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.
After the six-week Coachella harvest, grape pickers moved on to their main destination: the Central Valley. Most favored a back road that led into the small towns around Bakersfield. They drove to the eastern foothills of the Tehachiapi Mountains through the high desert, which was untouched by irrigation or major human settlements, apart from the sprawling Edwards Air Force Base. Although just as hot as the Imperial Valley, its multicolored canyons, Joshua trees, various kinds of yucca, and seasonal desert wildflowers are a more attractive sight. Then winding through the Tehachapis and passing the UFW headquarters at La Paz, they could catch fleeting glimpses of the enormous plain that awaited them below: miles of fields, brown and gray, with occasional patches of irrigated green, stretching out endlessly without a landmark to measure the vast emptiness in between.
Once they were on Highway 99, competing with produce trucks and tractors on the two-lane, undivided road, they got a closer view of the valley, only to find each town on the 275-mile stretch between Bakersfield and Sacramento—McFarland, Delano, Tulare, Madera, Chowchilla—barely distinguishable from the next. The monotony was achieved honestly: meant to be collection depots for wheat, the valley’s first bonanza crop, most of these towns had been designed in the 1870s according to a standard pattern. Almost a hundred years later they were still company farm towns, with Anglos living on the east side of the tracks and Mexicans, Filipinos, and a few blacks crowded into the older, more rundown houses on the west. Their flat, often treeless main streets featured a Fosters Freeze, a few diners, gas stations, a Giant Orange drive-in, tractor retailers and always a branch of the Bank of America, which held much of the town’s money and where many of the most important decisions were made.
The poverty of the towns stood in contrast to the wealth generated by the Central Valley’s unique combination of a long growing season, alluvial soil, extensive irrigation, and farm worker labor. The lower part of the valley alone, the 112-mile stretch between Fresno and Bakersfield, was the most productive agricultural area in the world. Its grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products were worth more than $1 billion in 1970, about a quarter of California agribusiness’s total gross receipts.7 But the money did not spread around. It remained under the control of large growers and their bankers, who owned vast amounts of land along with the necessary processing and shipping facilities, and who were loyal to their dynastic families and not to the towns nor to the people who worked the valley’s soil.
This area has little to do with the California that looms large in the national imagination. The whole region, from Mt. Shasta in the north to the Tehachapis in the south, is home to less than 15 percent of California’s population. Delano, which the UFW put on the map in 1965, had fewer than 15,000 residents then, and has about 50,000 now. Although it produced most of the crops that made agriculture California’s number one industry, the Central Valley was relatively unknown even to most Californians, until the UFW came along to point an accusing finger at it.
Its name hides its history. As recently as a hundred years ago, what is now called the Central Valley was made up of four different regions. In the north were thick riverside forests. In the Sacramento Delta, marshes, swamps, and sloughs meandered west, rose and fell with the seasons and flowed into the sea. In the wider midsection the San Joaquin River made its way to the sea from the Sierras through a much smaller riparian forest and a broad expanse of grassy plain. In the south, three seasonal lakes in the Tulare Basin produced tropical springs and genuine autumns, unlike the incessant ten-month summer the current residents endure.
The diverse flora once supported an impressive array of fauna: perch, beavers, turtles, and otters inhabited the region’s lakes, and salmon, trout, and sturgeon swam in its rivers. Badgers,