CHAPTER TWENTY: 1998, YUMA ARIZONA
Part IV: America 1990s, Journeys in Flyover Country
Throughout the 1990s the BBC World Service sent me back to parts of America that were rarely reported on to write a series of essays, similar to Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America. The last of these trips took place in March 1998 when I traveled along a section of America’s border with Mexico. This chapter is based on the first of the five essays I wrote for World Service immediately following that trip. These words, slightly adjusted for tense, are the contemporaneous record of what I saw and heard on that late-1990s trip with no retrospective judgment from the present and no adjustment of statistics to reflect current immigration numbers.
You have to live for a while on an island smaller than Texas that has three countries on it, as Britain does, to understand America’s special geography and how that contributes to the nation it is. For all its Atlantic to Pacific breadth, the United States of America is bordered by only 2 other countries: Canada in the North and Mexico in the South. But when Americans speak of “the border” they mean only one thing: the border with Mexico, running 1,931 miles from the Pacific ocean in southernmost California to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas.
The Border has always had a bad reputation in American culture.
It's the place where America, founded by white Angl-Saxon Protestants, has its interface with the other: a country of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking Catholics. In the dozen years since I'd left the US, the border had come under greater scrutiny. A tidal wave of humanity has been crossing from Mexico into the US in the last three decades—4 million legally, 1.5 million illegally—and this migration was one of the biggest changes to the demographics and politics of America since my departure.
The region was also having a cultural moment. One of the most popular novelists in the country was Cormac MacCarthy. He had labored in obscurity for years but in the 1990s had begun a trilogy of novels set along the border in the middle of the Twentieth Century. The books brilliantly evoked a time only recently passed when the unfenced emptiness was traversed by people on horseback for all kinds of reasons, a place where language and some elements of culture like food and ranch work were shared and the border between the Anglo and Mexican worlds was in people’s minds and hearts, not on a treaty map.
So, as I had never been to the border, and as I wanted to observe the changes this big migration was causing, and also because I was a Cormac fan, I decided to travel along its’ middle third. Two great rivers, the Colorado and the Rio Grande, would mark the start and finish of my journey. My first stop would be Yuma, on the Colorado River, in the far Southwest of Arizona.
So on a Saturday morning when it was still winter in London but well into spring in the desert, I found myself driving towards Yuma along Interstate 8. I was travelling through empty landscape, nothing but desert and harshly weathered mountain ridges all around, and other than clusters of old cars surrounding cheap houses, few signs of humanity. For hours I drove through this emptiness, growing increasingly nervous that I might have chosen to write about a place that was all land and no people. Then driving over the southern end of Castle Dome Ridge there was a strange sight.
The valley floor was carpeted with what looked like thousands of dirty white pebbles. Yuma, visible in the distance, was surrounded by these things. Occasionally they moved and the sun glinted off them. The pebbles weren’t pebbles, they were RVs, recreational vehicles, motor homes, houses on wheels complete with indoor plumbing and all-modern conveniences. They’re the natural nesting place of the ‘snow bird’ a species of pensioner from the cold northern states in the US. They drive or haul these huge vehicles South to the desert every winter. Around 62,000 people live permanently in Yuma, but another 80,000 jump in their RVs and come for the winter, turning a big town into a small city. A thoroughly modern one.
As I pulled off the Interstate into what I expected to be an old western border town, I found a fairly typical mid-size American city going about its Saturday business. The Highway’s exit had had been sectioned off and a 10k charity run was in progress. The finish line was at the old downtown’s Main Street. Along Main Street there was a fair in progress, celebrating Yuma’s heritage as the only crossing point on the lower stretches of the Colorado river back in the days of Western settlement, and as the home of the notorious territorial penitentiary. The scene was pleasant enough but it could have been Anywhere, USA. It lacked the distinctive sense of Yuma, Old West.
I grabbed a coffee and a homemade cookie from one of the stalls and sat down on a bench with the local newspaper which had a big story on the state high school Rodeo championships taking place that weekend. Rodeo means Old West where I come from, so I drove out to the county fairgrounds to watch.
It was a for real rodeo and the teenagers were good, riding bucking broncos for all they were worth, chasing calves down and roping them in with one throw of their lassos. I sat in the bleachers and watched the competitors and kept an eye and an ear on their parents hoping to eavesdrop on an opening to start a conversation. No opportunity presented itself. There was a certain amount of parental self-absorption but there was also a genuine lack of interest in chatting with someone who was by dress and hairstyle not of the ranching tribe.
In another building on the fairgrounds a gun show was in progress. My sister, worried about the border’s reputation, had urged me to buy a weapon when I got to Arizona.
“They’re crazy down there and you’ll need protection.”
As I said the Border has a really bad reputation and although I wasn’t too worried, in my regular work as a foreign correspondent for NPR I had had guns drawn on me and felt I knew how to handle myself in dangerous situations, I went over to see what a decent side-arm might cost.
More taciturn folks—men mostly—were buying and trading enough rifles, shotguns, machine guns, knives and crossbows to keep a guerrilla militia operating for several months. The centerpiece was a tripod-mounted, air-cooled Browning machine gun, with a long ammunition belt threaded into it, an historic artifact still in working order.
What anyone needed a working Browning for was open to question but in this region paranoia about the Federal government either taking away people’s guns or intentionally not securing the border was entrenched in a section of the Anglo community. It wasn’t too hard to imagine someone wanting to own the weapon and challenging the government or an illegal immigrant to come on to my land and, “pry it from my cold dead hands.”
Or maybe I was just letting what I read in the papers overexcite my own paranoia.
There didn't seem to be much social overlap between the activities in Yuma that morning. Each was attended by different segment of society living contiguously but not connected with one another. As I went from place to place, I felt like I was surfing between television channels: click-jogging, click-rodeo, click-spare parts for your AK-47.
Now, this was all very interesting to observe, but it didn't have much to do with the border. You don't get the feeling in Yuma that nearby there is another country, where the people are a different color and they speak a different language. Odd, because to get to the border you just have to drive a few miles West out 8th Street to the Colorado River—the source of life in this desert region—flowing tamely through man-made embankments built to control its flow and channel off its water. When you reach the Colorado turn south at US Highway 95 and drive for about fifteen minutes at a little over the speed limit and you get to the border.
The official land crossing into Mexico is in San Luis 20 miles south of Yuma but that is no distance in this part of the country, yet San Luis is a different world. As you roll into the town the street is lined with shops. The names on the stores are all Spanish. The road comes to a guarded gate with a special walkway for pedestrians heading south into Mexico. Stretching out from either side of the gate is a jerry-built wall of corrugated metal. The border.
There was a steady stream of human and vehicular traffic passing North and South. There was a long line of Mexicans, two and three abreast, walking back into their country. They had been to San Luis to shop for food. Not that there wasn’t food in Mexico, but the variety and quality is better North of the border. It was a strange sight. Up the road in Yuma people were also doing their Saturday shopping, but you would never see them in the street. They drive from shopping mall to shopping mall; in Yuma, as in Los Angeles, to walk is a sign of poverty. I watched the impoverished paseo in San Luis for an hour before getting in my car and returning to Yuma.
But as I headed out of town I heard an announcement on the radio. The previous week Yuma’s City government announced it was annexing 100 square miles of desert right down to the border. Throughout the United States in the years after the Second World War this is how municipalities had grown: annexing chunks of empty or underused land and then zoning it for residential development. More residents equals more tax revenue. This process has created the look of the modern American city: a vast suburb with a downtown core and new roads, not public transport, to get around.
The land around Yuma is scrub desert, much of it owned by the US Department of Defense and there was nothing exceptional about the process of annexing this desert land, especially if the DoD was willing to part with a small amount of it. But included in the annexation announcement was a proposal to build a new border crossing some miles to the east of San Luis which would be operated by the ever expanding Yuma If the small Mexican-American town lost the border crossing it would be a crisis for that community
“Time to organise against Yuma’s land grab! Come to the park in Gadsden on Sunday!” came a voice on the radio. And so I decided to go.
Gadsden is a general store, a few houses and a small park with a baseball field and basketball court by the side of Highway 95. Joe Harper, candidate for Mayor of San Luis, and organiser of the rally was busy trying to set up for the event: hooking up an electricity supply to the loudspeakers, making sure there were cold drinks enough for the crowd.
I decided to commit journalism and introduced myself as a reporter and asked what the Yuma land grab was all about. “It's killing us,” he began, as he explained the simple economics of the situation. Trucks and cars passing through the San Luis border crossing stopped to buy fuel and food as they come through town. The sales taxes on these items provide the services for San Luis’s people. If the port of entry was shifted to a new one inside Yuma’s city limits, that revenue would disappear. Harper excused himself to return to his preparations. He told me to relax, “We won’t start on time. My people run late.”
Two pieces of American history—one ancient, one modern—were resonating here.
By war and by cash purchase the US expanded westward throughout the first half of the 19th century. In 1853 diplomat James Gadsden was sent to Mexico to buy the land between Yuma and El Paso. Railroad owners, the shopping mall magnates of the day, decided the best route for a Southern Transcontinental Railroad was through the area. Gadsden bought the land for $10 million. The village of Gadsden is named after him. That was the old history.
The modern bit was all around me; the flat black fields created in the desert had been worked for decades by Mexican labourers. In the 1960s Cesar Chavez, against mighty odds, organised them into a union. That struggle made Chavez an international figure. Chavez had been born in Yuma, and although he made his mark in California some marches he organised went right up Highway 95 past Gadsden Park. Many of the children and grandchildren of those who walked that route were attending the rally.
By now, about 150 people had gathered. There were a couple of members of the Yuma City Council, long-time residents of the area, who had come to talk to the San Luisans. A flatbed truck pulled up and a microphone was set up on it. A school band played the Star-Spangled Banner and the speeches began. After about half an hour an extraordinary looking fellow got on the back of the truck. He had an ample gut, as virtually every man over 40 around the town did, but his striking feature was his head; massive and big-jawed, crowned by white hair. The weight of it made it jut out from his neck and shoulders. The crowd was particularly attentive as he rambled through his speech. He spoke of ‘his people’, ‘the border people’ as if they were separate culture. He spoke of their struggle to establish themselves in this dusty corner of the south-western United States, and he finished by singing a song about the land they lived on, the land they would fight for. When he was finished, the crowd cheered, the band played, and the Yuma City Council shuffled their feet, and looked slightly embarrassed.
Still commiting journalism I asked Joe Harper who the guy was and could he introduce me. He did. The man's name was Charlie Page, and I arranged to meet him the next day.
I pulled up into the sandy side of the road by Charlie Page’s house a little before our appointed meeting time, and found him in earnest conversation with his lawyer. There was to be a Yuma City council meeting a few days hence to discuss the annexation, and the pair were discussing strategy. I apologised for being a few minutes early.
“Oh it’s ok, you’re a gringo, its expected,” Page said wearily.
Of course, Charlie Page is a gringo as well. The man came from Northern California, which is where he met and married a Mexican woman from near San Luis. But his wife grew homesick so they moved back south to be near her family. That was almost 4 decades ago. Page settled in at the local school and taught the Mexican immigrants English. Generation after generation of them. There were very few people under 30 at the previous day’s rally who had not been taught by the big, white-haired man.
We went inside and listened to his lawyer’s theory on the whole Yuma situation. The lawyer believed the land grab had been instigated by outsiders who saw a business opportunity and had no sense of the culture of the region. He was not entirely pessimistic about the prospects of stopping the whole project. San Luis had allies still on the Yuma city council. Not everyone had been bought off by outsiders waving checkbooks.
After the lawyer left, Charlie Page summoned me to his desk and asked what I wanted to talk about.
“You used a phrase a couple of times—”the border people”—what did you mean by that?
“It’s a way of looking at life. It’s hard to explain.”
He carried on trying to find the specifics that would explain an idea that was abstract.
“Border people are very simple. They aren’t very introspective. They don’t think much about the world. The borderline on the map isn't important to them. They go back and forth across it a couple of times a day. The real borderline in their lives is the borderline poverty in which they live. The most important thing in their lives is family. It kills them when their children have to move away.”
Page spoke from painful experience. His own children had had to leave the region to find work. For him that’s why it was so important that San Luis get rights to some of the land Yuma planned to annex and continue to be the site of the border crossing. The town could build a tax base, attract investment and grow an economy that would allow families to stay together.
With an attentive pupil taking notes the retired school teacher was warming up, the gruffness had disappeared.
“The border people are the future of this region in the 21st century. I’m certain of that.”
I asked him about the song he had sung at the rally. Was it an old union song from the days when Cesar Chavez was organising the farm workers?
“Nah, I wrote it. When I get frustrated I play the piano and write songs. I just wrote that one last week.”
“Really? It’s pretty good.”
Then I asked him if I could have the words. Charlie Page seemed surprised and a little pleased that I felt like taking them down, but they seem to be worth knowing.
“We come for our land, this blessed land.
We come in peace to work hand-in-hand.
With the help of God above, we shall stand
With the help of our glorious saviour,
we shall have our land.”
This has been the fifth chapter of Part Four of History of a Calamity, the story of how America went from Victory in World War 2 to Donald Trump and Cold Civil War in a single lifetime … Mine, and possibly yours. The next chapter continues my Border Run in the Sonoran Desert. Here’s an extract:
There are 2 basic groups of villains working the border area; smugglers from Mexico and local poachers. Steve listed the former.
“You got your drug smugglers and your illegal aliens being smuggled in, and rare tropical birds being brought up from Central America.”
Among the poachers there were herpists—snake thieves—there are 6 distinct varieties of poisons rattlesnakes in the desert and, believe it or not, there’s a market for them as pets. Steve added,
“People even steal the cactuses.”
“What?”
“You get landscape architects designing a house or courtyard for a restaurant, they want a full grown Saguaro. They don’t ask too many questions about where it came from.”
How people can dig up a fully grown Saguaro—some are 50 feet high—and then transport it out of the park on the one road that runs through it without anyone noticing, Steve couldn’t say. But it had been done, he assured me.
And if you need to catch up on previous parts of my book, Part One, Bliss Was It In That Dawn, begins here:
