Imperial (35 page)

His favorite kind of palm tree was the queen palm. That was what his people called a fan-palm. Just as I did, he saw them in terms of royal stateliness.

I could have come every day with my notebook to stand beneath the multitudinous, multipointed canopies of fan-palms, watching José and Marciano, writing down their stories and their slang, and after work I could have met their sweethearts and children. I could have described their homes. (As Officer Murray used to say,
if something catches your eye, there’s a reason.
) Had they refused to invite me in, I could have gone to Michoacán to meet Marciano’s mother. And if I failed to meet her, I could have appropriated that fat orangeskinned woman in Mexicali who stands in her flat square yard, which is bare earth, and she is hosing down the dust. This is how to write a novel: Gather details and plant them in the pale tan soil of narrative, which sometimes finds itself formed into levees and sometimes makes walls around orchards. My notebook is a fan-palm grove. I am José; I uproot the grandest trees which have grown there, and carry them out to Marciano, who is also me, to hack them up and pack them up, so that they can be potted in the lobby of my
Grapes of Wrath.
That is how one writes novels. Imperial County is fifty-seventh for incidence of tuberculosis, so we’d better give José tuberculosis. South of Mecca lies a watermelon field, then citrus groves, a fan-palm orchard. Once upon a time there was a man named José . . .

But in Mexicali there is a man named José López who has become my friend. And Lupe Vásquez is my friend. I would never consider changing a word of their stories. They are real and they have taught me many things that are true as I peer into the mystery called Mexico.

Chapter 12

THE GARDENS OF PARADISE (2007)

Motivations, even if ideological, are not monolithic.

—Ross Hassig, 1988

A
s I said, this book forms itself as it goes. Fields, cemeteries, newspapers and death certificates beguile and delay me; I don’t care that I’ll never finish anything; Imperial will scour them away with its dry winds and the brooms of its five-dollar-an-hour laborers (and a very few Anglo farmers, too). It is they, the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, the cabbage-pickers legal and illegal, whom it is slowly becoming my privilege to know. Imperial is what I want it to be, but they are ones who are what they are. The desert is real, as are they, but there is no such place as Imperial; and I, who don’t belong there, was never anything but a word-haunted ghost. This is my life, and I love it. Books are whatever we want them to be. I am where I want to be, in Paradise.

Let me now commence the history of Paradise.

PART TWO

OUTLINES

Chapter 13

WHEN BREAD WAS LIGHT (1768-1848)

For years they had wandered alone in silence and solitude, where the sun burned white all day and the stars burned white all night, blindly following the whisper of a spirit.

—Zane Grey, 1913

“CHIEFLY COVERED WITH FLOATING SAND”

Once upon a time, in that limbo of mostly dry centuries between Lake Cahuilla and the Salton Sea, Spanish delineators, knowing that assertion is necessary if not sufficient for possession, drew their northernmost boundary-line as far as (let me crib from Mr. Samuel T. Black) Nootka, while the English stretched their claim all the way down to San Domingo. Fortunately, my own system of grids and lines came along to save Imperial from this maddening doubleness—oh, the place is bifurcated now, to be sure, but that’s a different thing from existing within two mutually exclusive zones of authority! Here is how Mr. Black tells the tale (he’s writing a history of San Diego County, specifically, of San Diego County’s
Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement
):
It was not until the Americans, by the seizure of Oregon, came in like a wedge and spread them apart, that their respective overlapping claims may be said to have come to an end.
Hurrah! Now it’s us
versus
the Mexicans, with
our
overlapping claims comprising “California,” “Arizona,” “Texas,” and other ill-defined entities. Well, where did Imperial end in the old days, before some fur trader’s clerk invented Oregon? Any reasonable person can see that Imperial is contracting, imploding even, as Los Angeles, represented by Indio, comes in like a wedge, etcetera. Why not say that in those days before the first line it wandered indefinitely northward, all the way to where “California” begins to get cool, and deeply, vaguely southward down the Baja Peninsula where until 1768 the Jesuits had their fifteen missions?

Imperial is a dream without details. Imperial is a future of
Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement,
which its own pioneers, settlers and organizers might not like if they knew what was coming.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Imperial is and unanswerably was: Somewhere within its dust-clouds lay a white-ringed basin of indeterminate extent, within which the Mexicali Valley’s nine hundred and eighty-eight thousand acres still cohered with (which is to say, remained equally unnamed as) the Imperial Valley’s six hundred thousand; and these in turn, continuing to be themselves all the way down and up the gentle hollow of the Salton Sink, which in spite of its circles of stone (Indian fish-traps) had always been, so must always be, dry—who can foresee, much less believe in, the comings and goings of water?—had not yet been divorced from the Coachella Valley, whose palm forests, excepting an oasis or two, were as long gone as Lake Cahuilla—and I should probably tell you that the Coachella Valley would still have been the Cahuilla, after the Indians who lived there. In short, nobody had drawn either county or national line to trisect that long downsloping bed of a long-lost sea; the core of Imperial remained whole. (Only what’s unknown is safe from dissection. Bow to the eternal vacuum!)

Somewhere, somewhere, potentiality slept. Somewhere the Sea of Cortés sent roaring tidal bores up the blood-red Río Colorado; east and west of it, unchristened Indians dug irrigation ditches. No one had gathered up Imperial’s treasures, the concretions which resembled knurled unicorn horns; these lay on the north slopes of Signal Mountain, in the dry washes west of the Salton Sink, and around the travertine altars northwest of the latter, in a zone still blessedly unburdened by the Riverside County line. The artesian wells that would spurt a full thirty feet into the air still lay vaulted up beneath Imperial’s maidenhead, which in the words of Lieutenant W. H. Emory (1846)
is chiefly covered with floating sand, the surface of which, in various places, is white with diminutive spinelas and everywhere over the whole surface is found the large and soft mussel-shell.
All over, you see, Imperial sported the spoor of bygone and future water. Half a century after him, the founders of El Centro would marvel at Imperial’s petrified clam and oyster beds without wondering which dreams of theirs would fossilize into something for you and me to marvel over.

Imperial was an unprimed canvas which Mark Rothko would someday paint with glowing field-rectangles and name
Untitled;
Imperial drowsed more and then some, pillowing itself upon sandhills; Imperial sprawled inchoate within the more formless formlessness of California itself—California, island in a Spanish romance!
⁵¹
This island, as the concretions prove, is characterized by
treasure,
and its inhabitants are Negro Amazons about each of whom it may be fairly said:
To look at Barbara Worth was a pleasure; to be near her was a delight.
Or, if you’d rather, California is not actually an island, but a peninsula
somewhere on the way from Mexico to India
whose coordinates in space and history, so the founder of the Bancroft Libraryconcluded in the course of reading more than four thousand documents sixteen hundred of which predate the Gold Rush, were
vaguely fixed by such bounds as Asia, the north pole, Newfoundland and Florida.
Never again; vagueness has been illuminated away by the whiteness of American bread; we
know
California; we came in like a wedge and took it from the English.

And so: Between Asia and Florida lies California, which now lies wrapped in Mexico but will soon be partially stripped of Mexican-ness, with American and Russian bedclothes thrown haphazardly over her shoulders while she slumbers on, turning uneasily in her sleep so that one coverlet or another slips away; deep within her womb, Imperial gurgles with rivers and aquifers, but the cavity’s sand-packed, so nobody hears anything; Imperial sleeps within her mother; not even the shining of bread can lure her out.

We know California. Now let’s know her better than death. Let time begin: In 1804 the Spaniards draw a line bisecting this territory into Baja and Nueva California; twenty years later, Nueva California gets renamed Alta California; a quarter-century after that, this world will hold only one unqualified California, the American one; Mexican California we still call “Baja” to this day.

So much for context; now what about Imperial itself? (Or did I already ask that?) Well, let’s talk about the portion lying in Lower California; the rest remains unknown. Imperial sprawls down far past Loreto in those days; she snores and fidgets, crossing her ankles; with one grimy toenail she scratches at a mosquito bite on her naked brown foot, never waking up; she opens her legs and spreads them across the Gulf of California; there, we have her now; let’s say that Baja’s her right leg and Sonora’s her left. What about the rest of her? Surely Imperial’s more than a pair of legs! With her right hip at Los Angeles and her right side running all the way to Nootka and her head in China and her—all right; I give up; she’s nothing but a pair of legs. Lake Cahuilla’s her womb, but Lake Cahuilla’s dry now.

Do you feel as if you know Imperial yet? According to one of the Jesuits, the peripatetic Father Baegert,
it was altogether one of the most miserable countries in the world, fit only for three kinds of people: self-sacrificing priests; poor Spaniards, who could not make their living anywhere else; and native Indians, for whom anything was good enough.
(Baegert goes on to condemn the poverty of the Indians’ language, which pressed metaphors into service to name those new things brought by the Fathers: A door was a mouth, bread was light, and wine was bad water.) Other visitors were equally enthusiastic. For instance, General Sherman called the Baja
a miserable, wretched, dried-up peninsula.
Well, but even then Imperial did have her points: the quicksilver monopoly, unauthorized pearl-fishing, the hope of one more El Dorado to rape.

So that was Imperial for you, amorphous, virgin and vast. On the west the Pacific Ocean did constrain her, no doubt, and to the east there was still the Río Colorado; oh, yes, there was that. A hundred years after we overthrew the Mexican regime in Imperial Norte, a scholar who was preening his talents for the
California Blue Book
laughingly recalled a map from 1564 in which
the Colorado, largest river in the world, rising in the mountains of Thibet and meandering through a course of 15,000 or 20,000 miles, pours its vast volume of waters into the Gulf of California.
Perhaps it was really almost like that, in those days when bread was light.

THE BODY-SNATCHERS

Beyond this streamlet, also known as the Buena Guila, lay the subdistrict of Pimería, which swept southeast through much of Sinaloa and which in those days was little more than an outline drawn in around unknown quantities. Strictly speaking (as we delineators do prefer to speak), the conquest of Pimería had commenced in 1687 with the erection of the latest palisaded mission, appropriately called Dolores; the tale of the two Yuman missions in Imperial territory would prove more dolorous by far, as you’ll read. Speaking still more strictly, we should mention Hernando de Alarcón’s voyage from embryonic Acapulco to unborn Yuma; that happened in 1540; the Río Colorado had begun to be mapped. Melchior Díaz also grazed Imperial that year, but we won’t allow him into this book.

In 1697 Imperial got hemmed in from another direction when Loreto, first of the Baja California missions, cauterized itself off from the surrounding landscape of non-delineation:
la línea
was born! The Jesuits stood on one side of the ditch, with their mouths, lights and blood-colored bad water; on the other side were the people whose grandchildren would be Mexicans. And between Northside and Southside, I mean around the perimeters of those little Northside islands in the immense tan sea of Southside, stood soldiers;
their duties were to act as body guards for the missionaries, to stand watch at night, to keep an eye upon the Indians and inflict punishments.
The body-snatchers of my era wore uniforms and used night-vision technology to catch the half-Spanish-half-Indians of Southside; they enclosed them in a blare of police-light, lined them up on the silt of roadsides, standing over them, concentrating headlights on them, and then, when they’d accumulated enough to validate the trouble, expelled them back beyond the line. The body-snatchers of the old days cut the line, which was still infinite and had not yet been placed anywhere in particular, into manageable segments, then pulled each segment around themselves to make another loop of Northside, their dwelling place. Then they issued forth into Southside’s surrounding blankness, hunted Indians, hauled them back to the new islands, and saved their souls by means of confinement and whip-lashes,
⁵²
not to mention the fresh-baked Host, which shone with magic light. (Acting Governor José Joaquín de Arrillaga, 1796:
I found about 150 Indians beside the women, who fled upon my arrival. The men remained passive. I took a Christian girl, 12 or 13 years old, who was running away and who belonged to Mission San Vicente.
) That is how it was in the missions, century after century. Perhaps it did get a little better toward the end, since it was worse in the beginning. (Petition of some of Cortés’s allies against the Aztecs—the petitioners are pleading against a crushing new tax: . . .
when they gave us the holy gospel . . . with very good will and desire we received and grasped it . . .Not once was anyone of us . . . ever tortured or burned over this, as was done on every hand here in New Spain.
) My own hatred of the very idea of authoritarian compulsion, and the experiences of the century in which I was born—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot—incline me to see only the worst side of these establishments. But it might well have been that bread was, on occasion, light. There; now I’ve proven that I have an open mind; back to my axe-grinding: As late as 1826, a visitor to Alta California reported that
if any of the captured Indians show a repugnance to conversion, it is the practice to imprison them,
then once again offer them the sunny choice of Catholicism, sending them back to their dungeons should they still return the wrong answer.
⁵³
Wait again, ask again, bring them back into the light! By that date there were fountains for the undecided to gaze upon, and tall trees shaded the body-snatchers’ courtyards. Here is how a California county history tabulates the rewards of those who chose correctly:
The dress was, for the males, linen shirt, trousers, and a blanket. The women had each two undergarments a year, a gown and a blanket. What a dreamy secluded life it must have been . . .
But in those first Spanish centuries, delineation remained too feeble to ornament itself, at least in California. Bread was light, but it didn’t shine very far. No fountains, and saplings or bare earth in place of trees! The Fathers did the best they could, but their rectilinear establishments were roofed with mud or tules. Only the very grandest, Mission San Diego, for instance, sported bronze cannons; and San Diego wouldn’t be founded until 1769.