no twin city on the other side of the border, unlike Tijuana and Juarez, which are matched by San Diego and El Paso in size and heft. In the 1970s, midway through the golden age for California farm workers, more than half a million people crowded Mexicali’s streets, while all of Imperial County claimed a population of less than 75,000. The California town of Calexico, named as if it were a twin, had just a few thousand residents and was little more than a privileged Mexicali barrio with a U.S. postmark.1
People only come to the Imperial Valley to make money. It is not a valley—no river runs through it—and with no potable water of its own, only irrigation canals keep it alive. Only at its edges are foothills in sight, and they are less impressive than the twenty miles of sand dunes along Highway 8 on the Imperial’s eastern side, mountains of sand so desolate that in the nineteenth century the U.S. Army used camels to cross them.
Local postcards feature pictures of the border entry, as no natural sight is worth reproducing. The native plants are armed with thorns and the animals with fangs, claws, and poison. In the summer, the Imperial Valley is one of the hottest places in the United States, the July temperature averaging 107 degrees. An old joke has it that when people from Mexicali die and go to hell, they come back for their blankets.
Cheap labor and cheap water made the Imperial Valley into America’s winter garden, supplying most of the lettuce and cantaloupe consumed in the U.S. from December to March. Converting the desert for agriculture was not easy. It could not be done without tapping the wild Colorado River, nicknamed the Red Bull, which in most years bypassed the area and fed into the Gulf of California. The first men who attempted this feat—a small group of irrigation visionaries, Protestant teetotalers, land speculators, financiers, Indian killers, and engineers—failed. So did two of America’s richest men: E. H. Harriman, whose Southern Pacific Railroad built a series of inadequate floodgates and irrigation ditches in the early 1900s, and A. P. Giannini, whose Bank of America in the 1920s bailed out the Imperial Irrigation District, which had fallen into bankruptcy trying to keep up with the costs of irrigating the desert.2
Finally the federal government stepped in. In 1931, it contracted seven private companies to build what would be Hoover Dam, which, along with three other publicly financed dams farther down river, finally tamed the Red Bull. Starting in 1940, Colorado River water arrived on a regular, predictable basis to the Imperial Valley. Two years later the first braceros arrived.
All of the braceros were brought across the border from Mexicali, fumigated, and then sent to a holding station in El Centro, where growers’ agents checked their hands for calluses, sized up their ability to work, and took them away for their first contracted try-outs in the fields. Mexicans who were not part of the bracero program but still wanted to work the California harvests also came to Mexicali and, legally or not, made their way across the border, where labor contractors and farm foremen waited. Wives, children, and older men often remained on the Mexican side, where rent and food were cheaper, so Mexicali became not only a port of entry but a home base, the place where many farm workers returned after the seasonal harvests were over.
At the same time, Hoover Dam was changing the American West. Three of the construction companies that built it—Kaiser, Bechtel, and Utah Construction—used the money and contacts they made to launch themselves into the highest ranks of the coming military-industrial establishment. Water from the dam made some of the suburbs of semi-arid Southern California possible and allowed people to settle in fully arid Arizona. The dam’s electrical power fueled the development of Southern California’s industrial base just in time to make the state a major platform for military production during World War II and a center of military research and spending in the Cold War.
But those who simply wanted water for the old Colorado Desert—the dam’s first proponents—were among its main beneficiaries. They received the bulk of the dammed water, now 80 percent of the allotment, at highly subsidized prices. The All-American Canal, eighty miles of concave concrete laid through the sand dunes on the U.S. side of the border, allowed big growers and absentee landholders to solidify their control over the old Valley of the Dead, as Imperial County became the first place where the federal government allowed Bureau of Reclamation irrigation water to be used on farms over 160 acres. The project also freed the men who ruled Imperial County from the compromises that had been required when sections of an earlier canal ran through Mexico, and turned the once-fertile lower Colorado Valley, on the Mexican side of the border, into a salty desert.3
Farm workers making their way through Mexicali after the bracero program ended came upon one more residue of irrigation history. Its Chinese-owned bars, whorehouses, restaurants, and small shops were a reminder of one of the earliest water schemes, one engineered in 1901 by General Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, the powerful owners of the Los Angeles Times. The first cut along the western bank of the Colorado River had diverted water to the desert through Baja California, allowing the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz—advised and probably bribed by the two newspaper moguls—to demand that half the flow be assigned to Mexico. Otis, Chandler, and other officials of the Times then bought 860,000 acres of Baja California land, at 60 cents an acre; they planned to hire Mexican peons to farm it.4
But few Mexicans were around. Mexicali is far from the interior of Mexico and there was no settlement on the southern side of the border. Agents for Otis and Chandler recruited some Mexican tenant farmers from among the railroad workers who had been laying Southern Pacific tracks in the U.S. Southwest, but there were not enough of them. New Japanese immigrants were also recruited, but Japanese workers had better opportunities in the San Joaquin, Sacramento, and Salinas valleys. The Chinese became the perfect choice. Run out of California cities in the 1870s, out of the fields in the 1880s, first banned from immigrating in 1882, and permanently banned in 1902, many Chinese laborers had already moved south to Mexico. A fair number had settled in Tijuana. Mexico was both a refuge and a convenient base from which to smuggle newly arrived immigrants into California. Accordingly, the U.S. Border Patrol was set up, not to stop Mexicans but to keep out Chinese.5
Mexicali became a classic sin city: a fortuitous combination of border town and Chinatown serving the recreational needs of a male frontier settlement built only to extract wealth. The town was the moral complement of what was happening across the border. The earliest water imperialists were also semi-utopian dreamers and moral reformers. In each of Imperial County’s little towns they passed antiliquor, antigambling, and antiprostitution laws. Subsequently the Women’s Christian Temperance Union became one of the most important organizations in the county, doing what it could to see that those laws were observed. The laws could be enforced on the U.S. side only because liquor, gambling, and prostitution, all in wide variety, were available on the Mexican and Chinese side. Even when the Chinese were pushed out and the city became mostly Mexican, after railroad tracks linked the Imperial Valley to the Mexican interior in 1926, Mexicali never lost its Chinatown feel. Chinese vice lords, swindlers, and smugglers were simply replaced by Mexican ones, who developed smooth working relationships with corrupt Mexican politicians and police. Those relationships would play a surprising role in UFW history.
From 1965 to 1985, Imperial County typically ranked no better than fourth among all California counties in gross agricultural sales. The $750 million generated from farming in the county in 1982 was still less than 10 percent of California’s agricultural production.6 Most farmwork occurred elsewhere, performed by workers based in Mexicali but traveling around the state alongside migrants from deeper in Mexico and from Texas, and by local residents, primarily Mexicans and Filipinos, who had settled in the areas that offered more abundant work.
Farm workers favored different routes out of the Imperial Valley, depending on the crops they intended to pick. Grape workers traveled north on Highway 86 to the desert vineyards of Coachella. On the way, they passed the Salton Sea, formed in 1905 when the Colorado River first refused to be dammed. Just forty miles from Palm Springs, it was once promoted as a place for working-class recreation; now it is contaminated by pesticides from the Imperial Valley and has become a death trap for migratory birds.
