Imperial (73 page)

Granted, many of the local informants and interpreters I employed were poor. Why else would they work for me? Extrapolating from their opinions as a means of determining how Mexicans felt about Chinese was junk science, equivalent to interviewing a few railroad bums to learn how Americans of all classes felt about the war against Iraq. The people who were most ready and available to inform me about the Chinese tunnels could be well represented by the Mexican boy who had worked at a certain Chinese restaurant for five years now (it was the one we’ll call the Nuevo Peiping, which, conveniently located near to two floor shows, offered bronze bas-reliefs of Chinese ideograms, an octagonally recessed ceiling, thick plastic on all the tables, mariachi musicians whose patrons took life as it came because for them it came easy; when a waiter such as this Mexican boy rushed over, shouldering a heavy platter of Chinese dishes, they regarded his service without surprise), and the Mexican boy explained: They come from far away from here, so their character is different from ours, and it’s bad. They don’t share.

The boy’s salary was seven hundred pesos per week. His labor ran five days a week, from one-o’-clock to ten-o’-clock. That was a dollar-fifty an hour, not so far from what he might have made working in a
maquiladora.

He got a mother, he got three sisters, the interpreter bitterly informed me. He says, the Chinese always get angry over nothing. And if somebody comes hungry or thirsty, they never help; they never share.

Has he ever heard anything about tunnels?

Never, because these kinda people, they don’t wanna talk to no one about their life.

A whitehaired, pleasant, roundfaced lady named Lupita, who had once worked in the office of a semi company, had graduated to being a security guard in a prostitute discotheque, and now held afternoon duty as the moneytaker for a parking lot beside a shut-down supermarket, allowed that her favorite aspect of Mexicali was her friends, and her second favorite was the Chinese food. Would she consider marrying a Chinese? I inquired, and she replied: No! I’m not a racist, but no Chinese, no nigger!

So the people I met on the street didn’t like the Chinese; unfortunately, I have to tell you that many of the intelligentsia, the journalists and archivists, didn’t seem to like them, either.

“THEM DAMNED NAGURS”

Imperial is a boarded-up billiard arcade, white and tan; Imperial is Calexico’s rows of palms, flat tan sand, oleanders and squarish buildings, namely the Golden Dragon restaurant, Yum Yum Chinese Food, McDonald’s, Mexican insurance; Imperial contains a photograph of a charred building and a heap of dirt:
Planta Despepitadora de Algodón “Chino-Mexicana,”
an establishment which has vanished like the Climax Grill. Imperial is a map of the way to wealth; the map has sun-bleached back to blankness. Leave an opened newspaper outside for a month and step on it; the way it crumbles, that’s Imperial. Imperial is a Mexicali wall at twilight: tan, crudely smoothed, and hot to the touch. Imperial is a siltscape so featureless that every little dip made by last century’s flood gets a christening, even if the name is only X Wash. In spite of its wide, flat streets and buildings, Imperial is actually a mountain, Gold Mountain to be precise.

In 1849 the California gold rush begins. Mr. Chung Ming gets rich right away. Hearing the news, his friend Cheong Yum rushes to California and achieves equal success. By 1852, twenty thousand Chinese a year, mostly Cantonese,
¹²⁰
are trying their luck. A decade later, we find twelve thousand of them digging, blasting, mortaring and shoveling on the transcontinental railroad.
Wherever we put them we found them good,
reports a white magnate who happily paid them less than he did his Irishmen. The Irishmen take notice. One of them laments:
Begad if it wasn’t for them damned nagurs we would get $50 and not do half the work.

“Chinamen” and Indians get preference for employment in the vineyards around Los Angeles, I assume because
we found them good,
and in 1860 a contingent of white laborers gives up and departs for Texas. In 1876 a chronicle of Los Angeles reports this news:
City still rapidly improving. During June anti-Chinese meetings were the order of the day.
Those words depress me all the more because they were written a mere five years after the infamous Chinese Massacre.
¹²¹
In spite of the anti-Asian movement’s best efforts,
An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County,
published in 1889, estimates that between two and three thousand Chinese walk the streets:
The Chinese are a prominent factor in the population of Los Angeles . . . The Chinaman, as a rule, with occasional exceptions, is not desirable help in the household. On the ranch . . . he can be tolerated, when white men are not obtainable.

Meanwhile, in 1898, the Britannica Company contracts with Mr. Ma You Yong to bring a thousand Chinese to Mexico for railroad work. A tunnel cave-in kills seventy-seven. And they keep right on, from Oaxaca all the way to Salinas Cruz and Jesús Carranza. No doubt, onlookers remark that they live together like cigarettes. In the sixth year of their labors, Jack London publishes a bitterly logical little essay entitled “The Scab.”
When a striker kills with a brick the man who has taken his place, he has no sense of wrong-doing . . . Behind every brick thrown by the striker is the selfish will “to live” of himself, and the slightly altruistic will “to live” of his family.

Under capitalism, continues London, we are all scabs, and we all hate scabs. But not everyone takes his reasoning that far. The Chinese coolie, whom London mentions in the same breath as the Caucasian professor who scabs by being meeker than his predecessor, is to haters of
damned nagurs
a dangerously particular case. You see, in California the Chinese do more than we, in exchange for less. Moreover, they keep what they get. (An eyewitness judgment:
They sent up to the mines for their use supplies of Chinese provisions and clothing, and thus all the gold taken out by them remained in Chinese hands and benefited the rest of the community but little . . . In fact, the Chinese formed a distinct class which enriched itself at the expense of the country.
) In that case, we’d better make it hot for the Chinese. Hence anti-Chinese riots; hence the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its many descendants.

“The Scab” saw print on the official date of Mexicali’s founding. The Chinese were already there.

“THEY CAME FOR THE WORK”

My Chinese interpreter Clare Ng (about whom more later) interviewed an old couple at Condominios Montealbán and reported: Those two people tell me, the Chinese people start the whole city, but I don’t know.

In 1890 two Chinese named Mariano Ma and Chang Peio arrived in Ensenada, from where I don’t know (after all, this is a creation myth). Thirteen years later they made the twenty-six-day journey to Mexicali. They might or might not have been the first. They were not the last.

A softspoken old Chinese shoe-store owner at Altamirano and Juárez (who became less open with me once I started badgering him about tunnels) said from behind the glass counter: Before me, my grandfather was here. When the city was founded, my grandfather came in 1906. He had heard from people who were here before that there wasn’t a city, nothing but land; they came for the work. There were no buildings. My grandfather came to pick cotton.

Was he in business for himself?

He worked for someone else, an American company. I didn’t remember the name.

I suspect that the name was the Colorado River Land Company, which had already hired Mariano Ma. In later years he’d be seen at the racetrack with the Governor of Baja California, but in 1903 he spent his days with Chang Peio and the other braceros, leveling roads, digging canals, all for a wage of fifty centavos (twenty-five additional for food); whether this was paid daily or weekly is not recorded. Señor Ma remarks:
In that place there were a lot of mosquitoes. Many people died on account of the various sicknesses caused by insect bites, rattlesnakes and the intense heat. Some people were buried underground by quicksand and whirlwinds.

The old Chinese-Mexican mestiza Carmen Jaham told it this way:
Mexicali began with about a hundred or a hundred and fifty Chinese.
And between 1902 and 1921, forty or fifty thousand Chinese came to Mexico, some of them sent for by the Colorado River Land Company. In 1913 there were a thousand in Mexicali alone. And they kept coming.

On Calle Altamirano there stands a photo shop whose glass cases contain as fine a selection of merchandise as anything this side of Palm Springs; the owner was a middle-aged third-generation Chinese named Steve Leung, and here is how he told it:

When American people brought in Chinese to build the railroad, there was a big buildup in the Chinese population. After the project finished, there started being a concentration in San Francisco. Chinese culture, even though we can recognize them by a lot of invention like gunpowder, paper, etcetera, they do a lot of agriculture. So the first thing they saw was the wasteland here in the desert. There was nobody here, especially here in the Mexican side. Same thing happened here like in Las Vegas. So they started moving in and they started growing cotton. This was eighteen something; in the whole Mexicali Valley it was about ninety percent Chinese. There was no official power or authority that was Mexican, so the Chinese could do what they wanted. So downtown was a replica of what used to be San Francisco at this time. They were doing cotton and they were doing fine.

Then Mexican government started coming in. As Mexican people came in, Chinese people started putting in grocery stores and other services that will provide to the Mexican sector—laundries, etcetera. But of course they have some success and some failures. What they were able to keep were the grocery stores.

Then Mexican people started taking over the grocery stores, so they pulled back to the restaurants. Mexican people have not been able to take that over, since Chinese work longer hours. They don’t fight with the local people; they let them come in, they just pull back.

And in my mind’s eye, as Mr. Leung said this, I could see them pulling back into the tunnels.

Whether or not his version of events correctly explains the facts, it certainly fits in with them, for the photo albums in the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali do show an awful lot of Chinese grocery stores. By about 1915 the Chinese must have pulled considerable commercial weight in Mexicali, for in a photograph from that year we find a storefront for C. B. Williams & Sons, Cotton Selling Agents, Hardware Implements and Wagons; the same legend appears in both Spanish and Chinese. One Northsider claims they might have made up forty-two percent of Mexicali’s population then. By 1923 the Chinese have a Masonic lodge on Avenida Juárez at the intersection with Calle Altamirano. (According to Mr. Auyón, it was here that the Associación China de Mexicali began the confederation of Tongs in 1919.) The facade of this edifice boasts four pillars, and between the engraved dates 1916 and 1923 I see the words CHEE KUNG TONG. The Logia Masónica proudly shows off its own pillared portico, its roof facade of grandly spaced pillars which widen like doublebladed axeheads.

On the same block, at about the same time (this photo is dated 1923) we discover the long rectangular cube of the Chong Kee general store right next to the business of Harry E. Bowman. On the corner of Altamirano and Guerrero, Juan Chong Mercantile Cía. S.A. offers the world Mexicali Beer and a high trio of ideograms, gazing out on the blank white street.

And so they kept coming, but not everybody liked them. The ultraleftist Mexican Labor Party, which called for the exploited masses to rise up against President Díaz, could not resist reviling the exploited Chinese. In 1911, the locals down in Torreón, Coahuila, had a party and murdered three hundred and three of them, not to mention five Japanese; but Coahuila’s not in Imperial; it’s not in this story, so never mind.—Many times I’ve heard the tale of how when the Chinese illegals arrived in San Felipe, many of them paid money to a certain captain who advised them to walk in the direction of a certain hill; they’d see Mexicali within half an hour. From San Felipe to Mexicali is two hours by car. These luckless people walked into the desert and died. I’ve been told that the ghosts of the Chinese victims continue to haunt the now long dead captain’s spirit, and sometimes the flitting specter of his ship is seen.
¹²²
All the same, they kept coming. They spread out through the Mexicali Valley and across the Colorado River into Sonora and Sinaloa, where they were persecuted especially violently. At the beginning of the twenty-first century I found an almost inconceivable number of Chinese restaurants one after the other in San Luis Río Colorado, all of them wearing the same sign: an upturned-boat affair which was sometimes red, sometimes green. A fighting-cock breeder from near there, not the older man whom I usually interviewed but one of his competitors, said to me during a match in Islas Agrarias that
of course the Chinese are all into slavery.
That was why one never saw any Chinese beggars. He got even more animated in the course of telling me that seven years ago, the authorities had rounded up many illegal Chinese in Mexicali and sequestered them in a stadium under heavy guard, but some had mysteriously escaped, an occurrence which he considered both uncanny and hateful; he turned bitter when he mentioned it. He supposed that they had disappeared into one of their tunnels . . .

It’s always the same story.
Begad if it wasn’t for them damned nagurs . . .
And it never matters what color the niggers are. In 1962 a Texan farmhand who’d moved to the Imperial Valley
’cause they told us it was the land of plenty
ended up standing in soup lines.—I have nothing against the Mexican nationals, he told a journalist. All I’m saying is how can domestics compete with guys who will work harder and for less?