Imperial (74 page)

“THE CLASS WE USE IN OUR CAMPS”

Employers, of course, love scabs. In the very same year that Mariano Ma and Chang Peio first raise shovels in Mexicali, the “Imperial Catechism” advises settlers to the new American towns of eastern San Diego County how to harvest the richest crop of nickels from their fields. For your ranch hands
you can get Chinese or Japanese cooks, which is the class we use in our camps. There is no female help to be had in that valley. Chinese or Japanese make good house-servants as well as cooks.

In his biographical directory of 1918, Judge Farr writes a few words about Mrs. Julia Lyon, wife of a postmaster-baker-dairyman-hardwareman:
When Mr. Lyon had his large ranch holdings in Lower California,
which means Mexico,
Mrs. Lyon . . . rode horseback and looked after seventy-five Chinese, thus saving the expense of a foreman.
I suspect that her seventy-five Chinese saved her other expenses as well. Let’s assume that what she paid was what the Colorado River Land Company paid. Fifty centavos daily or weekly still sounds awfully cheap.

“TRULY IN EVERY SENSE ALIENS”

One never knows to what extent economic competition exacerbates racism, as opposed to being exacerbated by it. In any event, both were present. The historian Bancroft, whose many-volumed work on California comprises a monument nearly as eminent as the border wall, expresses his epoch when he tells us:
These people were truly in every sense aliens. The color of their skins, the repulsiveness of their features, their under-size of figure, their incomprehensible language, strange customs and heathen religion . . . conspired to set them apart.
This thinking continues to thrive in Mexicali today.—Goddamned gooks! cried my interpreter, Lupe Vásquez. I know you don’t like that word, Bill. But look at that old gook there! See how he won’t even look at us? Goddamned old gook!

In Condominios Montealbán, on one of whose four-storey cubes was graffiti’d BROTHER FOREFER, a middle-aged man was working with jumper cables on a rusty car; he had all the time and kindness in the world for me; yes, he agreed, he had more liberty than any American; on the other hand, he couldn’t own as many things. Well, that was all right with him. His pretty young wife, whom I first took for his daughter, came to get a cigarette, and they smoked lovingly together. He had lived here for twenty-seven years. Yes, Chinese lived here, too, and they said hello to him, but
they keep to themselves and we keep to ourselves.

We’re not like friends, the man went on. It’s like the whites and Negroes in your country.

That was the day that my poor interpreter, José López from Jalisco, not to be confused with the Jose Lopez with whom I rode the New River, kept getting kicked out of one Chinese restaurant after another when I sent him to inquire about tunnels; since I paid him by the hour, it is fortunate that Mexicali had somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty Chinese restaurants
¹²³
for him to get kicked out of; he came to me redfaced with angry humiliation. (Those gooks
yelled
at him? cried Lupe in amazement. I wouldn’t have let no gook raise his voice to me. Those gooks need to get hit upside the head!) At first I wondered whether José’s incomplete success had anything to do with the fact that he smelled rank; that day he kept disappearing behind a bush or a garbage heap to have diarrhea (fortunately, Condominios Montealbán was rich in garbage heaps); then there was the fact that he didn’t project a dynamic attitude, having fallen asleep on one of the border benches at three in the morning; the sun woke him much too early, and so he kept nodding off today. In short, how much responsibility did he bear for his failure to gain high-quality intelligence on Chinese tunnels? Well, I proved for myself that whenever I greeted a Mexican at Condominios Montealbán, my greeting was invariably returned; when I greeted a Chinese, it usually wasn’t. Here came another young Chinese man; José and I called out a greeting, but he didn’t even turn. A pretty Chinese girl returned my
buenos días
in a low voice and kept walking. I politely requested her help, and she kept walking.

Next I met Alicia and her fifteen-year-old daughter Luisa. They came from Sonora. Condominios Montealbán had been their home for twelve years, ever since Alicia’s divorce. They had no Chinese friends. The reason, said the mother, was this:
Chinese aren’t happy the way we Mexicans are. When I have some problem, I go to a neighbor. The Chinese keep it all to themselves.

On Saturday night there was a
quinceañera
for Luisa, right there where I’d first met Alicia when she was sweeping, in the plaza beneath the freeway overpass. It was the night before the year’s heat settled back upon Imperial. Twin disco balls which strangely resembled police car lights sped their spatters of luminescence across the Aztec-style reliefs. Behind the tables, a sun-colored banner had been taped to the graffiti’d wall to frame the three-layer white cake on the red-colored table. Lupe Vásquez was with me, and he had a fine time, although he was so used to getting up early for his field work that by eleven he felt exhausted. Still, it brought his youth back. He used to know where all the
quinceañeras
in Calexico, Heber, El Centro and Mexicali would be held; he and his friends would crash these parties almost every weekend, for the free drinks and the dancing. His memories rushed like searchlight beams across the cracked plaza. Oh, he remembered the good old days in San Luis Río Colorado when they had a nice
zona rosa
with back rooms in the bars so that it wasn’t necessary to rent a hotel room just for fifteen minutes; unfortunately, San Luis Río Colorado had grown too much, and the
zona rosa
got torn down. That was how he and I passed the time at Luisa’s
quinceañera.
My friend Larry from Borrego Springs was there, too; he had such a fine time that on the next day his cheeks were sore from smiling. Here came the “waltz of the last doll,” the song whose words were
I bought my daughter her last doll today, then noticed she had grown up; now the bud has become a rose;
Luisa and her stepfather were dancing slowly to this like lovers. Now she was dancing with her brother and her mother. A huge tree, I think a eucalyptus, towered over the first two apartment blocks, which it had grown between, and meanwhile there was a certain dancer, a dancer in red. Lupe loved to look at her. He said that he wanted some white meat. It had been a long time since he’d tasted any of that, if I knew what he meant. He’d repeatedly expressed this wish to his brother-in-law, who advised him to go buy a can of tuna. Every now and then the Río Nuevo, which was maybe thirty paces away, sent us a whiff or two to remind us that it might be interred but it refused to be forgotten; and there was Luisa, dressed like a bride, nestling her head on her stepfather’s shoulder; there she was dancing with all her girlfriends, smiling and clapping her delicate arms. A little boy also danced dartingly among them; and high up on a narrow ledge between the Aztec reliefs, little children danced in the night, with the disco ball raking across them. Only half the tables were occupied, but nobody seemed to mind. Alicia brought every two or three guests a big bottle of beer, and when Lupe was so tired that we had to go, she offered to make a dinner for us. Her daughter danced on, her white dress distinguishing her from the others, who were all dark almost beyond visibility in that warm grey night against the spinning lights. All the young girls were dancing to a happy song about a cuckold:
It’s only rumors, rumors, that he’s around the corner,
Lupe chuckling goodnaturedly; now came another song of sexual innuendo:
I want to eat a banana with whipped cream on top
, the guests smiling, the fifteen-year-old dancing happily while her mother clapped. I loved this Mexican expression of the sunniness and funniness of sexuality; I loved the fact that these materially poor people could find joy right in the midst of the Río Nuevo’s stench; up on the overpass, a man leaned over the railing to watch and listen; he stood there smiling for an hour. And Luisa danced with her girlfriends to a song about getting so wasted that I have forgotten my name and I don’t give a damn.

By the way, said Lupe, how many Chinese do you see? Alicia’s been here for how long did you say, and she’s a nice lady, a real nice lady to welcome us like this, and these Chinese are her neighbors, and there’s not a single goddamned Chinese. They won’t even give her that much respect. Goddamned gooks.

THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING

A few months after this
quinceañera
I met a very friendly, pretty, educated Chinese waitress who lived in Condominios Montealbán. I asked her why she had refrained from coming to Luisa’s party, and she replied, not without contempt,
I don’t care for that sort of event.

“UNTIL THE LAST ALIEN SERF IS RETURNED TO THE ORIENT”

It is particularly painful, not to mention significant, to find that even the utopias of turn-of-the-century irrigation dreamers fail the test: Democracy will be built on small plots of equal size, none of which ought to belong to Chinese.
¹²⁴
I quote from the second edition of
The Conquest of Arid America
(1905): California
has distinctly failed as a land of big things, and achieved its best successes in the opposite direction. Its true and final greatness will consist of the aggregate of small things . . . Progress toward this end is already well begun. It must go on until the last great estate is dismembered and the last alien serf is returned to the Orient.
Let’s count it irrelevant to the serf’s alienness that life in China at this period bears a strange resemblance to the Imperial goal. According to my 1910
Britannica,
most Chinese
are cultivators of the soil. The holdings are in general very small, and the methods of farming primitive. Water is abundant, and irrigation common over large areas.
Well, who cares? Goddamned gooks!

“WHERE THEIR HABITS WOULD BE LESS OFFENSIVE”

As it happened, many Chinese do not get “returned to the Orient,” so their employers in and around Imperial do the next best thing. A 1912 history of Riverside County remarks about its eponymous city:
The older citizens will remember when the back portion of the block, where the Reynolds Department Store now stands, was largely occupied by Chinese, mostly used as grape pickers in those days, and how rough and filthy a quarter this shanty section was in consequence.
Fortunately, a solution lay at hand: Remove that Chinatown and reestablish it
in the Arroyo, where their habits would be less offensive.
In the fullness of time comes a still better result:
The Chinese are no longer employed in Riverside,
because grapes and apricots, in whose tending they were employed, have been replaced by oranges and lemons.

“A HIGH-PITCHED VOICE WAS SCREAMING CHINESE ORDERS”

What if the alien serfs didn’t want to be returned to the Orient?

In around 1905 we find Mr. Hutchins, the Chinese inspector, carrying out his task at Jacumba,
which is to allow no unentitled Mongolian to cross from Mexico into the United States.
When he catches them, they’re jailed and tried. But something tells me that my government wouldn’t keep paying Mr. Hutchins if the Chinese didn’t keep crossing.

In one of Zane Grey’s novels, published in 1913, a rancher on the Arizona side of Sonora explains to a cowboy that
of course, my job is to keep tabs on Chinese and Japs trying to get into the U.S. from Magdalena Bay.
(That same year, the Colorado River Land Company imports another five hundred Chinese into Mexico from Hong Kong.)

So why on earth wouldn’t there be tunnels?

In 2003 the man in the
casa de cambio
on First Street assured me in a gleeful murmur that of course there were tunnels
everywhere
in Calexico because if they started over
there
in Mexico then it stood to reason that they’d come up over
here.
He was Chinese. His building had three tunnel entrances, he said, but unfortunately he couldn’t show them to me because they were closed. But he knew for a fact that the old building which now housed the Sam Ellis store had a tunnel. The kindly old proprietor of the latter establishment showed me photographs of the way the border used to be; he advised me to go to the Chamber of Commerce for an interpreter; as for the tunnels, every time I asked if I could just take a peek in his basement he didn’t seem to hear me, but he did say: You’re never gonna find any of those tunnels. Anyhow, it’s all passé. It’s all hearsay . . .

It’s all
secret,
he might as well have said.

Hence the supernaturalization of the Chinese in the minds of others. Do you remember that old pioneer from Heber who had his mind made up about
pollos,
coyotes, and their
modus operandi
? It was all I could do not to burst out laughing when he’d assured me:
Now I hear the people smugglers are getting so brazen, now they got the Humvees with the guns mounted on them.
I remembered the shy boys in the dark, the hopeful and hopeless trying to make the snake or swimming amidst the suds and turds of the New River, and I thought: This old man was born here. He has lived next to Mexico and with Mexicans all his life. And still he believes this. Is it any wonder that far stranger things might be believed about people who
live together like cigarettes
?

In 1925, Dashiell Hammett’s crime story “Dead Yellow Women” envisions Chinese tunnels in San Francisco, all the while keeping faithful to the expectations of his public:
¹²⁵
The passageway was solid and alive with stinking bodies. Hands and teeth began to take my clothes away from me . . . A high-pitched voice was screaming Chinese orders . . .
That was one passageway to alienness. In another, which the protagonist reached through a trapdoor,
the queen of something stood there! . . . A butterfly-shaped headdress decked with the loot of a dozen jewelry stores exaggerated her height.