PRE-POST: on "Imperial", 1 [W.T.Vollmann 2010]

reading Imperial. somewhat devastating. It is jut THIS world- level 0 or level +x -  he shows it is posssible to exist here (for many, that's just normal). so many agencements, and building, parting, destroyng and creating. Just the strength to take it all...
(beauty, too, and wild joy)-    GC June 19- a letter

IT WAS THE GREAT LUPE VÁSQUEZ who first informed me of the existence of the baladas prohibidas. We were at the 13 Negro drinking early in the evening, which is to say that it was not yet midnight and Lupe had not yet blacked out. The jukebox exploded into another happy song, indistinguishable to my ignorance from the others, and the grim field workers at other tables nearly smiled, while the dancing couples on the metal floor grew livelier, and several men shouted along with the singer. Even Lupe, who trudged bitterly through life, cheered up when he heard this corrido, which was naturally so loud that he had to shout into my ear for me to apprehend that it dealt with the demure lady friend of a wanted drug lord who happened to be absent when two federales visited their residence, promising her that they wouldn't hurt him, so she told them to sit down and wait if so it pleased them; but while fixing refreshments she overheard their plan to liquidate her lover, so she sweetly invited them to rest just a moment longer, then strode out and blew them away!

Lupe's hatred of authority exceeded even mine, and for good reason; most days he had to deal with the lordly ways of United States immigration inspectors, of foremen who might or might not offer him a job and who if they did cared about their production quotas, not about his back; of companies who didn't pay him for the hours he had to sit in buses waiting for the frost to melt off the broccoli; and whenever he got a vacation from these entities, he got to visit the know-it-alls at the employment office in Calexico. Now and then he had also enjoyed the hospitality of Northside's police and judges. That was why a few beers at the 13 Negro soothed the pain of the 13 Negro's prices, and when a certain sort of corrido came on the jukebox, Lupe even smiled.

He always had stories about drugs. Once he said: Last year the asparagus crew found a lot of weed that somebody left. At first they were scared to get it, in case someone was watching, but they did it; they got it and said fuck it! And they took the marijuana. One guy sold his share for $400.

To Lupe this outcome represented not only a significant score (he was always hoping to strike it rich), but also, and I think more fundamentally in his mind, a victory over the official bullies who imprison people for drug possession.

And so that happy ballad about one loving lady's murder of two federales was ambrosia to Lupe. I asked him how many of those songs there were, and he said: Many. They're called the baladas prohibidas. Some also call them thenarcocorridos. Of course, the more they try to stamp them out, the more popular they get. Those assholes who try to control us, we just make fun of them.

IT'S BEEN THREE YEARS that we haven't played any narcocorridos, said Alfonso Rodríguez Ibarra, theprogramador at Radiorama Mexicali. Three years ago the people who owned the station and all of their affiliates decided to stop. But a year ago, the government of Baja California made it a policy not to play them.

In your opinion is that a good thing or a bad thing?

A good thing just from the marketing standpoint, he said. If we played narcocorridos, there are enough people who would be offended that we would lose the advertising.

THE POLICEMAN Carlos Pérez said that some of the most famous ballads were about Jesús Malverde, whom he called the patron saint of the narcotraffickers. He lived in Sinaloa. He was Robin Hood. He sold drugs and used the money to help the people. He was killed in a gun battle because he didn't want to give himself up. Some say he was never caught. Some say he died of old age, and others say that he is still alive. Everybody has his own story. (One Arizona lawman proposed that discovering a Malverde image in a suspect's wallet "might be sufficient grounds for indictment.") I asked him whether he knew any local narco-ballads, and he replied: Most of the bad guys are Sinaloan. Here in Mexicali, there's just middle management.

His colleague, Juan Carlos Martínez Caro, explained the genesis of the ballads thus: So the people who were dealing drugs paid singers to write songs about them. It began in the '60s. It's a way to make themselves look good.

I cannot say that I was greatly surprised to learn that Officer Caro preferred those corridos praising the police who captured and killed drug traffickers, such as "Comandante Reynoso." What a good thing just from the marketing standpoint!

Just then there came an ex-policeman of eagerly jaunty sadness, bearing roses and dinner for his policewoman wife, who accepted his offerings without enthusiasm. His name was Francisco Cedeño, and he was now Christ's age. He invited me home, where behind a wall of plywood lurked a one-room palace, anonymously male and disarrayed.

He had enlisted in the military in his early teens. A small table was strewn with photographs of his various adventures in uniform. He showed me a photo of ahectare of marijuana in Sinaloa. And here was a photo of an amapola drug flower. Here he was in the Army at 16 (it was an important stage of my life, he said wistfully), and here in police uniform at an official reception...

My wife was annoyed most of the time I was involved with the government, he said. So one day she told me I had to do everything possible to have a child or she would leave me. So I decided to find out which drug would help me perform sexually. It was crack. I lost my job due to my drug problem.

I nodded in silence.

There is no organized crime without protection in government. Here you can find yourself in trouble without wanting to. By the way, this Mafia is run by families. But a person like me, well, I grew up on a ranch; I didn't know anyone. But if I have a brother who's a drug dealer and I'm in the military, I'm not gonna catch my brother. If my brother harvests marijuana, I'm gonna protect him. But to do that I have to share money with my bosses.

First you harvest it, and he showed me another photo. The owner of this field is a politician. It's not easy when you walk with God, but then no one harms you. The next photograph depicted soldiers destroying a field. But behind this field, said Francisco Cedeño with what I was already calling the narcocorrido smile, there are five more, even bigger! We just took our orders; we were supposed to destroy one and leave five, because if you didn't follow orders you didn't live to tell about it.

I heard narcocorridos in the military. Everyone enjoyed them. There are people worthy of respect in the military and the police who don't do drugs. But everyone listens. I composed one for my wife, he said, and here I thought again of that weary, bitter, slender policewoman to whom he brought dinner and roses, and with whom he claimed to read the Bible every day.

Now he began to search everywhere for the corrido he had written in honor of his wife, but he couldn't find it, so, changing his clothes and donning a hat to formalize the performance, he sang what snatches he remembered:

In Baja California / there are very valiant women.
Don't take my word for it; / all the people say it!
This corrido is for them; / I'm always thinking of them.
There is one I carry in my chest, / or my soul it could be called.
Even for many huevos / I wouldn't want to trade her.
The way she carries herself / makes the people respect her.
She's a norteña, / this valiant woman.
Some call them patrona / because they give us food.
Some love drug dealers; / some love the law!

That was as much as he could remember.

ANGÉLICA, WHO WAS loitering on the street but had an urgent all-night appointment working at a restaurant whose name she couldn't remember, gladly sang a snatch of narcocorrido right there and asked which ones I preferred, the ones where they cut people up or what? The next morning she staggered upstairs to my hotel room, reeking of urine old and new, bearing a garbage bag of empty cans in each hand.

The ones I like the most are the prettier ones, like the traditional ones, she said. It used to be that the corridos sang about famous men who were brave or who were real womanizers. Now they are about men who sell drugs and kill federales, and make them larger than life. It's almost always the same story: I sell them, I do them, I kill them. There are also some who talk about working your way to the top. You start out helping and then you're the one who's telling the people what to do. I don't really like that. I kill, I do, I sell, I make fun of. The federales tell us what to do and we do it, but the drug dealers are always the big boss and nothing ever happens to them. In all the songs, they never kill the drug dealers.

Why do you think they are so popular?

People like to listen to them when they're drunk in a cantina.

And why do drunks like to listen to them?

For people who sell drugs, it makes them feel valiant.

That was the operating word, I thought. The ex-policeman had used it in the corrido that flattered his wife.

And what about those who don't sell drugs?

Because they play them a lot on the radio.

That begged the question, I thought. For me, the answer was this: Mexicans didn't like being told what to do.

IT'S ALMOST ALWAYS the same lyrics. It's a story that never ends. Angélica was referring to the narcocorridos, but her words applied equally well to the idiotic War on Drugs itself. To quote from Los Tigres Del Norte's "Jefe de Jefes":

I navigate under the water.
I also know how to fly in the sky.
Some say the government watches me;
others say that's a lie.
From up high I entertain myself.
I like them to be confused.

Just as Jesus spoke in parables, likewise the narco-saints—and their listeners. The more desperate they were, the more profoundly the narcocorridos sang to them.

The hotel clerk, whom I had known for years, disliked them actively; the barber who always remembered me and said God bless you felt the same. The police expressed various tolerations, exasperations, and likings from within their collective prison of stolidity. Emily, a waitress at the 13 Negro, liked tunes more than words; narcocorridos pleased her on that basis; certainly the so-called drug culture was more normal for her than for many Northsiders; in fact I knew nobody in Mexicali who lived in isolation from it. The great Lupe Vásquez stood loyally for them; the field workers at the 13 Negro shouted the words out.

I've failed to mention the Tucanes de Tijuana, a famous band who composed the first narcocorridos Angélica ever heard; I've failed to introduce you to the most famous narcotraffickers, whom even the police speak of with respect: Chapo Guzmán and the brothers Arellano Félix from Tijuana; Cárdenas the chief of chiefs, the Valencia brothers...But maybe I have showed you that certain individuals of a daringly decorative bent can paint the walls of hell with words as yellow, hot, and sulphurous as Mexicali at three in the morning.

Michael Hemmingson

REVIEW (of sorts)
excerpt from William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study
(from the FB group cited below)

Imperial, is the result of ten years of obsessive research, riding on the coattails of success after the National Book Award winning Europe Central (2005) and the 2008 Strauss Living Writer’s Award.

In 1997, Vollmann discovered the Anza-Borrego dessert in California (via Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory) and the neighboring county of Imperial that encompasses thousands of acres of desolate desert, the contaminated Salton Sea, a curious mixture of Mexican, Chinese, and Indian culture, as well as the volatile and controversial issues of the U.S./Mexican border and the “illegal migrant worker” and their conditions and human rights quagmire.

Similar to Vollmann’s career, Imperial cannot be framed into any compact genre: part journalism, part ethnography, part memoir, part cultural study, part political manifesto, part prose poem, it is a logical extension of his previous two books: Poor People (2007), where some of the migrant workers in Imperial County make an appearance, and Riding Toward Everywhere (2008), where Vollmann hops trains in, or rides on trains the pass through, Imperial County.

Vollmann searches for what may or may not exist during his decade long jaunts into a region whose name (much like another county, Inland Empire, not far north of Imperial) ironically conjures up images of majestic colonialism. For migrant workers in Latin America, Imperial represents the American Dream, a path out of poverty, a promised land of blue skies and green hills; crossing over, they find a harsh land with little work, and sometimes return home or are caught by la migra and forced back to Mexico. Vollmann also searches for the Chinese tunnels under the two border towns Calexico (U.S. side) and Mexicali. The Chinese communities on the border and the outskirts of the Salton Sea are descendants of the Chinese railroad workers of Nineteenth Century expansion. No one talks about the tunnels, many treat them as urban legends, yet Vollmann uncovers evidence that the Chinese folk on the border did indeed use tunnels to smuggle in goods, drugs, people, and engage in illegal gambling (and possibly still do).

Casting himself as a “private investigator,” Vollmann outfits a spy camera in the shape of a shirt button (paid for by Playboy magazine) and infiltrates a “sweat shop” to uncover the true conditions of those seeking the American Dream: Mexican women forced into backbreaking labor for little pay. Vollmann also searches for himself: inevitably, over a decade, the events in Vollmann’s life, and his experiences while in Imperial, change his outlook. He finds the invisible county, state, and country lines of the region “delineations and subdelineations” in the lives of the people he meets, and his own life, so that this book forms itself as it goes.

"Fields, cemetaries, newspapers and death certificates beguile and delay me; I don’t care that I’ll never finish anything. Imperial will scour them away with its dry winds and the brooms of its five-dollars-an-hour laborers […] Imperial is what I want it to be [….] The desert is real […] but there is no such place as Imperial; and I, who [doesn’t] belong there, was never anything but a word-haunted ghost" (181).

Claiming that “books are whatever we want them to be” (181), and that this book has multiple labels and layers, Vollmann imagines an Imperial in his mind, an ideal place, in contrast to the physical Imperial County. It is a place where Vollmann gets away from his domestic life in Sacramento, his image as a major American writer, his role as the danger-seeking journalist, a place where “I know that I’ll sleep happily and well” (1118).

“Imperial is the father and son who sit high and gently swinging in one car of the otherwise unoccupied ferris wheel which reigns over a sandy night carnival” (1120) he muses. Imperial is also a space where he finds and loses love—when

“until a week ago, this place had been hers and mine, our place, she said, and so it had been for years” (99) to a painful delineation: “And so what if we had made love one more time after she said it was over? […] I take back what I said at the beginning” (100).

Imperial is no longer “theirs” but his and his alone, long after “she’d been begging me to let her go, but I’d been too blind and too selfish” (100) wanting to share Imperial, the idea of Imperial, when in fact it is a solo state of being. It takes him a long time to free himself from the pain of this failed relationship; when he does, his view of Imperial, the book project, and Imperial the real estate, and his reasons for the research, change from idealism to fatalism: the land goes from “green, green fields, haystacks, and wide mountains” (49) to “the poorest county in California and its water […] robbed away by state threat and federal intimidation” (159).

Imperial does not have to be read from page one onward. Vollmann has structured the text so that each of the 208 chapters operates as a stand-alone entity, jumping back and forth through time in a stream-of-consciousness non-linear phenomenon. It is possible to begin the book in the middle at Chapter 82, “The Long Death of Albert Henry Larson” (511) and then jump backwards or forwards, going to Salton Sea’s New River, or experiences in Mexicali brothels with the midget whore, Elvira. We find Chapter 10 titled “Preface” where Vollmann is still thinking about writing the book, a meta-reflection on the birth of a text that is yet to exist:

“All these delineations and subdelineations had persuaded me that if I were going to write Imperial, the book should probably investigate what used to be called ‘the American dream,’ with some broader strips of its Mexican counterpart” (158).

Vollmann ruminates how “this book forms itself as it goes” (181) and is not confined to an outline or chronological layer. As with other Vollmann books, Imperial does not arrive to a completion that adheres to normative expectations of narrative; in the end, Vollmann finds “America itself, empire of ingenuity, progress, equality, enrichment and self-sufficiency and now a wavering half-symbol of imperiled decrepitude” (1121) and the text smoothly merges into 167 pages of back matter: chronology, source notes, bibliography, and acknowledgments (reading the long list of those who aided the writer over a decade is a narrative curiosity in itself). Just as Vollmann advocates creating an Imperial that can be anything in the mind of the beholder, he wants the reader to enter this book on any page and make it whatever the reader wishes it: history, ethnography, debauchery, journalism, fiction, or love story.

***
I must admit I have a bias toward this book, and read it as a participant rather than a distant reader, since I know Vollmann, co-edited, with McCaffery, Expelled from Eden (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004), have written a recently released critical study (McFarland, 2009) and compiled an annotated bibliography (Scarecrow Press, 2010); I also read half of this book in manuscript form since 2002, published several parts in Expelled ("The New River" and "John Steinbeck"), and was involved in some of the research, as was McCaffery ("in his autumnal years" from "The New River"), one of my ex-girlfriends, and a grad student assigned to Vollmann for credit. In that regard, I have enjoyed -- and admired -- the process of this book over the past decade, what Vollmann once called "my Moby-Dick."

It's a surprise that a commercial publisher put this one out -- Viking has been Vollmann's fiction publisher, Ecco Press his on fiction, and a 1300 + page book is no easy project to edit, advertise print, and distribute. Viking, however, owes Vollmann for snagging that NBA in 2005, showing that Viking is doing its job for the canon of American Literature. Such an award assures a writer that his next book with the house can pretty much be whatever he/she wants.

***

A note on the physicality of Imperial, and other Vollmann books: at 1300 plus pages, this is Vollmann’s heftiest volume, albeit Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), essentially one book, is divided into seven manageable volumes. When The Royal Family (2000), at 780 pages, was published, I found I could not carry it around—comfortably anyway; nor could I lie down on a couch or in bed and attempt a blissful vetting. The book required placement on a flat surface to manage. This is also the case with Imperial; this is not an object one can take to the beach, read on the train or bus, or feasibly carry around in a purse or backpack. The softcover galleys alone weight five pounds; the hardcover weighs more. Imperial becomes a challenge to digest on the material, practical level; that is, it cannot be read at times and in places where one might read an average book. Critics have applauded and condemned the girth of Vollmann’s volumes , yet have not discussed their place in the history of The Big Book. Consider the illuminated manuscripts of antiquity, placed on podiums or shelves where they remained and could only be read while standing up. The bulk, and hulk, of a book such as Imperial becomes as pertinent as the text within: the actual land of Imperial County is just as taxing to navigate and explore as the act of reading about it.

***

So what is next for William T. Vollmann? He has completed a 600-page study of Japanese Noh Theater, which will most likely only find a niche audience, even for die-hard Vollmann fans. Word was, he was wrapping under another volume of the Seven Dreams, and stories from a collection of "erotic romance stories" have been appearing in the literary journals lately. Whatever his next title is, will it compare in breadth and vision of Imperial? Many critics did not think he could top Rising Up, but he has. I contend Vollmann will win the Nobel Prize, possibly in the next 10 years. I am not alone in this forecast.


http://southeastreview.org/2010/10/book-review-imperial.html
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_2226649449 ('What would William Tanner Vollmann do?')

[http://gconse.blogspot.com/2011/06/tijuana-postborder-city-metropolis.html
http://gconse.blogspot.com/2011/06/tijuana-2-michael-hemmingsons-zona.html]