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America's Berlin in Southern California (1987)

Calexico is a North American town of roughly sixteen thousand situated directly on the Mexican border, a hundred and twenty miles southeast of San Diego, in the warm and sunny Imperial Valley, where agriculture will always be the most abundant business; but Calexico differs from other towns along that extended border in being essentially the suburb of a Mexican city, Mexicali, with its population of nearly a million. At least 95 percent of the Calexico population has Mexican ancestry, and most everyone has relatives south of the border. To me, a sometime resident of West Berlin, it generated hints of Berlin both before and after the Wall.

Between Mexico and the U.S. runs only a single fence, without any of the no-man's-land that stands, say, between Holland and Germany. On the Calexico side of the fence roams the U.S. Border Patrol, whose job it is to arrest illegal Mexican immigrants and, for punishment, simply deposit them back on the other side. However, the border is visibly porous. On the Calexico side is a golf course where you can see Mexicali kids playing soccer, simply because its fairways offer the best field close to their home. No doubt they step back through the "border" fence to get home for dinner and sleep.

Because laboring wages in California are considerably higher than those in Mexico, farm workers scale a fence that, even in Calexico itself, has holes that apparently aren't repaired; and once in the U.S., they have little trouble finding jobs in a state that needs cheap labor and rarely asks to see anyone's passports or papers. If the border were as securely closed as that between East Germany and West, California agribusiness, as well as its restaurants, hotels, construction companies, and residents needing household help, would need to look elsewhere for its cheap guest-workers. Once the Wall cut off East Berlin, West Berlin found its laborers in Turkey.

One reason why Mexicali is so populous is its proximity to the U.S. Its comparatively large Chinese population, for instance, has been there since the unfortunate exclusion acts kept them out of California in the late nineteenth century. The biggest industry in Mexicali is maquiladores, factories assembling American goods at piecework wages. It is cheaper for American companies to send to Mexicali the materials for videocassettes, audiocassettes, circuit boards, clothing, etc. for assembly there before bringing them back north of the border, just as it has been cheaper for West German companies to send their piecework east. Since the principal business of Calexico is import/export, it is wise, you see, to cultivate cordial relations with the folks on the other side.

As in Berlin, within a single geographical entity, within the range of radio stations that speak the same language, are two economies--one with a strong currency, the other with weak money; one with stable politics, the other with a fear of flux. The air is worse in Mexicali, first because the dust of its unpaved streets floats up in warm weather and then because much cooking is done over fires of wood, but also because, as in East Berlin, Mexican emissions standards for cars and coal heaters are considerably lower than those in the US. There are different ways of living as well. Some of Mexicali's wealthy live in Calexico; but wealth in Mexico is ostentatiously displayed, while everyone in Calexico subscribes to the American suburban value of living in medium-sized houses, on modest plots, none more offensively prominent than the others.

In Calexico, there are reportedly unoccupied houses that are owned by successful Mexicali businessmen as a kind of insurance policy in case of an economic collapse or a revolution south of the border. That revelation reminded me of a man I knew in East Berlin man who lived off rents from buildings in West Berlin--buildings he had never seen but that he had inherited from childless uncles who, when the Wall split the city, stayed on the other side. I also knew in West Berlin a family that kept in its house a pile of cash bequeathed to a spinster sister living in East Berlin. If they gave the money to her, the deutsche marks would be confiscated by the East government and translated into East marks as the rate of one to one (that is considerably less than the free market rate of four to one). Instead, the West Berliners used the sister's money to purchase "gifts" for her of clothes and other goods that could not be found in the East. In both Mexicali and East Berlin, it pays to have a foothold, whether human or material, on the other side.

To Calexicans, Mexicali offers exotica that are not available in the suburbs, from Chinese and Continental restaurants to prostitutes; but the main difference between Calexico and other American suburbs is that its city, Mexicali, is much, much cheaper, as it is located in another country. Nonetheless, to get from Calexico to a Mexicali restaurant by car took us exactly fifteen minutes.

As in Berlin, there is unequal access from one side. American travelers entering Mexicali from the U.S. need not show passports to go across or to come back. If their returning car has U.S. license plates, the armed American customs agents might ask such questions as, "What did you do in Mexicali? Where were you born?" (To the former, it is sufficient simply to answer, in accentless English, "dinner"; to the latter, "U.S.A.," perhaps adding a particular city.) Mexican travelers must obey different rules. Some have, in addition to passports, so-called "green cards" (that are actually colored blue) entitling them to employment north of the border; others have white cards granting them visits not to exceed seventy-two hours, which is to say trips to relatives or for consumer goods. As in East Berlin, the definition of privilege is not local wealth but the ability to go through the border at will; the mark of class in Mexicali is a house full of goods that are available only on the other side.

There are Calexicans as well as West Berliners who fear crossing the border. As one of the former explained, "If you get in a wreck, they'll slap you in jail and then watch out." If East Berlin police can catch a Western car in any traffic infraction, they will insist upon collecting a fine on the spot, only in Western currency, of course. What some Calexicans tell me about Mexico reminds me of what West Berliners say about the East: "The restaurants are unclean, the public lavatories filthy, the streets dangerous at night; you can get thrown in jail for anything." As there are West Berliners who have never been east, so there are border Californians who have never been south.

I came to Calexico to give a lecture at its state university, to an audience of professors and students scarcely different from those at other small colleges; but not unlike West Berliners toward the East, my American hosts felt sufficiently kindly toward their Mexican brethren to send me over there, at American expense, for another presentation and, at first, an interview over its university radio station. The recording studio itself was filled with people with little apparent function. As I spoke, the whispering around me got noisier and noisier. It turns out they were translating for one another! After the presentation I heard questions with an aggressive Marxist tinge, students no doubt impressing their teachers in ways different from here.

Returning to Calexico, I went to parties celebrating a local election. The winners were proud; the losers accepted their fate, even though the results had been close and they had legitimate complaints. Nonetheless, no one spoke of disrupting the election, or disputing democracy by force. In this respect, Calexico was, as one hostess put it, "an ordinary American town," but at those local parties nearly everyone was bilingual, able in mid-sentence to switch from English to Spanish and back, able within seconds to switch from one outlook to another.

Thanks to a nasty earthquake, Calexico was featured on national television recently, the network cameras showing us the damage to, among other things, the American Immigration offices. What it did not mention was the greater damage, including deaths, on the other side of the border. That, you see, was in another country that Calexicans care about, though Americans don't (much as West Berliners care about East Berlin in ways that West Germans can't). In more ways than I can count, this place along the edge of two radically different cultures struck me as California's Berlin.