? When you’re hearing all the rats and cockroaches passing over that uncovered roof, no ceiling. So I got to thinking, man, if I’m gonna be here, might as well make the best of it. That’s how I decided to settle down.

He hit me up for a tip, and that was the last time I ever saw him.

Chapter 183

SUBDELINEATIONS: MONEYSCAPES (1989-2005)

Attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being?. . . We recognise the alphabet; we are not sure of the language.