by Bill Barich
“They’re easy fish to catch,” he told me. “We only fished for about two hours.”
“Were you using bait?” I asked.
“Mmm-hmm. Anchovies.” He accented the second syllable, anchovies.
They sipped from cans of Meister Bräu and went about their job in silence, moving their knives over the croaker to scrape away the scales and then digging in the tip to slit the fishes’ bellies and scoop out the entrails. They held the cleaned croaker under a tap and washed off the blood and the few clinging scales before stowing them in a plastic bucket, maybe two dozen of them lying there in a silvery pile.
SATURDAY NIGHT ON THE ROAD, twilight, and I was in Brawley, a cattle town in Imperial Valley about twenty miles from the border. In the Mexican quarter, men sat in folding chairs, on car hoods, and on steps drinking beer. The temperature had dropped into the nineties, and it was much cooler outside than in their little houses, where the blades of electric fans were turning.
Brawley was slow and stolid. The town looked flat-out poor. The cops were driving VW Bugs, and many buildings were boarded up. The marquee of the defunct local picture palace was blank but for two letters, BR, not yet fetched away by the desert wind.
The Planter’s Hotel was a big, old, rattly place that had been decorated and redecorated countless times. There were just three customers at the bar, Phillip and Robert, who were welders, and a cowboy from some ranch. The cowboy was talking about going to Mexico to get some fancy boots.
“I doubt I could walk in anything but boots,” he told us all, whether or not we wanted to know.
“Last night, I dreamed about an earthquake,” the bartender, Charlene, said as she brought him another beer.
The cowboy nodded. “You never can tell,” he said. “You get an earthquake in Brawley, the earth just rolls. It doesn’t shake the way it does in San Francisco. I saw a documentary about it on PBS. Plate tectonics.”
Phillip and Robert were corn-fed boys from Oklahoma. Phillip had played defensive tackle in high school and took up a lot of space. He and Robert, his assistant, were working at a geothermal plant by the Salton Sea. Phillip told me that he had no choice but to go where the work was, hauling his rig from job to job while his wife and his daughter waited for him on a forty-acre spread in Oklahoma.
“I’d drive home in a minute if my little girl needed me,” he pledged. He came from country where daughters revered their daddies, and vice versa. “I’ve got a fuzzbuster in my four-wheeler, and I’d be there in a minute, all right.”
“I had a daughter, but she died.” The speaker was a new fellow who’d joined us uninvited, a skinny dude from Texas dressed in his best shirt and smelling of cologne. This part of California seemed to slide into the Southwest and into Mexico.
The skinny dude’s story was sad. His wife had left him and his daughter had died. He was down to his last twenty-four dollars. He had looked at a room in an even worse hotel across the way, but it was full of dust and roaches. The manager wouldn’t rent to him, anyhow, because he didn’t have any references.
“I said to him, ‘References? Do those cockroaches have references?’ ”
“Maybe you ought to just go on home,” Phillip suggested to him.
“Ain’t no work in Texas, bub,” the skinny dude informed us. “And I’d do about any old thing! I’d be a damn roustabout.”
“You could try up in Bakersfield,” I said, recalling the oil fields.
“No way in hell am I going to Bakersfield!” he yelled, as if I’d asked him to pull out his fingernails with a pair of pliers.
While Phillip was doing some further career counseling with him, I discussed literature with Robert. He wanted to write a book for children, but he couldn’t spell very well. He’d write a page in his notebook, and then he would read it over, find some misspellings, get angry, and rip it up.
“What’s your advice?” he asked.
There he was, a bad-spelling welder from Oklahoma trying to cope with Brawley by writing a book for children. “Live with your mistakes,” I advised him.
“Okay,” Robert said. “From now on, I will.”
I drank two beers and picked an opportune moment to leave. The bar was getting crowded and smoky, and a very large, bearded cowboy in a Stetson approached Phillip with a conniving smile on his face.
“Well, sir,” he said, rocking on his heels, “you look to be about the biggest guy in here tonight.”
Phillip allowed that it was true. “I do seem to be.”
“Guess you and me will be the ones fighting later on.”
“I guess so,” Phillip said, not budging an inch.
Robert said, “When I get home tonight, I’m going to write a page and let it be. I promise it. I really will.”
I congratulated him and made for the door of the Planter’s Hotel.
In Imperial Valley, baled hay was stacked in fields. There were sheep and cattle being finished, herded in from the open range and fattened up for the slaughter. Cantaloupes were ripening on the vine, almost bursting at the seams. I saw some cotton, some sugar beets, and many little vegetable plots where truck crops grew. The telephone wires were heavy with hawks.
El Centro had a population of more than thirty thousand and was the valley’s big town. It liked to bill itself as the “largest city below sea level in the Western Hemisphere.”
At a pharmacy, a clerk told me that Brawley did have some money, but it all belonged to white ranchers.
“They even have a country club up there,” he said, as if in El Centro a country club had the probability of a blizzard. More economic growth could be expected, he thought, when the new prison was finished in Calipatria, fifteen miles to the north.
I drove on to Calexico on the All American Canal. Arizona was about sixty miles to the east, toward some sandy hills and the Cargo Muchacho Mountains.
At the Mexican border, INS agents were supervising the comings and goings of people to and from Mexicali. On a Sunday afternoon, thousands were passing through turnstiles and gates, carrying shopping bags and straw baskets. They were almost all Hispanic and did not appear to be under any close scrutiny.
I walked through a gate into Mexico. The transition was simple and undramatic. The border seemed meaningless. Mexicali had some chain stores such as Leeds, National, and Pay Less, some cantinas, a couple of hotels, and many Chinese restaurants. There was life in the noisy streets, a heartening press of flesh that was good to see after witnessing all the main streets in California rolled up and packed away, from Smith River to Brawley.
Mexicali also had 131 maquilas, the assembly plants where Mexican workers labored for a very low hourly wage putting together everything from computers to elevator parts for U.S. and foreign corporations, doing the work that Californians used to do.
THAT EVENING, I camped in the Anza-Borrego Desert and woke around midnight to a whipping wind and a sky cracking with electricity. I heard thunder and saw streaks of lightning, but no rain ever fell. The lightning flashed like a strobe and threw bolts into the desert and illuminated the spiny, crippled arms of ocotillos. The wind blew hard through the tent to bring scatterings of sand.
I crawled back into my sleeping bag and listened to the thunder. I could hear creatures moving about in the dark making sounds. It was as if the storm had roused every living thing and had started them all skittering across the sandy earth. I lay there unable to sleep, alone and listening to the noises and feeling the immensity of the desert all around me until I finally nodded off toward dawn and woke later to a clear sky and sheep grazing on distant hills.
FROM EL CENTRO I traveled east through Seeley, Dixieland, and Plaster City, where gypsum was mined and off-road vehicles were tearing up the ground. The landscape turned extraordinary again near Jacumba on the border with huge boulders strewn about for miles, a poetry of plate tectonics. The vegetation was various and had an internal sense of order, as composed in its way as a terrarium.
Farther on, I came to the Desert Tower, a work of f
olk art built of rock and commanding a view to the north of Anza-Borrego and the Coyote Peaks. An old rockhound sat at a table covered with polished gems and minerals. He was talking to a tourist couple from Washington State.
“We’re from Seattle,” the woman was saying. “We thought we’d come down here because everybody from California’s going up there.”
Walking around the tower, I saw two scorpions locked in an arachnoidal embrace.
Foul brown air drifted up from the maquilas in the town of Tecate, at the Tecate Divide on Interstate 8. Between six and nine new assembly plants opened in Tecate every month. The workers were making such things as patio furniture, wine racks, kitchen cabinets, and rubber Halloween masks in the image of Freddy Kreuger.
Then I was climbing into the Cleveland National Forest past Live Oak Springs, Pine Valley, and many Indian reservations—Manzanita, La Posta, and Capitan Grande.
El Cajon marked my return to civilization. Here again was the panoply of strip malls and franchises, the jumble of immigrant communities—Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean—and the card parlors, check-cashing facilities, and adult bookstores. El Cajon was the gateway to San Diego, the last big city in California and also the last paradise before Mexico.
CHAPTER 27
IN HIS CELEBRATED BOOK, California for Health, Wealth and Residence, (1872), Charles Nordhoff told of a visit to southern California during which he encountered lovely mountain scenery and bright sunshine wherever he went. The sublimity of the climate peaked in San Diego, he said, where the sun shone so constantly that people took it for granted.
Unaccustomed to such splendor, Nordhoff had once made the mistake of remarking on the perfect weather to a San Diegan.
“It’s a fine day,” he’d said, innocently enough.
The man had looked at him aghast and had replied, “Of course, it’s a fine day. Why not? Every day is a fine day here!”
More than a century later, the editors of Twin Plant News, a trade journal that chronicled the maquiladora industry in California, Texas, and Mexico, where the legal working age is fourteen, conveyed a similar picture of San Diego to its readers:
Visiting San Diego is like stepping into paradise. With an average year-round temperature just below 70 degrees and with none of the oppressive heat of the desert or the wilting humidity of the tropics, San Diego seems just about perfect. There is so much to see and do that visitors usually find themselves short of time and residents never lack for entertainment.
San Diego, the last paradise. Realtors had built it, too, during the boom of the 1880s, selling off the land so fast that the city’s population had jumped from about 5,000 in 1884 to nearly 32,000 in 1888. Speculators bought on credit and turned their holdings around for a profit in less than twenty-four hours. It could cost you up to $500 just to stand in line to bid for a lot.
The real estate fever hit its highest pitch with the marketing of Hotel del Coronado, in 1888. The owners advertised that the grounds were free of malaria and hay fever, and that languor was absent from the air. Guests would never have to contend with thunder, cyclones, or mad dogs, either. A cage full of monkeys appeased visiting kids, who also got to ride across the lawn on the backs of giant sea turtles.
San Diego was Ray Kroc’s hometown, a McDonald’s kind of town. It was a paradise without affect, thick with Republican virtues. You could count on having a good time in the city, I thought, but you’d never have a great one. The first few days I was around, I kept pinching myself to be sure that I was still alive. Purgatory could be like San Diego, really, with each moment and each day repeating the one before it, and nothing ever changing.
On the downtown streets, I saw so many blond, well-groomed, conservatively dressed men and women that I became convinced there must be a convention of former quarterbacks and cheerleaders going on somewhere. They had the high spirits of students who’d passed a tricky geometry exam and had just been told they would not have to miss the prom, after all. So much blondness, so much sun-washed light—I felt as though I were being tugged kicking and screaming into the pages of Sunset.
San Diego was for the young in spirit and the young at heart. The median age in the city was 28.7, and everything seemed half-formed and still tinged with a blush of adolescence. People were clinging to their naïveté and keeping at least ten yards between themselves and any serious information.
San Diegans might not be bookish or intellectual, but they were religious in their way and all worshiped at the First Church of Recreation, conducting their devotionals on 78 golf links and 1,200 tennis courts, in countless parks and fitness centers, and aboard 50,000 boats. They had to work, yes, but they did it reluctantly. The prevailing fantasy was to become a successful entrepreneur, not for the money but for the time it would buy you, more time to recreate. About three-quarters of the city’s businesses were small and independent and had fewer than ten employees.
The economy of San Diego had once been pegged to agriculture and the U.S. Navy, but now manufacturing and tourism were equally important. The big fortunes were still being earned in real estate, on subdivisions, and on strip malls. The hills around town had all been shaved and leveled for new construction—“condo-farming,” the practice was called.
Not every San Diegan was in favor of growth. A vocal minority objected strongly to the tracts and the condos and complained that San Diego was spreading too fast and without proper planning. The city lagged far behind its needs in building schools, roads, and firehouses. Its budget was stretched paper-thin, and its suburbs were an eyesore sprawl.
So what else is new in California? I asked myself.
Some alarmists subscribed to a hellish scenario whereby San Diego would blend gradually into Los Angeles to form a monster megalopolis. They yanked at their hair and cried that the distance between the cities was slowly being eroded, mourning the loss as they might a closing of the gap between sanity and madness.
Only Camp Pendleton, a training camp for the U.S. Marines, stood in the path of developers, commanding the terrain that separated San Diegans from their threatening neighbors.
Jokes about how to keep Angelenos and Los Angeles away were rampant in the city. One writer had suggested setting up a checkpoint where guards would search cars for such L.A.-style contraband as Evian water, self-hypnosis tapes, and cellular phones. The guards would also ferret out interlopers by asking questions like, “What’s the difference between a treatment and a screenplay? Between a screenplay and a novelization?”—questions that no self-respecting San Diegan would be able to answer.
While a few San Diegans were trying to shut the gate behind them, many others were kicking it open again. The Convention and Visitors Bureau was even advertising the merits of the city over the radio in Los Angeles. In one commercial, a man and a woman stalled in a traffic jam were heard talking about what they did to stay calm. They both closed their eyes and thought about moving to San Diego.
SAN DIEGO MIGHT BE THE LAST PARADISE in California, but it was a paradise under siege. While Los Angeles was pinching it from the north, Mexico was pinching it from the south. Thousands of Mexicans—and Central and South Americans—crossed the border every day, some of them legal and some of them not, and made the city their first stop and often never left.
Immigrant women gave birth at public hospitals, families went on welfare, and children were educated in public schools, and the taxpayers in San Diego County had to pick up the tab. They did not pick it up with enthusiasm.
San Diegans, although closer to the border, were not unlike other Californians in their schizophrenic attitude toward Mexico. They wanted the shoppers and the laborers and the bargain-priced goods manufactured in maquilas, but they didn’t want Mexicans to stay in their city. All the maids and the gardeners, the pourers of concrete, they should go back home on the evening trolley.
Irma Castro ran the Chicano Federation out of an older house in Barrio Sherman in San Diego. She had the same sort of coffee cups and furniture that Alejandro Montene
gro had up in San Rafael. She was a fiery, dynamic woman who cared deeply about the rights of Latinos and the federation’s mission to attend to them and see that every person got their due. Almost all the clients of the agency came from low-income families and lacked the language skills to cope with the forms and the offices of government, even when they were legal residents of the state.
In many respects, Irma Castro told me when I visited her, San Diego was just as segregated as Los Angeles. Hispanics lived in barrios in the inner city and in the towns south of Interstate 8 that rolled toward the border. National City, Chula Vista, and San Ysidro were gritty and prone to drugs, gang life, and crime.
The next generation of Hispanic children might not be much better off than their predecessors, Irma Castro felt. The elementary schools in the barrio were designed to hold about six hundred kids, but they took in twice that many. The buildings were old and the playgrounds were dirt. The San Diego School Board had one black person on it, but there were no Latinos, even though they made up about a quarter of the city’s residents.
“The leadership here thinks this is the Midwest,” Irma Castro said. “They reject the whole notion of diversity.”
San Diego had never welcomed immigrant Hispanics with open arms, she explained, and that was still true, except that the situation had gotten more complicated. Sometimes legal Hispanics were as hard on the new arrivals from Mexico as white people were. They thought that the newcomers reflected badly on them, that they were lumped together with them in the public mind and forced to pay for their mistakes.
In the past, it had been almost impossible to make any progress in the city, Irma Castro said, because of blatantly dirty politics. Among the recent triumphs of the Chicano Federation was the role it had played in forging an important settlement agreement with San Diego that would help to change that.
The federation had joined in a class-action suit, Perez v. City of San Diego, that had taken issue with the way that districts were gerrymandered for electoral purposes. Because of the gerrymandering, no Hispanic had ever been elected outright to the city council. Furthermore, no nonincumbent black had ever defeated a nonminority candidate.