Imperial (191 page)

An official of the district agrarian tribunal in Mexicali—Lic. Carlos E. Tinoco, official of the Tribunal Unitario Agrario Distrito Dos. Interviewed in the tribunal offices in Mexicali, September 2005. Terrie Petree translated.

Maximum allowed size of land grants; owners of Orange County in 1850—Marschner, pp. 5, 46.

Acreages of Mexican ranchos in the Riverside area—After Lechs, pp. 676-78.

22 . Mexico (1821 -1911)

Epigraph: “They did not recognize themselves as the only real hope for the future . . .”—Strugatski and Strugatski, p. 131.

Description of Benito Juárez, and information about him—Engraving reproduced in Wasserman, p. 92, and capsule biography, pp, 93-97.

Footnote about Maximilian and Carlotta—Lowry, p. 15.

“After the nation’s humiliating defeat by the North Americans . . .”—Wasserman, p. 93.

Casualties of the Caste War—Ibid., pp. 101-2.

Casualties of Ayutla—Loc. cit.

The Ley Lerdo—Ibid., p. 103. Dwyer claims (p. 28) that the
ejido
lands were in fact exempted.

Footnote: Classes and balance of power during mid-nineteenth century—Wasserman, pp. 54, 71.

Juárez’s aim to increase agricultural production—Dwyer, p. 28.

“In the long run . . .”—Wasserman, p. 110.

Increased water needs of haciendas—Ibid., p. 153.

Description of Porfirio Díaz—After an engraving; ibid., p. 161.

My 1910
Britannica
: “Then came the long, firm rule of Porfirio Díaz. . .”—11th ed., vol. XVIII, p. 322 (entry on Mexico).

The Law of Colonization—Wasserman, p. 169.

Higher wages of Northside and Southside border areas—Ibid., p. 183.

Population of Baja California Norte, 1900-1910—
Britannica
(11th ed.), vol. XVIII, p. 324 (entry on Mexico).

Census data on Mexico, 1900 and 1810—Ibid., p. 322.

Many government lands were vacant only of clear title—See Boyer, p. 71.

Similarity of Dawes Act with American policy in Dominica, 1915—Pike, p. 213.

Luis Terrazas’s ten million acres in Chihuahua, etc.—Described in Wasserman, p. 177.

The two waves of expropriation of communal lands—Ibid., p. 187.

“Like so many other Latin American strongmen . . .”—Ibid., p. 166.

“By 1910, most rural folk in Mexico . . .”—Boyer, p. 47. Dwyer writes (p. 29) that 77% to 88% of the people in Baja were “landless rural laborers” in 1910.

23. The Line Itself (1844 -1911)

Epigraph: “What are the colors of the map without a dream?”—Torre and Wiegers, p. 81 (Alberto Blanco, “Maps,” 1998; trans. Michael Wiegers).

“The Californian boasts of California . . .”—Bull, p. 21.

24. Los Angeles (1850)

Epigraph: “But I hope as soon as I set forth . . .”—Bowman and Heizer, pp. 111-12 (letter of 9 February 1774).

Dates of Los Angeles’s first brick house and first legal hanging—McGroarty, vol. 1, p. 367.

The murder of Juan Diego Valdez—Gostin, pp. 564-65 (records #1562-63).

“The streets were thronged throughout the entire day . . .”—Bell, p. 10.

“All, however, had slung to their rear the never-failing pair of
Colt’s
. . .”—Ibid., p. 7.

Violent deaths of unknowns in Los Angeles County, 1850s—Gostin, pp. 596-97 (records #2249, 2243, 2244, 2247, 2261, 2262, 2270, 2269, 2276, 2277).

Los Angeles, “then the greatest cow county in the state . . .”—Bell, p. 11.

“Nigger Alley, which was the most perfect and full grown pandemonium . . .”—Ibid., pp. 12-13.

Information on the Los Angeles County Recorder’s register—Gostin, pp. 355-56.

The adventurer from the British Isles: “The portly Californian, under his ample-brimmed
sombrero
. . .” and “I have frequently seen a quiet and respectable party of natives . . .”—Ryan, vol. 1, pp. 72-73, 104. These words were written about Monterey. But why should Los Angeles have been different? The acclaimed novelist Helen Hunt Jackson (op. cit., p. 12) expressed what Mexican Californians must have felt: “The people of the United States have never in the least realized that the taking possession of California was not only a conquering of Mexico, but of California as well; that the real bitterness of the surrender was not so much to the empire which gave up the country, as to the country itself which was given up.”

Los Angeles in 1859—Dana, pp. 478-79.

Listing of two Chinese in L.A. 1850 census—The Great Basin Foundation Center for Anthropological Research, vol. 1, chronology.

Various violent deaths 1852-58—Gostin, pp. 492-93 (records #51, 54, 55, 58, 60, 513-19, 524-25); pp. 494-97 (records #126-33); pp. 498-99 (records #175-86), pp. 510-11 (records #444-47), pp. 528-29 (records #819- 20), pp. 536-37 (record #958).

25. Lost Mines (1849 -20 05)

Epigraph: “But a few miles from us on the east . . .”—
The City and County of San Diego
, p. 38.

Number of gold seekers crossing the Imperial Valley in 1849—Griffin and Young, p. 172.

The Colorado Desert, which runs a hundred and fifty miles long by fifty miles wide—Figures from Elliott,
History of San Bernardino and San Diego Counties
, p. 173.

“A mere thoroughfare for the adventurers . . .”—Marschner, p. 33.

“Business of every description is reported as being extremely dull.”—
The Country Gentleman
, vol. V, no. 16 (April 19, 1855; whole no. 120), p. 256: “CALIFORNIA NEWS.”

News of La Paz mines, 1864—
Illustrated History of Los Angeles County
, p. 100.

Crosses, flowers and saints at Mexican mines—Quaife, pp. 243-44 (from ch. XVII of J. D. Borthwick,
Three Years in California
).

The tale of Peg-Leg Smith—Ainsworth, pp. 126-29.

Tumco in 1870—Harris, pp. 51-52.

Gold mines 70 miles north of San Diego—McPherson, p. 61.

Tumco—In this connection let me quote Penn, song number 9 (Tumco Mine): “Howdy do and welcome to you / This is the Tumco mine / Here’s your mining hat here’s where everything’s at / You’re gonna have a real fine time . . . There’s a hospital in the middle of town / Whitewashed and 40 foot square / It’s easy to see and I guarantee / Heat stroke will send you there.”

Transactions of the Alexander couple—California State Archives. Microfilmed Imperial County records, 1851- 1919. Roll #1433101. Index to Grantors, 1851-1907. May 6, 1886: Book 15, p. 310. July 13, 1894: Book 15, p. 243.

Gold and water statistics for Imperial mines (actually, “mines in the area”)—Tumco pamphlet, last page.

United Mines Company telegram—UC Berkeley. Bancroft Library, farm labor situation 1933-34. Folder: “Mexican border incidents.” To Governor Hiram Johnson, from Wilbank Johnson, President, UMC, 10:46 A.M., 24 April 1914. 29SF SO 124—3 EX.

26. White Eyelashes (1853 -1926)

Epigraph: “The discourse of Cortés . . .”—Gómara, p. 25.

“The cause of humanity . . .”—Bancroft, vol. XXIII, p. 603.

The Mexican War: “It is generally admitted that Mexico was provoked into aggression . . .”—1910
Britannica
, 11th ed., vol. XVIII, p. 340.

“Those spirited men who had gone forth to uphold the broken altars . . .”—D. Gunn, p. 196.

Bancroft on Walker’s “seemingly pupilless, grey eyes . . .”—Vol. XXIII (1888), p. 159.

Walker sees Mexico’s race-mixing.—Based on his remarks quoted in Pike, p. 147.

Walker’s career: San Francisco to Tijuana—D. Gunn, p. 195.

“An anomaly in the history of mankind . . .”—Ibid., p. 198

Walker’s 3 expeditions against Nicaragua—Ibid., pp. 196-97.

“A movement to secure the annexation of enough territory . . .”—Tout,
The First Thirty Years
, p. 200.

Story of General Enrique Estrada—Kerig, p. 251.

27. Colonel Couts’s Homestead (1839 -
ca.
1915)

Epigraph: “I want and desire . . .”—León-Portilla and Shorris, p. 251, the Bancroft Dialogues.

Epigraph: “Get an Indian wife . . .”—Gilberto Sanders, interviewed on his rancho in Ejido Morelos, 2003. Terrie Petree interpreted.

Syncretism: Let me give you an inkling of the possibilities. On 17 July 1858, William Abbott, aged 24, weds Merced García in Los Angeles, in a Catholic church. In the meantime, Phineas Banning has already married Rebecca Sanford at the home of William T. B. Sanford; while María Eduige (or Edwigo) Soto, whose parents hail from Sonora, has taken Vicente Carrasco to be her lawfully wedded spouse. Antonio Regan has likewise wedded Mary Fay at the Los Angeles Mission Church. In short, as we see from the surnames, either sex is free to legally mate with either race—true democracy, my friends! To be sure, the choice made by Antonio Regan and Mary Fay—a man of the conquered with a woman of the conquerors—will not be so widely emulated.—The four marriages: William Abbott through Mary Fay—Gostin, pp. 360-61 (records #1-5); pp. 364-65 (records #93-95); pp. 368- 69 (records #165-66); pp. 398-99 (record #810).

“Make money and marry a Spanish woman. . .”—Muir, p. 544 (
The Mountains of California
, 1894). Muir continues: “People mine here for water as for gold . . . ,” and the suitor tells him: “If I chance to strike a good, strong flow, I’ll soon be worth $5000 or $10,0000.”

Opinion that the señoritas of San Diego, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles “preferred for husbands, not finely dressed, courtly, serenading cavaliers . . .”—Samuel T. Black, vol. 1, p. 73.

Footnote: “Their chief faults they had brought with them in their blood from Mexico . . .”—Ibid., pp. 66-67.

“I was Married on the 4th of November . . .”—D. Mackenzie Brown, p. 32 (Alpheus B. Thompson, Santa Barbara, to his brother, Wildes T. Thompson, Topsham, Maine, March 18, 1835).

“It is two years to-day since my Wife was buried . . .”—Ibid., pp. 59-60 (Alpheus B. Thompson, Santa Barbara, to his sister, Mary Thompson, Topsham, Maine, February 28, 1853).

Tale of the Spanish conquistadors who “heard that ten suns distant from there was an island of Amazons . . .”—Gómara, p. 303.

The name “California”—Industrious, voluminous Bancroft, unable to find the word in any of Cortés’s writings, attributes first mention of the real California to the diary of Ulloa’s voyage of 1539. The Amazons eluded Ulloa as they had his predecessors; Bancroft plausibly supposes that the name was applied in derision (vol. XVIII; pp. 7, 64, 67).

Syncretism and sensuality: Even nowadays, Imperial frequently likes to clothe herself in a chaste seriousness, in evidence of which I once again bring to mind that 117-degree June day when Rebeca Hernández insisted: “I’ve never had sex in my life, although I’ve made love. My sister is still a virgin at twenty-one, and she was shocked when I finally told her that I wasn’t. I’ll never have sex, ever. That would make me feel so empty . . .”—No doubt this sentiment was in our nineteeth-century Ramona’s heart, when she married her American. But this Indian garbage-girl, she’s far more alien to me than one of those bygone Hispanicized señoritas of Los Angeles; to go with her, even to hold her hand for an instant, is to accomplish the impossible adventure of Cihuatlán at last. I kiss her hand. She throws her arms around me and kisses me passionately on the mouth. I’m thrilled by the rattling of ice in the juice vendor’s glass jars, the creak of unknown things, the sounds of Mexican cars and power tools, the long, slender shadows of people’s legs on the wide yellow crosswalk; in other words,
there is much else that is fascinating in connection with this remarkable tribe, such as their habit of “roasting girls” ceremonially at the period of their adolescence
(Samuel T. Black, vol. 1, p. 432); and it gives me comfort to know that I can copulate with her if I want to; I can also enter one of those bars where they shine a flashlight onto your money to see how much you’ve paid them; when the security guards first hold the door open for you, they always keep it open on their own behalf for a single extra instant, I suppose either to enjoy the coolness or to get a personal peek at the naked dancer shimmying down the stainless steel pole onstage.

Dress of the señoritas in mid-19th-century California—Based on Samuel T. Black, pp. 70-73.

“Sandoval had no desire to fight . . .”—Gómara, p. 300.

“But who is that at the side of the Captain-General? . . .”—León-Portilla and Shorris, p. 179 (“The Imprisonment of Cuauhtémoc,” orig, source not given).

Cortés’s bedmates—Lanyon, pp. 137-43, 167-68.

Jensen-Alvarado marriage—In the Riverside Directory she is memorialized as
Miss Merced Alvarado, of Compton,
which proves once again that syncretism does work both ways.

“The belle and beauty of Southern California,” etc., including Anglicization of Mercedes’s name and home—Bynon and Son, p. 54 (biography of Cornelius Jensen).

Tale of the Jensen-Alvarado House—The Great Basin Foundation Center for Anthropological Research, vol. 1, pp. 167-69.

Marriage of Michael White—Wagner, p. 28.

Marriage of Yorba and Smith—Gostin, pp. 402-3 (records #897-98); pp. 406-7 (record #971).

“I could not but feel a pity for him . . .”—Dana, pp. 297-98.

Bandini’s ownership of Tecate—Niemann, p. 68.

Footnote on the marriage of Coxcox’s daughter—León-Portilla and Shorris, p. 201 (“The Founding of Tenochitlán,” from
Crónica Mexicayotl
). In Meyer et al., p. 56, the King is identified as Coxcox, who in fact seems to have been the previous King who gave the Aztecs land when they arrived (León-Portilla and Shorris, p. 200; the King’s name is Coxcoxtli). The same tale is related in Carrasco and Moctezuma, p. 16, but there again Coxcox is called Achitometl.

“Orozco’s famous painting”—“Cortés and Malinche,” painting by José Clemente Orozco, reproduced in color in Lanyon, after p. 12.

American disapproval of miscegenation—Heizer and Whipple, pp. 564-65 (S. F. Cook, “Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization”).

Discussion of “squaw men”—Pike, p. 145.

“The marriage of Indian women by white men of course involved degradation of the latter.”—Hittell, p. 189.