Imperial (40 page)

Never mind.
Our
American girl will be Barbara Worth.

Chapter 26

WHITE EYELASHES (1853-1926)

The discourse of Cortés filled his companions with great hope . . . and now they felt such a keen desire to accompany him to a land that hardly anyone had even seen, that it seemed to them they were not going to war, but to certain victory and spoils.

—Francisco López de Gómara, 1552

O
ther adventurers prospected more ruthlessly for Imperial’s treasures. They called themselves the filibusters. Cormac McCarthy’s horrific novel
Blood Meridian,
arguably his greatest, fictionalizes careers whose extremities scarcely called for embellishment. Meanwhile, in that multivolume history of California, Bancroft refers to
the cause of humanity bandied in filthy mouths to promote atrocious butcheries.
What was this cause?
It is generally admitted,
says my old
Britannica, that Mexico was provoked into aggression in order that additional territory might be available for the extension of slavery.

A wonderful cause indeed! Let us accordingly pay reverence to the memory of a certain Watkins, convicted by a heartbroken judge who nonetheless proclaimed his admiration for
those spirited men who had gone forth to uphold the broken altars and rekindle the extinguished fires of liberty in Mexico and Lower California.

Watkins and his colleague Emory were each assessed a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine, which they never had to pay.

Watkins was the Vice-President, and Emory the Secretary of State. Who then was President?

Bancroft marvels over his
seemingly pupilless, grey eyes, their large orbits, half concealed by white eyebrows and lashes, at once repelling and fascinating with their strong, steady penetration.
His physique resembled Napoleon’s. Turning his grey eyes upon Southside, William Walker instantly spied out that it was a zone of race-mixing; hence inferior.

Ironically, he was a martyr to freedom of the press. Jailed in San Francisco for contempt of court because he condemned leniency toward criminals, he was eventually freed thanks to lobbying from his sympathizers. Then he opened his recruiting office. Denied the
Arrow
by the sole anti-slavery man in power, General Hitch-cock (who, needless to say, would not rise high come the administration of Jefferson Davis), Walker sailed on the
Caroline
instead, with forty-one disciples. And so he entered La Paz, sporting a Mexican flag. Kidnapping the governor, our hero proclaimed Louisiana law!
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.

On he led them to Sonora, seeking to uphold the broken altars of slavery in this year 1853. But his knights of freedom abandoned him at the Río Colorado, so he marched back west through Mexican Imperial, all the way to Tijuana, and turned himself over to Americans, who treated him with compassionate comprehension. After all, why
not
bite off another piece of Southside?

Walker’s career is an anomaly in the history of mankind,
writes a historian who can’t help believing in people.
Devoid of all the characteristics of a great leader . . . homely to the point of ugliness, in disposition cold, cruel, selfish, heartless, stolidly indifferent to the sufferings of others, living only to gratify the cravings of his inordinate ambition—it is strange that such a man could induce thousands to offer their lives for his aggrandizement . . .
I am sorry to say that I do not consider it strange at all.

His three expeditions against Nicaragua are outside the purview of this book. But you will be happy to know that on the first (1855), he did succeed in establishing the glorious institution of slavery, and declared himself head of state; his men then mutinied. Two years later, failing again, shipwrecked, rescued by the British and repatriated on the USS
Wabash,
he faced trial for piracy, a trial which conveniently never occurred. On his final attempt, the men rose up against him as before. The captain of a British warship handed him over to representatives of Honduras, who on 25 September 1860 perforated his nasty carcass.

Walker reminded Northside that the international line was the merest beginning. His spirit survived in Americans and Mexicans alike.

In 1916, the new Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Imperial County instigated
a movement to secure the annexation of enough territory in Mexico to serve the purposes of the Irrigation District . . . It aroused international interest but the object was never realized.

As late as 1926, General Enrique Estrada from Jalisco was captured not far from San Diego; he had plotted to overthrow the government of Baja California.

I am happy to report that none of the people I asked in Mexican Imperial remembered William Walker.

Chapter 27

COLONEL COUTS’S HOMESTEAD (1839-
ca.
1915)

I want and desire that I might enjoy their precious emerald, their fine turquoise, their bracelet that was forged and perforated at the throat and in the womb of the lady.

—Pro forma address of an Aztec ruler to the parents of a girl he would marry

Get an Indian wife. They’re sweeter.

—Gilberto Sanders, 2003

T
he military conquest of Imperial now being complete, and attempts at further paramilitary annexations having failed for the present, the quest for desert gold being a dangerous game of chance, what was an American who wished to establish himself in California to do?—Why, marry a Mexican girl!

Syncretism is a slender Chinese girl at the restaurant counter, maybe with Mexican blood in her because her skin is darker and ruddier than that of the other Chinese; she speaks Spanish to her Mexican boyfriend. In 1877, on a ramble out of Pasadena, John Muir meets a Mexican-born mestizo who aims to
“make money and marry a Spanish woman.”
Syncretism’s banner gets complacently hoisted by a certain citizen of San Diego who’s observed the last days of Alta California; in his opinion, the señoritas of San Diego, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles
preferred for husbands, not finely dressed, courtly, serenading cavaliers, but the colder blooded plainer dressed foreigners, who were more industrious, treated them better as wives, and took more care of their children.
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In 1835 a sea-captain in the sea-otter trade writes home to Maine:
I was Married on the 4th of November last at Santa Barbara to Miss Francisca Carillo of that place, her age is nineteen, have been attached to her for four years.
They will have six children who grow up speaking Spanish. In 1853 he writes his sister:
It is two years to-day
since my Wife was burried, she was born the 28th day of Feby 1816, died the 26th day of Feby 1851, and was burried on her birthday: her Father Don Carlos Antonio Carrillo . . . was one of the handsomest Men in the State . . .
He never remarries; I wish to believe that he truly loved her, although it might be that what Don Carlos had bestowed upon her sufficed him.

Syncretism is its own reward, and one can well imagine the longing and the real disappointment between the lines of that fable you already know of Spanish
conquistadors
who
heard that ten suns distant from there was an island of Amazons, a rich land; but these women were never found. In my opinion the error arose from the name of Cihuatlán, which means “place of women.”
Or perhaps it arose from the name of California itself, which Cortés is said to have bestowed upon our peninsula in honor of a romance then the rage; the romancer’s California was an island of jet-black Amazons. No matter; Imperial’s Amazons suffice. Ladies’ bare brown sweaty shoulders, women wearing loose white T-shirts pulled down over their bare brown thighs just far enough, so that it seems as if they were wearing nothing underneath; all this flesh calls to me when the evening gets cool and I stand on the northern side of that rust-red border fence, gazing through it as the Amazons of Southside gaze back at me; in search of syncretism I cross the line and meet a barefoot, reeking Indian girl in a gorgeous dress of white, red and purple. She’s sweeping the sidewalk and lifting heavy boxes of garbage. She stops and smiles at me. She wants to syncretize. Did I tell you that she does her hair in two long black braids tied off in ribbons, just as the belles of Alta California used to do? They wore silk or calico bodices with embroidered sleeves, so I’ve read; their skirts were flounced and lace-trimmed; sometimes their shoes were satin, sometimes velvet; they wore dark
reboso
scarves over their shoulders; they wore rich necklaces, and sometimes headbands adorned with a cross or a star. When an American wanted to syncretize with one of them (where did he see her? why, from afar, riding a horse!), he addressed himself to her buckskin-shod father or her brother, presenting his case with courtesies and presents, until finally he was permitted to enter the family’s house of whitewashed adobe and sup beneath their roof of burned-clay tiles. I imagine that if he thought it would help him or if he enjoyed entering into the spirit of the thing, he dandied up in a white shirt and a dark vest, with a serape over everything. Handsome or not, well-dressed one way or another, he sat at table, complimenting the mother’s cooking, jesting with the cousins while shooting half-secret glances at his intended Ramona or Isadora to see if she also laughed, trying to impress the father with his life-dreams of cattle ranching, merchandising, or maybe even irrigation:
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.

Syncretism is when you drink an orange juice and suddenly taste chili in the bottom of a glass. Syncretism is also one of control’s most effective strategies. In 1521, Cortés sends a deputy into the as yet unbroken hinterlands to subdue Tuxtepec and Coatzacoalcos. Among them is a certain Gonzalo de Sandoval, who becomes an Amazon-hunter.
Sandoval had no desire to fight, but, having no choice
(we never have a choice),
he made a night attack on a village and there captured its lady, which made it possible for our men to reach the river without opposition, occupy its banks, and seize Coatzacoalcos.
We’re never told the lady’s name, much less her fate. Once she bears children, a Hispanicized dynasty may well endure.

The syncretic marriages and amours of Cortés’s generation had been tied to two causes: a dearth of women from the homeland; and a calculated ambition to obtain, hold and legitimize both property and status by marriage into some high-ranking indigenous bloodline. For Cortés himself, who hoped to join the nobility through the blessing of that ultimate secular authority, the Spanish sovereign, a few thousand or million acres of Mexico made secure between the thighs of an indigenous “princess” would have been too insignificant a gain. To be sure, for some time after the Conquest he did enjoy his private harem of Aztec wards. Begin with Tecuichpotin, whom her father Moctezuma had married to Cuauhtémoc at twelve; long before the latter’s execution Cortés removed her from that spouse and renamed her Doña Isabel; one Aztec lament runs:
But who is that at the side of the Captain-General? Ah, it is Doña Isabel, my little niece! Ah, it is true: the kings are prisoners now!
Her three sisters were also kept in that house in Coyoacán. Meanwhile, the famous-infamous Malinche and her daughter or niece Catalina provided their own diversions. Cortés’s Spanish wife, who might not have approved, died peculiarly and rapidly after her arrival; but this deed, if such it was, was certainly not committed so that Cortés’s five bedmates could supplant her. They shared Malinche’s fate—abandonment—and in due course the conqueror obtained a new Spanish wife.

Captain Cornelius Jensen from Homburg sails to California in hopes of benefiting from the Gold Rush. In 1854 he arrives at the town of Agua Mansa, which happens to be five miles downriver from San Bernardino, and there marries Mercedes Alvarado,
the belle and beauty of Southern California, . . . a member of one of the then most aristocratic families in the country,
lives with her until they get flooded out, and in 1868 hires Chinese masons to built what is now the oldest brick building in Riverside County. Their syncretic marriage thus has its monument, which is officially known as the Jensen-Alvarado House.

The British sailor Michael White becomes Miguel Blanco and marries his Mexicana at Mission San Gabriel; in 1843, we find him already the patentee of Rancho Muscupiable! Meanwhile, California passes into Northside’s control; and on 2 April 1858, Josefa Yorba marries a man whose name has been variously handed down to us as Juan Salmih, Juan Samith, and John S. Smythe.

The question of how many of these unions of white men with Mexicanas in these early days of Imperial might have been equivalent in spirit to Cortés’s with Malinche is certainly a painful one. In the last decades of Mexican California, an American sailor catches sight of that scion of a once great family, Don Juan Bandini, and after variously condescending words about the man’s ineffectuality continues:
I could not but feel a pity for him, especially when I saw him by the side of . . . a fat, coarse, vulgar, pretentious fellow of a Yankee trader, who had made money in San Diego, and was eating out the vitals of the Bandinis, fattening upon their extravagance, grinding them in their poverty; having mortgages on their lands,
which as you will remember included Tecate Canyon, site of the future Imperial city of that name,
forestalling their cattle, and already making an inroad upon their jewels, which were their last hope.
It is easy to imagine such a Yankee buying up that jewel of jewels and key to jewels, a daughter of the house.
⁶⁴