Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  Of course, as soon as Hispanics began to recede, like bison and Indians, they grew in stature and romance —the Western historical glow of the rear-view mirror. The old rancho and mission life was elevated to a mythic idyll. Red-tiled roofs and adobe walls rose in new Anglo neighborhoods. And those much-feared Mexicans, the political bandidos, were cast as the last of a daring breed. Just before he was hanged, Tiburcio Vasquez was interviewed by sympathetic reporters, posed for a formal portrait, and was the recipient of fresh-baked pastries brought to his jail cell by the Anglo ladies of Los Angeles. He was the last caballero, it was said, a brown-skinned Robin Hood, fitted for a place in history that would make the new residents of California feel comfortable enough with the recent past. By 1893, the year that Frederick Jackson Turner made his bell-ringing statement that the frontier was now closed, one of the many pamphleteer-journalists of the former northern provinces of Mexico celebrated the old border country as “the new Eden for the Saxon homesteaders.”

  But in fact, the Anglos living the good life in the valleys with lyrical Spanish names soon discovered what the Hispanic padrones long ago knew: an empire in the sun was best built on the back of cheap labor. So, the border opened. And between 1890 and 1920, 10 percent of Mexico’s population—1.5 million people—emptied out of the home country and came north. It set a pattern, still unbroken, of Mexico providing cheap labor for a neighbor it could never match in economic might. The Mexicans picked cotton in Arizona, tended cattle in New Mexico, and were everywhere in the fields of California, fast becoming the world’s dominant industrial agriculture region. Early on, stories emerged of harsh treatment, disease-breeding campgrounds, horrid conditions, and meager wages. The only difference between the new outrages and those of a century earlier was that now Latinos were the victims. It had been the Spanish, after all, who had introduced the pattern of hiring poor farm labor—usually Indians— paying them a pittance, and keeping them in line with beatings and threats. They used Yokut Indians in the Central Valley, Modocs in the north, Chu-mash along the coast. Natives who dared to rebel were hunted down—as in 1829, when a posse led by the beloved Vallejo went after a group of Indian rebels. Vallejo, incidentally, was no friend of the Chinese, calling them “clouds of Asiatics” and “a threat to the moral and material development” of all who lived in California.

  In the twentieth century, Mexicans were welcomed in the West as long as prosperity reigned. The farm depression, which hit America before the rest of the country came tumbling down following the crash of 1929, put an end to the first great immigration wave. Then whites from the broken lands of the Great Plains, where rain failed to follow the plow, poured into the Central Valley of California and the fruit orchards of the Pacific Northwest. In less than a decade, from 1929 to 1937, a half million Mexicans were sent home. And along the border, guards with machine guns patrolled the line drawn by treaty. Latinos who stayed, who had gained citizenship, or were the descendants of people who had lived in America for decades, faced a new set of rules. In the 1920s, Los Angeles segregated Hispanics from whites in the schools. And the city police department espoused a view that Mexicans were inherently criminal, that they had a racial disposition to break the law. Throughout the West, a peculiar form of vagrancy statute appeared: “greaser” laws. Anyone who looked Mexican, and had no visible means of support, could be thrown in jail. Thousands were. And for a time again, the new Edens from Colorado to Castroville, from Sunnyside to Salt Lake, were free to pursue a certain destiny.

  When World War II brought a labor shortage, the border guards suddenly disappeared and greaser laws went unenforced. Any Mexican in good health was welcomed. But no sooner had the war ended, when another sweep of the land came about, designed to remove virtually every noncitizen Mexican from the West. It was called—formally, and not just in private— Operation Wetback, launched in 1954 by Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell. By the time it was over, more than a million Mexicans had been deported. Los Angeles, which had seen It’s Latino population rise to 20 percent by 1930, was an Anglo enclave again by 1960, with less than 2 percent of the population Mexican-born. “The so-called wetback problem,” proclaimed Joseph Swing, the Immigration and Naturalization commissioner, “no longer exists. The border has been secured.”

  A WEEK before Labor Day, almost half a century after Operation Wetback was conceived, the town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, was hit by a crisis. It was the height of the summer tourist season, with throngs of people eating ribs under the antler arches of the main city park, strolling in the meadows of the Grand Tetons, fishing the Snake, and at night, eating spicy food and sleeping between fresh sheets. But in a few hours, the city merchants were seized by panic. Overnight, the work force disappeared. There was no one to wash dishes. No one to make beds. No one to clear tables. No one to take out the garbage. No one to work the graveyard shift at the 7–11. No one to clean the wooden boardwalks in the morning. A team of federal agents and local police had made a sweep of town, arresting 151 Mexicans who were without proper documentation. They were promptly put on a bus for deportation. Hotel and restaurant owners were livid.

  “I’m upset. I’m pissed off,” said the manager of the Westerner Family Kitchen. The restaurant had to shut down for a while. They tried to hire enough Anglos to reopen, but it was not the same. “I’ve hired a total of six Anglos and only two of them actually showed up for work. That’s why we hire Mexicans. Excuse the term, but most Americans are lazy.”

  Another merchant called the Jackson police, asking if the officers who participated in the biggest immigration bust in Wyoming history were going to come down to her motel and make beds. She had lost her maid service and her guests were furious, and a little grungy as well. Calm down, she was told. You know how this goes. It’ll all blow over. And sure enough, within a few months the Mexican work force returned for the ski season, as they had throughout other mountain towns in the West. They lived more than a hundred miles away, across the Tetons in Idaho, in rusted, leaky trailers, and showed up every morning, no matter how icy the roads over the pass, to keep the wheels of winter vacations going. Merchants in Aspen thanked God that immigration authorities did not target them; the most famous ski resort in the West would likely shut down without It’s Latino work force, the twelve thousand people who live down the Roaring Fork Valley from Aspen, out of sight.

  Operation Wetback was supposed to cleanse the West of Mexicans. But the Latino West grew back, reclaiming the boundaries of the nineteenth century. In the old northern provinces of Mexico—including half of Wyoming and half of Colorado—almost three-fourths of the landmass now has a Latino population of between 9 percent and 40 percent of the population. In all eleven Western states, more than half the land has similar demographics. In California, Latinos will be 40 percent of the population within fifty years, which means there will be more election-day historical pivots like the one that happened in Orange County in 1996, when Bob Dornan, the copper-haired former radio talk show host, a congressman whose nickname is “B-i Bob,” was bounced by a Latin a accountant. There are now more people of Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles than in any other city in the world outside of Mexico City. And the city’s most-watched local newscast is in Spanish, with English subtitles. In the entire United States, by 2009, Hispanics will be the largest single minority. By 2050, when the United States is a nation of four hundred million, one in four Americans will be Hispanic. Much of the West, ahead of the rest of the country, is living the future now. Entire valleys, counties, cities have, almost overnight, become majority Latino.

  FOURTH OF JULY. In Sunnyside, the bank temperature sign reads ninety-six degrees. In two languages, it welcomes clients. You know you are in the Pacific Northwest because the roadside fruit stand just off the highway has big block letters spelling out four words: Apples. Peaches. Cherries. Espresso. The one-stoplight town is scrubbed for the summer season, park grass trimmed. A new Safeway has opened, and across the street, Tienda del Pueblo has been doing a brisk
business offering sugary pastries from Mexico and cactus ears from Arizona. They have sold out their supply of Lady of Guadalupe candles. The Chinese restaurant is sporting a new sign in Spanish—Comida China. Down Main Street, there’s a big mural of the heroic West, cowboys moving cattle against the leathered hills of the central Washington desert. In front of the mural, a crowd or campesinos eat tacos sold by a vendor on wheels. Sid Egley’s clothing store, “Work and Western,” has gone from traditional cowboy wear to more Mexican styles, and is doing It’s best business in a decade. I drop into El Conquistador for lunch, on a side street bedecked with American flags. A passel of rodeo cowboys, sunburned and blond, their spurs still on their boots, are gathered in one corner, sucking down beers and laughing. Hispanic families, dressed as if for a wedding, are seated at long tables. They had been to see the Virgin, a young man explained, and after lunch, they would celebrate the Fourth of July at the rodeo. In the borderlands, around Deming, New Mexico, and El Paso and Nogales, I had seen signs on businesses which read, “American owned.” Here, there are no such statements of defiant nationality.

  Once sluggish and midwestern, Sunnyside is changing by the day. The accelerated pace has produced a tension that is out of place in a town this small. But it has also given the sleepy valley a sense of drama. The drip, drip, drip of history is on hyperdrive here, all sparks and noise. With the first real heat wave of summer, and everybody gathering for the four day party on the rodeo grounds, the police fear trouble — a rumble or two, some gunfire.

  Sunnyside is where much of the West is headed. The Yakama Indians have lived in the valley for centuries; two-thousand-year-old petroglyphs are scratched into the rocks just above the valley. Now, the largest tribe in Washington State lives on a 1.4-million-acre reservation, sharing stores and parks with the new arrivals from Mexico. With dry heat in the summer, and annual rainfall of just eight inches, the desert interior of Washington was a paradise for sage grouse, but no place for Anglo farmers looking for another green home like the Willamette Valley. Ben Snipes built a little slouching cabin in 1881, a sometime home while he ran his cattle over the hills. Then came irrigation, the canals that tapped into the river, and the valley grew gold on trees, becoming the world’s biggest apple producer. In the 1930s, Dust Bowl refugees harvested much of the fruit. By the 1960s, it was mostly Mexican labor.

  Ii ten years time, from 1980 to 1990, the Hispanic population in Sunnyside went from 37 percent to 57 percent. Now it is close to 65 percent. Three-fourths of the students in the public schools are Hispanic. Throughout the entire valley, home to 200,000, the trend is the same, though Latinos are not yet a majority. They came mostly from south of Mexico City, in the poor state of Michoacan. But the echo from the 1847 debate is bouncing off the irrigated hills here: they don’t really belong this far north, some politicians who speak for the desert interior of the Northwest proclaim. Here is CongressMAN Helen Chenoweth again. “The warmer climate community just hasn’t found the colder climate that attractive,” she says. “It’s an area of America that has simply never attracted the Afro-American or the Hispanic.”

  Ricardo Garcia came to the Yak Valley—where temperatures sometimes plunge well below zero in the winter—in 1962, by way of Texas, and the army. “I’m an American citizen, but I have not forgotten my past,” he says, taking a break between radio shows at KDNA. “I was pleasantly surprised to find thousands of familes from the Tex-Mex country like myself. The attitude then was, folks welcomed the Mexican migrants. The growers would throw a big party after the harvest, and then most people would go home, back to Mexico. Now, they stay. And because of that, there is just so much tension.”

  Garcia helped set up the first Spanish-language radio station, in a crumbling, two-story building in Granger. They would broadcast a few hours a day, mostly giving survival information to farmworkers and trying to dispense hope to the people who had followed a harvest trail to this far northern valley, eighteen hundred miles from the Mexican border. Inside the building is a mural that shows three figures: a conquistador, a Mexican Indian, and a Chicano. Next to the mural, prominently displayed but yellowed with age, is the American Declaration of Independence. Now there are three Spanish-language stations in the valley, three newspapers, and a television station.

  “There came a time when so many people just wanted to live somewhere, to settle down,” says Garcia. “The talk was: we have to stop traveling and find a home. And then came the amnesty in 1986. Following that, people were allowed to bring their families in. So people stayed. But what they say around here is that Hispanics are going to take over our structures, our streets, our schools, our country. But it hasn’t happened. Look… here is what happens. We acquire a love of country—America. I don’t care what anyone says, but English is our language. We have our ties to Mexico; we are not ashamed. It used to be, you went to school here with a burrito and came home crying. Now… what is it? Salsa is the number one condiment in America? Salsa is bigger than ketchup! And we realize the American Dream works. There are three hundred Hispanic businesses in this valley. But still, there is so much tension now compared to twenty, thirty years ago. There are gangs. Teenage pregnancy. Families that have trouble because both parents work.”

  But there also is this miracle in their midst, the Virgin on the road sign at the Yakima Valley Highway intersection, and that has made the troubles seem less of a burden to many people, Garcia says.

  I WENT out to see the road sign from heaven in late afternoon. Along the way, I had arranged to meet a longtime resident of the valley, an Anglo, trying to live on seven dollars an hour, working in the new Wal-Mart. He ran a department, and every year Wal-Mart promised him a raise of thirty-five cents an hour. We met in a park near a city pool that was full of Latino children.

  “We hate them,” he blurted out, very suddenly, and then said I could not use his name. “Everyone here hates the Mexicans, I’m sure. They have no respect for the people who’ve always lived here. They’re dirty. They steal things at the store. All the time. I mean you really have to watch them. And they’re dangerous. Just the other day, in Pasco, there was a murder, some Mexicans killed a guy for no reason. There was never any crime around here. Now this valley is going down the tubes. I don’t recognize it.”

  I tried to argue with him. Little Sunnyside was going through the brutish initial stage of the immigrant cycle; the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, every nationality had gone through the same thing, from delinquent to doctor. In a generation’s time, they would be living in tri-level homes and whining about new arrivals from foreign lands. Besides, the West would fall apart without It’s Latino work force. Look what happened in Jackson Hole. How many apples would get picked if the blue-eyed boys of Sunnyside were all the muscle available in the valley? Just today, I had read in El Mundo, one of the valley’s Spanish weeklies, that farmworkers had won a 20 percent raise—to six dollars an hour.

  “Almost what I make,” said the Wal-Mart manager, frowning. “You watch,” he added. “Watch what happens at the rodeo. These people are different.”

  AT THE road sign shrine, I found two women praying in Spanish, and some plastic flowers at the base of the aluminum-and-wood structure. They were Mixteca Indians, from Oaxaca, and spoke only a few words of English. It was waffle-iron hot on the pavement. I went to get an iced coffee at the drive-through espresso booth, a block or so away.

  “Business must be terrific since the… miracle,” I said to the woman inside the caffeine hut, a young Anglo.

  “Nope. Just the opposite. It’s gone down some.”

  “But you’ve had huge crowds here.”

  “They aren’t the kind of people who pay two-fifty for a latte.”

  At the road sign, I sucked on my iced coffee and tried to see Our Lady of Guadalupe. There was a bit of color, a kind of rainbow, which the engineers said came from an antioxidant coating. I stared for a long time, waiting for a face, a movement, as the two Mixteca Indians prayed. The coffee helped. But after an hou
r in the hot sun, I could not see the Virgin. I left for the rodeo.

  IN TOPPENISH, site of the sixty-fifth annual Rodeo and Pow Wow, the streets were packed for the biggest celebration of the valley. Saloons were full. Restaurants were jammed. RVs and tents circled on the grass. Heeeee-yeeeah! Kids blew off fireworks from the reservation, illegal everywhere else, but just part of the background here. Horses trod through town, trailing turds. The streets smelled of burritos, barbecued ribs, beer, smoke, and horseshit. Even more than Sunnyside, the neighboring town of Toppenish shows Its cultural confusion—equal parts Indian, Anglo, and Latino. In a slump ten years ago, the town came up with the idea of doing to itself what many a person with a head full of cheap beer has done in dives along Seattle’s waterfront: gotten a massive tattoo. In this case, the town covered itself in murals. The first one to go up was called Clearing the Land and showed a tough-looking homesteader and a horse ripping what few trees there were in the Yakima Valley out of the ground, with tipis in the background. Once the wall-painters of Toppenish got started, they couldn’t be stopped. Now, it is the Illustrated Town, with every blank wall in town, brick or plywood, covered. The walls show Indians and whites in respective iconic poses—farming, fishing, or riding horses in a cloud of dust. One depicts the 1855 treaty, in which the Yakamas gave up twelve million acres, almost one-fourth of the state of Washington, in return for their 1.3-million-acre reservation. Governor Isaac Stevens, the dwarf alcoholic who pressured the Yakamas into signing the treaty, has never looked taller. In all, there are twenty-nine murals, with stagecoaches and thundering herds of horses almost jumping off the walls. But nothing of the Latino West.