Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  After lots of litigation and arbitration, the class plaintiffs and the defendant, San Diego, had reached a compromise agreement. It admitted that the political structure of the city was a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and had denied minorities fair representation. The settlement agreement ordered a redistricting that would allow minority candidates an equal chance to be elected.

  I had always heard that San Diego was not a good town to get caught in if you were a Mexican, but I still found it hard to believe that no Latino had ever been elected to the city council. Irma Castro assured me that it was so, but she added that one Latino had been appointed, Jess Haro, who chaired the federation’s board of directors.

  “You should talk to him,” she said, and grabbed a phone and arranged a meeting for the next morning.

  JESS HARO WAS A STRAPPING, strong-featured, opinionated man who looked every bit the former U.S. Marine. He met me for breakfast at the Hob Nob, a downtown restaurant that catered to government workers, where the waitresses knew everybody by name and the people occupying the booths spoke in whispers about the impending affairs of state.

  Haro’s parents had come to the United States from Jalisco, Mexico, in 1910. His father started as a farmworker in Texas and later moved the family to California and took a job with Columbia Steel in Pittsburg, in Contra Costa County. He and his wife had nine children, and Jess was the youngest of them.

  After graduating from high school, Jess Haro had attended Stockton Junior College and Sacramento State, studying economics and foreign languages. He’d had an attitude back then, a chip on his shoulder.

  “As a young man, I thought I was smarter than anybody else,” he said, amused by the notion and what time had done to it. “I might show up late for an appointment, and if you called me on it, I’d just tell you to go fuck yourself.”

  From college, he went on to join the marines and became a pilot, and when he returned home, a friend from the corps hired him to work for a brokerage firm in San Diego, but the job wasn’t to his liking.

  “It was so superficial,” Haro said, waving a hand in dismissal. “I was always touting clients on stuff I didn’t know a thing about. I couldn’t even read a financial statement. We were just selling intangibles. Truly, I learned nothing in two years.”

  So he left the brokerage firm and went to work as a lumber salesman for Georgia-Pacific, but he ran into trouble with his boss, believing that the man had it in for him and resented Haro’s success and the good time that he was having. One day, on the spur of the moment, he quit, although he had no idea how he would pay his rent. He began buying and selling lumber on his own, managing to stay afloat by turning around a load of mahogany, say, in twenty-four hours.

  “It can be better to do things out of ignorance sometimes,” he said. “You can be too analytical, you know?”

  Now Haro owned a big lumber and building materials company in the city. He did a lot of business in Mexico, about fifteen percent of his gross. Mexicans knew that it was wise to trade with Californians, he told me, and to keep relations cordial, but most Californians had yet to learn that lesson.

  When a vacant seat opened on the city council 1975, one of his buddies from the marine corps urged him to try to get himself appointed. This friend and others like him did not approve of the choice that Pete Wilson, who was the mayor then, had put forth. Haro rose to the challenge. He still had the presence of a person who was born to such things, stubborn and a little hotheaded and not easily dissuaded from reaching a goal.

  He won the appointment handily and served for almost four years. The coalition that picked him looked at his credentials as a businessman and assumed quite wrongly that they were acquiring another conservative member.

  “It’s funny how life works out,” he reflected, sipping his coffee, “how you get from here to there. If I think back, I can see that I always had a social conscience. My dad was a union man and a Democrat before me. With my background, what else could I be?”

  Haro had always felt that politics in San Diego were discriminatory, and his time in office confirmed it for him. He saw the greased wheels turning. The local papers, for example, never had a bad word to say about Pete Wilson. As for minorities, they were always outside the process of ascension. They had no sense of continuity in government and so had no connections and no patronage.

  In Haro’s opinion, successful Latinos were partly to blame. They made their money and moved away to the suburbs instead of pumping something back into the community.

  “What’s the future going to be like?” I asked him. “What effect will the settlement agreement have?”

  Real political power for Hispanics was at least a decade away, he thought. They needed to produce candidates who were not simply identified with ethnic issues, candidates who could addresss a much broader constituency.

  “The whole thing is about hope,” Haro said, with intensity. “If you give me some hope, I’ll bust my ass for you. I’m not impatient because we’re not in the top positions. I’m impatient because we’re not in the bottom positions. The pyramid is not being built.” He paused for a minute. “With all the immigrant-bashing that’s going on, every Hispanic politician has to stand up. The debate is just not rational.”

  When the waitress brought our check, I mentioned to Haro that I would soon be in Mexico, my journey ended at last, and his entire demeanor changed. His jaw no longer seemed so set, and the discipline and the intensity dropped away. He looked as though he were ready to jump in the car and go with me. He had some happy memories, all right.

  He took my pen and wrote in my notebook “Hotel El Rosa,” where the swimming pool was spectacular. He wrote “Rey Sol,” where the French food was exquisite. He wrote “Puerto Nuevo,” a little town known for serving lobster. You wrapped the lobster in a tortilla with some beans, some rice, and some salsa.

  “You wait until you get in that swimming pool,” Haro said, with a big grin, all thoughts of politics fled. “You’ll never want to get out.”

  UP THE COAST in San Diego County, in Carlsbad, some Mixtec Indians from Oaxaca were camped in a dry streambed, below the strawberry fields where they worked. Roberto Martinez took me there to meet them. He was the regional director of American Friends Service Committee in San Diego and kept a record of the abuses that were heaped on migrant laborers.

  Martinez was a chunky man who complained about being desk-bound. He preferred to be out in the open air. He drove north on Interstate 5 along the curve of the ocean. On every leveled ridge, in all directions, a monotony of newer subdivisions, Quail Ridge and Huntington Gate and Senterra Elite, looked out toward the Gulf of Santa Catalina.

  It was another perfect day, sunshiney, with a temperature of seventy-two degrees.

  Not much agricultural land was left around Carlsbad. There were a few farms for nursery stock, some truck farms for vegetables, and the strawberry fields, but the town was really a suburb now.

  We walked down to the Mixtecs’ camp through oaks, bay laurels, and eucalyptus. About sixty men were living in shacks cottered together from scrap lumber, newspapers, and chicken wire. They had no heat, no electricity, no running water, and no toilets. Their peak season had passed, so they weren’t working steadily anymore. When they did work, they were paid $3.65 an hour.

  The camp wasn’t a bad one, Martinez said. He knew of others where the men lived in spider holes, digging a pit and covering the top with leaves and branches to stay warm in winter.

  He had some old blankets and sweaters to distribute, and the Mixtecs gathered round. Nine out of ten were wearing baseball caps that said such things as “SWAT” and “Old Fart” and “California Highway Patrol.” They were all from the same pueblo in Oaxaca and were saving their earnings to send back home, hiding it in their shoes or in their underwear.

  I knelt to look inside some shacks and saw lumpy mattresses on bare earth. One Mixtec had used a U.S. government publication for immigrants as insulation, stuffing it between some wire and some cardboa
rd. The first paragraph began, “The United States has fifty states. Rhode Island is the smallest state.”

  I asked the Mixtec, “Is Rhode Island our smallest state?”

  “Okay,” he said, with a smile.

  Seldom did the Mixtecs leave their camp. Although most of them were documented, they were still afraid of the world outside. The strawberry grower had hired a private security firm to protect them from robbers and teenage gangsters, but the guards were surly and might as well have been holding them prisoner.

  The Border Patrol hardly ever raided such camps, Martinez said, and neither did any of the San Diego County agencies that you’d expect to be concerned. He didn’t know why that should be.

  With little fieldwork to do, the Mixtecs were relaxing. They played a penny-ante card game and did their laundry in buckets of water that they hauled from the tract house of Dona Elvira, who lived nearby. There were houses all around them, fifty yards away. They had a rusty basketball hoop nailed to a tree, but their ball was punctured and deflated and kept them out of action.

  Toward noon, a few Mixtecs ventured from the streambed to a Carlsbad 7-Eleven, where they would wait for somebody from Senterra Elite or Huntington Gate to drive by and hire them to pull weeds or pound nails. The others bought overpriced groceries from a quilt truck that was parked on a street above the camp. They called the truck a fayuca, or a roach wagon, and worried that they were eating too much junk food and not enough fresh fruit and vegetables.

  Dona Elvira had a mini-store in her house that the Mixtecs also patronized, Martinez told me. She made a profit on them, but she wasn’t an insensitive person. At night, she let the men sit outdoors on the patio and watch their favorite programs on a black-and-white TV.

  WHEN SAN DIEGANS wanted to be elsewhere, away from the unchanging ocean and the sun-washed light, they drove into the oak-and-pine foothill country of Cleveland National Forest. They could camp, fish, hike, or just park their RVs and blow off rounds of ammunition to their hearts’ content, firing into canyons and at tree trunks and small mammals foolish enough to present themselves as targets.

  Julian, a little mountain town, was one of the only foothill settlements of any size. The drive to it along Old Julian Highway took me through Ballena Valley and into the parched hills, where the green of apple orchards stood out against the straw-colored grasses.

  In Julian, you could kick over the traces of a late-blooming Gold Rush that had started with a strike at George Washington Mine in February of 1870 and had raged briefly through San Diego County. The mines were all played out in ten years’ time, so the miners packed up and crossed over to Tombstone, Arizona, for the next boom. The homesteaders had moved in and planted apple and pear orchards, run some cattle, and built apiaries to house bees for honey.

  Julian did not look very different from the northern foothill towns. It had a rustic, western feel and a museum dedicated to mining history. It was not as isolated as Willow Creek, say, and not as rough. It did not have the puzzled disappointment of those logging towns that were waking up from the nineteenth century with a terrific hangover.

  Still, Julian wasn’t an entirely peaceful place. Some foothill people were angry about the daytrippers from San Diego who came up to play. Foothill people could be as squirrely as Mojave Desert people in their need for privacy or secrecy. They staked out mining claims and plunked about for flakes and nuggets, finding just enough gold to give rise to paranoiac fantasies about flatlanders out to raid their Eldorado.

  Some foothill codgers idling about downtown told me of a recent incident involving two of their own, Chris Zerbe and Joe Lopes, an affable old boxer who was well liked. The men had gone off one afternoon to chase some flatlanders from a mining claim that Zerbe had been hired to protect.

  Zerbe was a decent sort, the codgers said, a hippie and a loner who walked around barefoot with a bandanna wrapped around his head. He liked nature and rabbits and would only cut timber from a tree that had fallen and not from anything live.

  The flatlanders were suburbanites from El Cajon. They, too, had filed a claim with the BLM and were enjoying a family picnic. By law, they had every right to be on the land, regardless of any existing claim, as long as they were not interfering with an ongoing mining operation. The codgers understood that, but they disapproved. It was not the way in the foothills.

  Everybody was armed. The suburbanites blew away Zerbe and Lopes and killed them dead. The killings didn’t sit well with the foothill people. The codgers felt that Zerbe was a good marksman with a rifle and could not have been shot unless he was ambushed.

  “They come up here with their guns like nobody’s business,” one angry codger said. “On the weekends, it’s Rambo time. How’d you like those idiots to be shooting at things in your backyard?”

  All that afternoon as I drove the backroads around Julian, I could hear the occasional report of arms being fired. The air smelled of apples, and of the chemical fumes from the illegal methamphetamine labs that the county police were busting at the rate of four a month, down from a dozen a month last year.

  THE PERFECT WEATHER WAS ALSO RESPONSIBLE for drawing the U.S. Navy to San Diego in 1907. The navy had valued the available land along the bay, as well, and the proximity of the city to the Panama Canal. Military operations would spread and grow after World War I until they evolved into the largest naval complex in the Western world, with a submarine base, a couple of air stations, a training center, and a base at the foot of Thirty-second Street.

  Point Loma was the navy’s focal point. There you saw the sailors promenading in their dress whites and the retired sailors who owned the 1950s ranch houses on the hills above the ocean. You heard the navy buffs talking in coffee shops about their latest sitings and how they had seen such destroyers as the U.S.S. Lynde McCormick or the U.S.S. John Young, or had seen a hospital ship or a dock-landing ship or an attack submarine.

  The buffs had an amazing grasp of military terminology and seemed to depend on it to keep them steady.

  Cabrillo National Monument was on Point Loma, a commemorative to the first European explorer of California. On the brilliantly perfect morning that I visited, there were some backsliding youths in Conservation Corps uniforms pulling weeds from the lawn, and some Japanese tourists, all men, marching in soldierly single file to their bus. Ships were maneuvering on the bay, cargo ships bound for port and navy ships on training missions. Military planes and helicopters were soaring through the sky, Goshawks and Greyhounds and Fighting Falcons.

  I looked out at the deep-blue water and at the flapping sails of boats and recognized again the primal beauty of the state. I tried to imagine the land as Cabrillo had seen it, a calm, low-lying harbor both vulnerable and inviting.

  You never should have pressed on, Juan Cabrillo, I thought. The real treasure, the true gold, was here, right here, along the privileged and sheltered shore where Diegueño Indians had lived, surviving on buckwheat, sage, and yucca, on rabbits and squirrels and the ocean’s bounty.

  SAN DIEGO WAS THE GRAVEYARD of the shipbuilding industry in California, regardless of the U.S. Navy. The once-prosperous shipyards could not compete with Japan, South Korea, and West Germany, where builders received direct and indirect government subsidies, or with Poland and China, where the industry was government-controlled. All they could do to stay afloat was repair work, patching the holes in such ships as the Exxon Valdez.

  The Valdez was in dry dock at National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NAASCO). A flotilla of tugs had hauled it there from San Clemente Island about sixty miles away, where the ship had been drifting for four months. The Valdez was responsible for the worst oil spill in U.S. history, dumping 11 million gallons of crude along a previously unspoiled strip of the Alaskan coast.

  While being dragged to National Steel, the Valdez supposedly had left an eighteen-mile-long oil slick on the California waters. It was not a ship to be trusted, not ever.

  Fred Hallett, a NAASCO vice-president, took me around the yard. He
was a tall, friendly, polite man in a hurry. His company was solvent but struggling. Its employees had bought it not long ago to save their jobs and had instituted a profit-sharing system. Hallett did not hold much hope of ever challenging the subsidized operations abroad. Their stools had four legs, he said, while NAASCO’s had only three.

  The NAASCO yard was a welter of steel, rust, and heavy machinery. It was as though I’d wandered by accident onto a forgotten set from an old war movie, the kind where a handsome skipper in a peerless uniform shields his slightly misty eyes with a hand to watch the jets taking off.

  The contract to repair the Valdez was a godsend to NAASCO. It would bring in more than $25 million and would create about three hundred new jobs. NAASCO had built the Valdez and its sister ship, the Exxon Long Beach, between 1986 and 1987 at a cost of $250 million. They were the last ships to be built at the yard.

  Hallett showed me the Valdez. I was not prepared for its majesty. It was like an expansion bridge or Hoover Dam, something monumental that human beings had dreamed up and then managed to build. The tanker was 166 feet wide and almost a thousand feet long. It had a deadweight of 211,000 tons. Most of its cargo tanks were badly banged up. The workers on it seemed as puny as the Lilliputians on Gulliver. Their repairs would go on for about nine months.

  NAASCO was actively hiring, Hallett said. The company paid $5.50 an hour for an entry-level position. That went up to $6.00 after training. A journeyman earned $11.00 an hour, but that was probably not enough to live on in the inflated real estate climate of San Diego.

  A few days after my tour of NAASCO, a statement from Exxon Shipping Company appeared in the paper. Its president, Frank Iarossi, said that the company was thinking about changing the Valdez’s name after it was rebuilt.

  IF SAN DIEGO WAS THE LAST PARADISE, why was I so eager to leave it? It had killed my desire to explore. I felt that even if I went looking for intrigue, I wouldn’t find it. Intrigue did not exist in San Diego.