Thursday, 22 Jul 1999
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
I remember being shocked when I first started flying that the borders of the states prominently featured on every U.S. map weren't actually etched into the landscape, as so many cartographers seemed to suggest. Perhaps this should have been obvious, but it certainly threw me at the time. Yet at the southernmost edge of California is one of the few artificial boundaries, like Berlin during the cold war, that doesn't actually defy its representation on a map. What appears as a thin straight line drawn across the landscape from above is in actual fact a series of massive metal plates rising from the ground forming a continuous fence emerging from the ocean and heading east. Not so long ago it was the difference between Alta California and Baja California. Today it's known simply as "The Border."
Approach it from the north and there's no mistaking where you're heading. "Guns Illegal in Mexico," reads the sign as you head down Interstate 5 from San Diego. I wonder what you get heading in from the other side. I'm thinking something like "Welcome to California. May We Suggest a 9 Millimeter?"
I'm looking for an exit off I-5, a small road that will take me to a park out toward the coast that supposedly straddles the border. It's anything but well marked, but I manage to find it and follow a road that gradually gets rougher until it turns into sand. "Welcome to the Border State Park, Hours 10-6 Thurs - Sun," reads the sign. No sooner do I check my watch -- five minutes to 6:00 -- than at the far end of the dirt road in front of me appears a strange sight. At first glance it looks like a scene out of the Magnificent Seven, or perhaps the ghosts of the caballeros. As the horsemen approach, however, things veer toward the surreal, looking more like a cross between Mad Max and Blade Runner -- six fatigued officers, radios and guns strapped to their waists, standing upright on their off-road ATVs, kicking up a massive cloud of dust behind them. They approach and -- unable to speak through their motorcycle helmets -- wave me back toward the gate. One of the more communicative ones points at his watch and shakes his head. Heeding their advice like any good citizen would, I turn back to my car only to see three helicopters, one after the other, rise out of the brush to begin their patrols. It's nearly dusk; the long metal fence delineating north and south will soon be awash in searchlights.
To say that immigration is a hot topic in California is an understatement. We're the home of Proposition 187, the now infamous ballot measure approved by the state's voters in 1994 denying any publicly subsidized services to illegal aliens. This is part of the curious paradox between the state's seemingly "liberal" image and its long history of political conservatism, particularly in the form of folks like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. But California is quickly changing. Demographers had predicted that by 2002 we'd be the first "majority-minority" state. Now they say, after revising their estimates, that we're already there. I've also been told that the racial makeup of the people who vote isn't at all like the makeup of the population at large; the voting contingent looks more like the population of California in the 1930s, largely white. This too is changing. One of the major fallouts from Prop 187 was that enraged Latinos have shown up at the voting booths in record numbers, and their targets -- the backers of 187 -- have been Republicans. As of last November's election in California, Democrats now control the Senate, the Assembly, and the governor's seat for the first time in decades. And by large margins. The unofficial motto of the state GOP these days is "feisty ... but irrelevant."
I often find myself in discussions about immigration and I usually wait until well into the conversation to mention that I'm an immigrant myself. Being white, sounding American, this often confuses people. "I was born in England," I'll say. "Lived there until I was 10." There's a pause. "But your parents are American?" usually comes next. No, they're not -- in fact we've been English for centuries, I'll explain, it's just that I'm good with accents. The conversation often ends with, "So really you are American," after they do some math with my age. And then I give in. I was sworn in as a citizen two years ago, along with a roomful with Russians, Jamaicans, Liberians, Koreans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ukrainians, Mexicans, and Canadians. My parents, too stubborn to take the plunge themselves, nonetheless sat in the back of the room, cheering me on with miniature American flags in hand.
All by way of proving things often aren't what they seem. I've learned that I first saw this stark Southern California landscape years before I ever even came to the U.S., mistaking it for the hills of Korea on the TV sitcom MASH, a favorite on English television in the early 1970s. And now, as I head back away from The Border, I pass a tractor-trailer heading north from Mexico, packed with something else that's from somewhere else, although you'd never know it. The shipment of palm trees exits before I do, heading out to one of the new retirement communities on the coast -- a place where it's always sunny, temperatures always in the 70s -- as close as you can get to perfection, at least for now.
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