Imperial (27 page)

Northsider born and bred, I actually do love my country, or at least the country that it wishes and occasionally even tries to be; besides, I’ve on occasion found, alone and at night in Southside, that I had no friends; I decline to claim that Mexico is “better.” It was in Southside, after all, that hundreds of vigilantes, mistaking three undercover police agents for childnappers, beat them with pipes. Although they called for backup, their colleagues failed to arrive for three hours and thirty-five minutes, by which time two of them had been burned alive.—Again, on the very last night I spent in Mexicali for this book, I saw a pimp, stern and burly father that he was, staring down a desperate girl with a gruesome face who stood ten paces away; she pleaded with me to take her. Sorrowing for her with all my heart, I smiled at her, wished her goodnight and walked to the United States to use a pay phone. Forty minutes later, on my return to Mexico, there stood the pimp with another much younger girl, in fact a child. Across the street, two bored policewomen chatted; one kept scratching her buttocks. And the child looked me full in the face with fear in her eyes, trying to appear hardened and available; she did the same with the next man and the next, perfecting what Northside vice cops would have called her “prostitution stroll,” while the pimp walked sometimes ahead and sometimes behind her. At the corner they were level, and the last I saw of them, he was angrily twisting her shoulder.

Steinbeck once wrote:
It is said so often in such ignorance that Mexicans are contented, happy people. “They don’t want anything.” This, of course, is not a description of the happiness of Mexicans, but of the unhappiness of the person who says it.
—He is right. And now let me quote to you the elegantly middle-aged woman at Condominios Montealbán whose son’s life was going dangerously downhill, which might have been why she appeared no happier than one of Steinbeck’s Americans as she stood in the doorway of her diabolically hot kitchen (it was nine-o’-clock at night, and the outside temperature had now ducked below a hundred); about the United States she said to me: You’re not free there. It’s terrible. You have to work all day, then sleep, then work again. Here we’re free. Over there they live like robots.

She preferred to dwell in the stench of the Río Nuevo.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DITCH

Mexicali has always been the antithesis of Calexico. The parable runs that once upon a time, the city fathers of Calexico, namely George Chaffey and his son Andrew, prohibited alcohol, and thereby brought into being Mexicali, where
the very first place of business
(recalls Otis B. Tout)
was a plank set up under a mesquite tree, where mescal and tequila were dispensed at so much per drink.
To me there has always been something rather profound about this story. Here are Northside and Southside separated by a ten-foot-wide international ditch; in Northside we cannot drink, but on the other side of that ditch a Mexican, holding up his dipper there beneath the mesquite tree. What can poor George Chaffey do? Annex part of Mexico? But we already did that in 1846, and all that happened then and all that would happen now is that at the extremity of our reach, there the border will run, its far side offering what we forbid. By 1909 the first gaming-house has officially opened in Mexicali; no doubt there was already a plank beneath a tree to build on. In 2003, cocaine happens to be illegal in Calexico, so it’s widely available in Mexicali. They frown on prostitution here, so come and get it there.

In 1915 California outlaws horseracing and prostitution. Come and get it down here. That very year, H. M. House informs the Chief Engineer:
The
Mexican
Collector states that a town is to be started at Algodones, the subdividing to be started tomorrow.
What sort of place will it be? I wonder. W. H. Holabird can imagine. He writes the United States Collector of Customs:
I greatly deplore this effort to start a town, because it has but one purpose and that is to sell liquor to the lawless element who can not obtain it in Yuma, nor in other California towns. I shall not build a bridge
to Algodones
across the canal, but I am powerless to prevent them if they wish to do it in Mexico.
And who might
they
be? W. J. Smith, Deputy Collector and Inspector of Andrade:
I understand a Mr. Ingraham of Yuma will start to build a saloon during next week.

In 1917, California forbids pro boxing and dance halls. Where might we find those? In 1919, the Volstead Act prohibits liquor in the United States.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
“Sunny Jim” Cofforth now controls the racing in Tijuana. Carl Withington from Bakersfield operates the Mexicali Brewery. That Mexican under the mesquite tree works for
him.

In 1920, the Imperial County Board of Supervisors publishes this incitement to make a home on our side of the ditch:
Calexico is one of the liveliest cities of its size in the southwest. It has four strong banks, large, well-stocked mercantile concerns, modern cotton gins, . . . and is a railroad center . . . Calexico has no saloons and the morality is high.
Meanwhile we learn that
Mexicali’s cabarets and bars catered to farmers and ranchers of the Imperial Valley of California, the most notorious among them being the Southern Club, the Imperial Cabaret, the Black Cat, and the Tecolote Bar, a gambling casino and brothel where floor shows went on all night.

One midnight in 1925 at the Tecate crossing, the Deputy Collector in Charge spies
two Mexicans in a tent on the Mexican side of the Line just west of the gate, selling liquor. I respectfully recommend that two Customs officers be stationed at Jacumba at the earliest date possible.

Every now and then, Northsiders who take the other side of the ditch for granted get punished, as in the case of Dawn Marie Wilson, who buys innocuous prescription drugs from a Tijuana pharmacy without a Mexican doctor’s prescription. The year is 2003. While easy sex and cheap cocaine continue to comprise much of Southside’s allure, our forty-nine-year-old American protagonist’s purpose has become ever more emblematic. In Mexicali, José López from Jalisco awaits his own customers beside the border fence: Some may be truckers in search of strip clubs, but many are elderly Northsiders who can’t afford to buy their arthritis medication in their hometowns. Old men drive across the line to Algodones to buy Viagra at half the price; widows in Coachella form carpools to pick up Southside’s generic drugs once a month. By the time Dawn Marie Wilson sets out to stock up on her anti-seizure medication, the price differential has become less advantageous than formerly. The way one elderly Coachella Valley resident described it to me, the other side of the ditch was less an
attraction
than a
secondary convenience.
—John used to go down to Yuma to a gun show, she said. Then we used to go to San Luis because it was so much cheaper. I take some kind of blood-pressure medicine but it isn’t hardly worth it unless you know someone who’s already going.—Indeed, one San Diego dweller I know who buys Tijuana pharmaceuticals for her friends reports that the counter cost per drug is virtually the same in Northside and Southside; the savings derive from the fact that in Southside nobody has to pay a doctor first.

And so the pharmacist happily sells Dawn Marie Wilson her pills, this being the other side of the ditch, after all, but in Ensenada the police stop her on the street, search her backpack, perhaps because she was involved in a small traffic accident the day before, and then she’s awarded a five-year prison sentence at Ojos Negros. In the end, thanks to Representative Bob Filner, past whose slogans I sometimes wander in El Centro, she serves a mere seventeen months, followed by three months more in a Northside prison. American authorities, needless to say, employ the occasion to issue stern warnings about the dangers of flouting the law (our law) on the other side of the ditch.

In 1931, Otis B. Tout is constrained to write:
Thousands of automobiles cross the line every day,
and at one time it was just that, literally a line. I open another album in the Archivo Histórico and see the San Diego Cafe in Calexico with its eleven arches (the edifice remains, but now it’s something else), then comes an octagonal kiosk in the middle of the street (also long gone), and under so many wires, like those within a piano, three squarish automobiles attend in a line, and behind them a dotted black line has been inked upon the photograph: the border. A queue of pedestrians waits to cross. The caption reads: Mexicali: Visto de Calexico. Hacia el Suroeste. (What is a border? Definitions vary. An old farmer told me that the C & M Ranch, now called the Bravo Ranch, used to straddle both sides of the border, but those days departed; we changed the definition.)
Thousands of automobiles cross the line every day,
writes Otis B. Tout,
and places of business in Mexicali enjoy an enormous patronage. The cafes, cantinas and palaces of chance offer a glamour of excitement.
(Here’s a grey old photo of a corner-building whose arched overhang shades its sidewalk: the sign reads
MEXICALI CABARET
). One may encounter underworld types in Southside.
The strict control of undesirables by the Mexican authorities, however, is efficient,
and if you believe that last you’ll believe anything.

What
does
poor George Chaffey do about it all? What can he do? (In his way this Canadian-born engineer is benevolent; he’s an idealist, not to mention a busy real estate man; his passion is to improve the desert for the benefit of unborn me. He’s the one who dreamed up the name “Imperial Valley.”) I’d suppose he closes his eyes.

In Calexico there was a certain hotel on Fourth Street where I always stayed when I was writing about
pollos
and coyotes. Whenever I’d ask the proprietor how he was, he’d bitterly reply: I’m here.

We need some more toilet paper, I said.

Bang-bang paper, huh? I’ll get you some. I don’t want you thinkin’ this place is bad. This place ain’t so bad.

No, it’s not bad.

He asked me where I’d go when I went across the border that night and I told him the Thirteen Negro (red and yellow lights flashing down on the metal dance floor, half-squeezed limes on the sticky table, tall men leaning against the dancers when they dance; in between dances, the women, most of whom are barelegged and some of whom are very bare, sit in dark-seeming clothes all in a row, many with lovely expressions on their faces simply because they are so young and beautiful that unloveliness would be an effort; they sport big buttocks and spread fat thighs; they’re bored but docile, and the men gaze at them in longing as bright against that darkness as the fresh bluish-green cuttings in alfalfa fields), and the hotel proprietor said in amazement: What do you want to go to some nigger place for?

I didn’t know whether to answer that I had nothing against nigger places or that the Thirteen Negro wasn’t a nigger place; mainly I was astonished that this man did not know the Thirteen Negro at all, which meant that his world did not extend for even seven blocks, the last three of which lay south of the line. And he derived so much of his living from the other side of the ditch!

This place ain’t so bad, he repeated almost apologetically. It’s actually kinda funny really.—And I could see that he was proud of his hotel.

I got nothing against Mexicans, said an old lady outside the Brawley Market. It’s just that there’s nothing down there.

It had been ten or twenty years since she’d visited the other side of the ditch; she’d forgotten exactly how long.

There’s nothing down there.
What a revealing way of putting it! In my
National Geographic
optical disks containing California maps, Mexicali has been, doubtless for commercial reasons, so blanked out as to only half-exist. The same goes for Tijuana in my
Thomas Guide
to San Diego. Well, after all, is it so sinister that Y should fail to be wholeheartedly represented in a guide to X? And yet, San Diego would have been better defined, could we have appreciated its street-patterns in relation to those of the neighbor on the other side of the ditch. Indeed, what does this will to blank out Mexico say about us?

“NOW THEY GOT THE HUMVEES WITH THE GUNS MOUNTED ON THEM”

It was in June, when the desert ironwood’s purple blooms were on the way to perishing, that through the recommendation of the Pioneers Museum I met that ancient man from Heber (his memory was the best of any in that cohort, they said), and I was hoping and halfway expecting many stories of Imperial then and now, not just the Imperial of
he sold out at a fancy price,
but the other side of the ditch, too. He said to me: In general, I think the border is too open. I don’t know why our country is just doing lip service. Now I hear the people smugglers are getting so brazen, now they got the Humvees with the guns mounted on them. They got laws on the books and they’re not being enforced.

He was a proud old patrician of Imperial, straight and narrow like George Chaffey. His profile was what a nineteenth-century capitalist-worshipper would have called Roman, chiseled; I forget whether he had the high forehead. So he thought that the border was too open, and at that moment our government was keeping seven or eight thousand agents across twenty-one sectors. Well, he had a point; Mexicans did get through. (An arrested
pollo
smiles at me with crooked-lipped pride; he may have gotten caught, but at least some gringo with a camera wants to take his picture; he’s made the big time.)

That Heber man was born here, and he knew as much about Southside as the hotel proprietor. He disliked me more every minute, I suppose because he could smell my immorality. (I am actually not an entirely bad fellow in my way.) Soon he was instructing me neither to use his name nor quote him on anything, because this interview was not an interview, only background information; and he kept warning his contemporary, a cheery old farmer named Eugene Dahm, to be more careful in my hearing. I inquired of the Heber pioneer regarding the Chinese tunnels in Mexicali, about which every soul in Mexicali I ever questioned possessed some myth or rumor, and in annoyance he said he’d never heard any such nonsense. I asked about the coyote route over Signal Mountain and he informed me that he’d never wasted his time on that sort of business. Well, he had been busy with his Northside life.