Imperial (59 page)

How many hectares does a person need to survive without working outside one’s own fields? I asked.

If you don’t have the implements to work, you can’t do it, said her son. It’s very expensive.—And he said again: You can’t do it.

The proprietress of a small restaurant not far away from Rancho García was more optimistic than he. I asked her: In your opinion, how many hectares would you need to support yourself, if you lived only off the land? And how many to support yourself, your spouse and children?

Here in the valley, she replied, people who work really hard can live on eight or nine hectares. If you were going to plant wheat or cotton, yes, you would need more land. For orchards, ten hectares, a family would live well. Now they rotate planting, of course. With this restaurant I know many farmers . . .

I quoted Richard Brogan’s assessment:
I don’t think that a small operator can farm less than seven hundred or a thousand acres,
in other words, two hundred eighty or four hundred hectares. And I told her: That’s what many Americans say to me in this same valley, on their side of the line.

The woman replied: Well, here the concept of living well is different, and also the Americans are addicted to machinery.

My father’s sister had six hectares
⁹³
and seven children, she remarked, and they lived perfectly well. They harvested cotton, melons and tomatoes. And all the kids studied; they had a house in Mexicali; they had a farm. There were many of them; they did nothing else; they lived well. They dressed well; they ate well; they travelled a lot, to Mexico City and Guadalajara.

How long ago did this happen?

This was thirty years ago.

Could they live in a similar way now?

Not really, because people want more. What happens now is that people are more demanding, especially due to technology. Back then, if people had good food and cattle, especially beef and pork, and good clothes, they could be happy. We picked cotton, but when there wasn’t cotton to pick, my father worked construction. We had the first television and the first washing machine in the area; we had everything.

THE POINT OF IT

So in Mexican as in American Imperial the expectations of the farmers have increased. But whereas in Northside
I don’t think that a small operator can farm less than seven hundred or a thousand acres,
when I ask the homesteaders of the Mexicali Valley how much land they hold, they usually say: Twenty hectares.—That works out to less than fifty acres.

ANOTHER ESSAY ON THE INFINITE

I wish well to Wilber and Elizabeth Clark. However representative or unrepresentative they may be,
⁹⁴
I desire for them good harvests, a comfortable life, success, which in America means expansion of income and capital. If they lived in Imperial today, drawing their water from the All-American Canal, which the taxes of other citizens had paid for, would I wish on them the power to gain property in excess of the limitation law? Would I wish them to extend their holdings until they could contemptuously say: What the hell can I do with ten acres?

By 1918, Paul Taylor’s description of limitation law was already behind the times; for the brains in the Agriculture Department had come up with the notion of an
enlarged homestead
which
may contain 320 acres, provided the land is nonmineral, nontimbered, and nonirrigable.
Then there were
stock raising lands,
six hundred and forty acres each, no watering holes allowed. Most conveniently of all,
a regulation has recently been issued increasing the area of a homestead from 160 to 320 acres on land having no water supply, in Los Angeles, Imperial, San Diego and Riverside counties.
In 1958, the United States Supreme Court will uphold the original hundred-and-sixty-acre limitation in its famous
Ivanhoe
decision; but don’t worry; Imperial will get around that in a decade or two.

Imperial is family farms. Imperial is corporate farms. Imperial is Wilber Clark, and also the Chandler Syndicate.
Imperial County,
we have read,
was settled in a large part by those who did not have a large amount of capital,
but what if the souls with small capital weren’t all farmers, but—small capitalists?

You Calipatria Fortune

Get the meaning of this heading?

Get busy now and buy a lot or two.

Calipatria had to be—it was a necessity.

Calipatria will grow, and grow fast.

Let this growth mean money in your pocket.

That was a newspaper advertisement from 1914. The real estate company’s main office was in Calipatria, but it just happened to have a Los Angeles branch office. One of the men to whom the Calipatria townsite lands belonged was Harry Chandler.

In 1925, Mark M. Rose, one of the Imperial Irrigation District’s five directors, introduces himself to a Senate committee by remarking that he owns four hundred acres in the Imperial Valley. His colleague Ira Aten possesses more than nine hundred acres together with his family. (Richard Brogan:
And that means money. That means acreage.
)

Consider
these Lyons boys,
who in 1907
baled more hay and threshed more grain than any other combination in the district. They operated on a large scale . . .
Emulating the Chandler Syndicate,
they bought 565 acres in Mexico, near Calexico, which they proposed to use as a model stock farm or a cotton plantation.
Meanwhile,
Dave Williams has five hundred and sixty acres near Holtville.
Harry Van den Heuvel arrives from Riverside in 1903 with twenty-five borrowed dollars, files on a quarter-section, and by the time Judge Farr’s history comes out in 1918 he owns six hundred acres!

Then there is W. F. Holt, of course. Only God and the Redlands syndicate know how much
he
owns.

The purpose of that law is to insure that water does not go to the pre-existing property owner for a tract of larger than 160 acres.
Or, if you prefer,
I don’t think that a small operator can farm less than seven hundred or a thousand acres.
(Alice Woodside, an ex-Imperialite whose recollections figure in the middle sections of this book, opined:
I think that first of all, a hundred and sixty acres you’re not going to survive. I would think in the neighborhood of two thousand acres is what you need now.
)

When does self-sufficiency become evil? Here’s an encomium in the November 1954 issue of
Quick Frozen Foods.
(Is there anything wrong about it? Ask a Marxist. For an opposing reply, ask Alice Woodside.)
FROM A RURAL MAIL BOX TO A FARM SO BIG IT HAS A POST OFFICE OF ITS OWN. Few American success stories are so dramatic as those of Charles F. Seabrook and the giant farming enterprise he built. The story begins half a century ago when a boy began farming his family’s 57-acre homestead . . . When young Charlie Seabrook could walk from the north field to the south pasture in a few minutes, today he can drive for 45 minutes and still be on land that belongs to his Farms,
with that corporate or maybe merely worshipful capital
F.

The fable of Charlie Seabrook is set in New Jersey, which lacks a limitation law. Does this put him in a separate category from Mr. Reider, who spits on his ten acres in the entity which I call Imperial? Anyhow, can’t every American aspire to be a millionaire?

More fundamentally, why did the pioneers settle in Imperial?
As has already been learned by the reader of this volume,
writes Judge Farr,
the financial end of the great project in this Valley has overshadowed every other feature from its inception.
In that case, is my reconstruction of Wilber Clark’s life the merest sentimental fantasy?

These questions cannot be answered with any degree of consensus. But this book will stick uselessly to its duty, and keep asking them.

THE ROMANCE OF GARDEN TRACT SITES

Setting aside unknowable dreams of others, and considering only results, what progressions can we discover in Imperial’s story?

Two doctors who have studied American rural poverty assure me that
between 1910 and 1920 there began for the first time a trend toward an absolute as well as a relative decrease in the farm population.
That ideal agrarian world was cashing out, bit by bit. The ability of the formerly Imperial state of Illinois
to produce cheap food
might remain a
matter for wonder and admiration;
but the cheap food producers were not only farmtowns anymore; they were the stockyards of Chicago. And speaking of Chicago, that city long since transformed its corn-acres into a Los Angeles-like concatenation. In short,
we need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
But the allure of the family farm only increased as it became more utopian.

In 1920, while a certain fifteen-year-old girl, daughter of Imperial homesteaders and subject of another chapter, lies freshly cold in her hospital bed in Fresno, California,
Garden Tract Sites
are being advertised in that same city: Get in on the ground floor and in three years your investment will be
Practically self-supporting!

As late as 1933, we find the President of the United States, no less, expressing his desire to settle twenty-five thousand more poor families on small farms (
Garden Tract Sites,
if you will) at a cost to the government of a thousand dollars each; and so the Subsistence Homestead Program begins.

Sometimes we read about
the myth of the family farm.
But it was not yet a myth even then, not to our noble, compassionate and practical President.

No boy should be deprived of the experience of harvesting,
wrote an old man in the last quarter of the twentieth century; he used to do it himself. The implication: Harvesting is fulfilling, defining, American, valuable beyond cash. And advertisements (which of course are eternally to be trusted) make the same point. I see a little orange-roofed farmhouse wreathed with leaves; a small boy waves to me from the doorway; the mother in mauve ankle-length skirts holds the youngest girl by the hand; her elder sister gazes at me by the edge of the front lawn; there’s the father in his khaki coat and the old grandfather leaning on a barrel-hoop; the rest is all lovely orange groves widening back to the mountains, because this is the label for Home Brand oranges from High Grove, California.

Chapter 51

THE
EJIDOS
(1903-2005)

A calpulli or chinacalli is a barrio of known people or of an ancient lineage which holds its lands and boundaries from a time of great antiquity. These lands belong to the said kindred, barrio, or lineage . . .

—Alonso de Zorita, 1585

L
et us now center ourselves in a certain bleached necropolis which endures infinity apart on one edge of a tan mound of cracked dirt whose particles are even finer than a child’s hair; and beyond the last row of faded crosses and white angels, bottles and fallen crosses lead the eye down to more dirt marked here and there by alkali; then a canal bisects the world, with emerald fieldscapes immediately beyond, bearing their furrows, ranchos and palm-groves westward through an atmosphere of bird-songs, so that it seems as if from that canal all the way to the horizon, which comprises Cerro Prieto and the Sierra Cucapá range—the western extremity of the Mexicali Valley, in short—it’s all green! And so this cemetery-mound on which we stand seems to be the only island of desert in this place, which ironically happens to be called Islas Agrarias, the Agrarian Islands. To the east, more green and more reddish fields obligingly continue the illusion.

Come to think of it, it’s no illusion at all, but the central human reality of Mexican Imperial, not to mention Mexico herself: the
ejidos.

An
ejido
is a territory with limits, owned by the federal government of Mexio but intended for the perpetual use and benefit of its inhabitants,
ejidatarios,
each of whom has been granted a specific amount of land (typically, twenty or forty hectares)
⁹⁵
to work and bequeath.

A
colonia
is an area of houses, and it possesses a name and a limit.

In 2004, there were two hundred and twenty-eight
ejidos
in Baja California. Around Tijuana there were five hundred and four
colonias
but seven hundred and sixty “named areas” which were not formally colonias. There were many, many
ejidos
around Mexicali—over a hundred—and perhaps a dozen in the vicinity of Tijuana, thanks to urban sprawl,
maquiladora
voraciousness and water scarcity.