Imperial (175 page)

—George Eliot, 1876

HOLES IN THE MAP

Module F, Social and Economic Data Tables, will depict our moneyscape for today. California in her entirety lies before us, nicely subdivided in money-zones of stepped grey, one county per zone. In this map of median household income in 1989, Imperial County stands out with the whiteness of earnings stripped down to the bone: $20,494 to $24,450. But she has company in her poverty: namely, the great belt from Inyo down to Kern, and up through Kings and Fresno counties—much of the Central Valley, in short. And this whiteness continues even into the Swiss-like counties of Calaveras and Alpine.

San Bernardino and Riverside counties are two full greys darker and richer than this. Their median household income lies between $28,867 and $33,520 inclusive.

Then come Los Angeles and San Diego counties, sharing the next shade of lush darkness at $33,521 to $39,113.

In Module B, we have what first seems to be a negative image of the previous map: white, not black, is now good; for this moneyscape shows County Unemployment Rates, 1999 Annual Averages. And so the deep black holes of Imperial, Tulare and Colusa counties stand grimly out from the map: thirteen point five to twenty-two point eight percent unemployment. (Ranked number one of all California counties: Imperial, 1997; Imperial, 1998; Imperial, 1999 . . .) Meanwhile, lying insouciantly alongside Imperial, San Diego County remains pure white, enjoying the lowest unemployment bracket in the state: one point nine to three point nine percent. Fellow club members: Orange County, and that other white coastal zone of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. As for Riverside, that county is a pale grey, like San Bernardino and Inyo above it: four to five point nine percent unemployment. The grey zone beginning in Ventura County and sweeping all the way up past Death Valley to the edge of Mono County, should we consider it a sick place or just average? Los Angeles County is grey, too, I see; Imperial County’s all alone in her blackness down there.

“SOME OF THE GREATEST INCOME DISPARITIES IN CALIFORNIA”

Palm Springs, Cathedral City and Palm Desert
have some of the greatest income disparities in California . . . In general, resort communities . . . had some of the highest income gaps, as did agricultural areas in the Imperial and Central valleys that rely heavily on immigrant workers.

Mecca: Median household income is $22,973.

Indio: $34,624.

Indian Wells (six miles from Indio): $93,986.
Retirees have flocked in recent years to dozens of gated communities,
which must be why in the
Desert Sun
one can find such lease bargains as
Sterling Cove: Exclusive Estate/Pool!
for nine thousand dollars a month . . .

RANKINGS

In 1997, a ranking of small-scale American urban clusters for various livability factors assigns the “micropolitan” complex El Centro-Calexico-Brawley a climate rating of zero; an amusement place availability ranking of second to last, just above Hinesville, Georgia; above the bottom ten for personal income (Eagle Pass, Texas, being the loser since it is
a port of entry for immigrants from Mexico
); for
change in per capita income 1990-94, adjusted for inflation,
the El Centro cluster finishes dead last.
In El Centro-Calexico-Brawley, California, the decline partially reflects an influx of immigrants with few initial job skills and low earning potential.
Second to last for percentage of adults with a high school education (once again, Eagle Pass, Texas, is at the bottom), El Centro gets fabulous scores for population growth, percentage of new housing, annual expenditures on health care and other peculiarities. Thus, on the overall report card, Eagle Pass finishes in last place with three hundred seventy-one out of a thousand points; Mount Vernon, Washington, wins at six hundred and five points; and El Centro gets four hundred and thirty-four points, coming in at a national rank of a-hundred-and-eighty-first out of two hundred.

May I tell you more? In 2001, a certain California county called Imperial (leading commodities: cattle, leaf and head lettuce, alfalfa, carrots and livestock) ranks eleventh in the state for total production value. In 2002, it will rank ninth. San Diego (cut flowers, ornamentals, eggs, avocados, tomatoes and the like) ranks just above Imperial at eighth for both years. Fresno and Tulare trade places for first and second; Riverside’s at ninth, then eleventh, busily vending its milk, nursery products, table grapes and hay; Los Angeles is halfway down the list at twenty-seventh and twenty-sixth (nursery plants, peaches, etcetera); Alpine is smack at the bottom, poor number fifty-eight, no produce to mention.

Meanwhile, in the year 2000, one out of four Mexicans, some of them doubtless in Imperial, exist
in extreme poverty.—
That year sixteen percent of all Californians were classified as impoverished, while thirty point three percent of Imperial County denizens made the same grade. Every day in every way we are getting better and better: For in 1990, only twenty-three point eight percent of Imperial County’s residents had been officially poor. Shall we give praise for the conquest of Arid America?—On a hot June morning in 2003, I walked out of my hotel room to get coffee and found a line of human beings, almost all of them brownskinned or oliveskinned, stretching along the sidewalk and around the corner; I followed them down the sidewalk and around the next corner; they went almost entirely around the four sides of a city block. I asked the girl at the end of the line what she was waiting for, and she said a Ralph’s supermarket job. The newspaper said that it was a Food 4 Less; two thousand people had lined up in hopes of getting seventy-five jobs. The first ones had been waiting since three in the morning. Applications were given out beginning at eight.

An essay on Tijuana remarks:
The closer you get to the U.S., the poorer the city becomes.
This is in fact the opposite of what I hear,
³⁴⁴
but never mind; Tijuana most certainly is poorer than her neighbor, San Diego. A Stanford historian informs us:
The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world.

What does it mean to be ranked? Does one
know one’s place
? Does Mecca hate Indian Wells?

Until a large pool of skilled workers willing to work for less began appearing in the Inland Empire, there was no incentive for high-paying firms to migrate to the region. Now, there is.
Why, how nice for high-paying firms! Something tells me that in Mexican Imperial a high-paying firm can find any number of people who are willing to work for less. And in material advantages they are well supplied. Imperial’s moneyscape may be summed up as
a steep and reliable differential,
whose reliability facilitates the commerce it specializes in. Necessity teaches poor people, as it does
maquila
managers, to map out specialized sub-gradients of particular utility.

In 2003 a man in Tijuana assured me: Most of the tourists are from the U.S., and all the money here is from the U.S. Basically, we live on the U.S.

How did that happen? I asked.

It happened bit by bit. Here basic services, like getting a car fixed, are cheaper that in the U.S., so Americans come to get more for their money.

The man was orginally from Frontera Sur of Chiapas. He said to me: Here in Tijuana there are more people from all over the Republic! A mixture from all the states!

In other words, the international line created a sharp gradient, over which money from Northside accordingly spilled; and Mexicans came from all over Southside to be nourished by that money.
³⁴⁵

In a classical economic model of international trade, raw materials, especially agricultural produce, come from the undeveloped country to the developed one. But in Mexicali the Guatemalan who squeezed my fresh orange juice said that his oranges came from across the border, from California, as did his grapefruits, carrots, celery, and even his nopales, whose pulp makes such a lovely bitter green when blended with orange juice; the only exception to this rule of reverse derivation was his bananas, which came from Chiapas. In 2003 he paid two pesos per orange. His profit on each glass of juice he sold was about fifty percent.

And infinitely eastward of there, a good fifty kilometers or more into the steamy furnace of the Mexicali Valley, the renowned fighting-cock breeder Señor Héctor, whose real name I decline to reveal to the law, dwelled in Ejido Monterrey. One of his birds survived seven fights. He’d bought his latest batch of chicks in Indio, where Northside’s strictness renders cockfighting more than nominally illegal, and drove them across the line, hiding them beneath the seat of his scarred truck. He gave them vitamins every day, and a shot of anabolic steroids. Up high in rope perches in their cages, the black cock with the flamelike mane and the reddish-brown one were jittering their heads back and forth. When they were young they used to fear being handled. Now they attacked as they were supposed to, which was why when he worked with them, Señor Héctor wore the same heavy canvas shield as lemon-pickers. He’d made a success through his own efforts. He sold them for up to five hundred dollars each; sometimes ten men each pay two hundred dollars to bet on one of his birds, winner take all. In his way Héctor was a great man.

But to know Imperial’s moneyscapes, the peaks of richness, the various boundary-lines, the rippling moneycourses which bear wealth away, is to make one inescapably conscious of the resulting inequalities.

Once upon a Mexicali night, my sweetheart and I set out for the Fiesta del Sol. Behind a wall, white tombs crowded each other in the evening dirt. We got into a taxi that rushed us down into the Río Nuevo gorge. Then we paid the woman behind the heavily barred window, who gave us one pasteboard ticket apiece. So we gained entrance to the carnival rides, the even lines of
policía
rigidly enjoying themselves, the darkfaced, proud-breasted girls tapping their feet to the music, with their fingers in the belt-loops of their jeans. There was a basketball hoop contest, a plastic Virgin of Guadalupe for a prize! Teenaged girls screamed in chorus on the twister ride. Meanwhile, accompanied by prerecorded music, all paying children could get their photos taken with Spider-Man!

On the edge of a dirt embankment overlooking the Fiesta, poor children stood in a line, looking down across the street and over a fence into the fun, the Río Nuevo stench coming in from evenly spaced gratings on the lovely cool wind, fountains spouting from a sunburst daisy booth where someone was about to win a Chevrolet.

Chapter 184

SUBDELINEATIONS: MONEYSCAPES (2003-2006)

MORE HOLES IN THE MAP

Between 2000 and 2003, one out of every six manufacturing jobs in the United States vanishes!
Economists say it’s largely the strong increases in productivity that have shrunk demand for workers.

Where does production go? China, India, Mexico.

But now Mexico’s also losing those manufacturing jobs. Where do they go? China, India.

What does Mexico gain? Agricultural revenues.
U.S. opens avocado pipeline: Mexico ramps up exports as trade barriers finally fall.

Chapter 185

PRESENT AND FUTURE SUCCESSES (2003)

Hopefully you’ll find the data and charts mostly correspond to your
impressions of Imperial from your many visits there. I’ve never been, and
I’m not sure I especially want to go. It seems likely to remind me of the
Anasazi ruins or some other collapsed civilization, except people still live
there, and a version of the collapse is still going on with only a handful of
bright spots.

—Paul Foster, 2007

County unemployment rate dips a bit to 22 percent.

OPTIMISTIC OUTLOOK: Local officials point to the housing and retail boom as indicators of present and future successes.

Economic signs have picked up across the country . . . Some of the good news has reached the Imperial Valley.

While the county still has the highest rate of unemployment in the state, there were more workers employed in September than at the same time last year . . .

Chapter 186

MARKET PRICES (2000)

Now a haze lies upon the land . . . and through it emerges an apparition of monumental cultivation.

—William DeBuys and Joan Myers, 1999

I
n 1993, when the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, Northside corn sold for a hundred and ten dollars a ton; Southside corn went for two hundred and forty dollars a ton. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the price of Mexican corn had fallen by half, bankrupting one point three million small farmers. Well, so Mexicans could buy corn for less.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

By the way, in 1989, fifty-four percent of rural Mexicans were classified as poor. In 2001 that figure was eighty-one and a half percent.
There’s a lot of crying-in-your-beer stuff going on.

Up in Imperial, the total agricultural wealth created in 2000 was a bit under nine hundred and twenty million dollars—ten and a half percent less than for the previous year. Only apiaries did better in 2000 than in the previous year.
You can’t produce things the way you used to.

The top five products were, in decreasing order of gross income, those old Imperial standbys cattle, alfalfa, lettuce, carrots and sugar beets. No doubt we will not be able to produce such items the way we used to; and if you wish to know how we used to, I refer you to the taxi driver Angel, who said as he drove me from El Centro to the good city of Imperial, passing a thick cloud of white birds hovering above a brown field over which one sprinkler made many rainbows: You know, lettuce is hard to work, because all day is bend down and cut. Watermelons is start at eleven, so you work only four, five hours. Melons you cut in early morning or late afternoon; watermelons is easier money. The hardest thing with watermelons is to know which is the ripest.