I must have been hungry as I drove the last few miles to mere feet from the Mexican border in San Luis, AZ, about 25 miles south of Yuma. San Luis lies at 163 feet elevation in the flood plain of the Colorado River as it leaves the U.S. and enters Mexico. It's blessed with sunshine, rich, fertile soil and, thanks to the Colorado River, plenty of water to grow the lettuce that's for sale in your supermarket all winter long.
The first sign of a "town on the edge," no real place to eat
I could have had all the lettuce I could eat, but I didn't see any restaurants whatsoever. And, no, a McDonalds and a Jack In The Box don't count. And I was tired so I scanned the horizon for a lit sign saying "Motel." I spied but one. There was only El Embajador. Across the street from the only supermarket.
El Embajador barely qualified. Run by people I would describe as East Indian, like so many "mom and pop" or non-chain motels are these days, it cost $39.99 for a single person and, no AAA discount on top of that.
The room? Tired. Cigarette burn marks in almost everything that could be burned. The sheets were stained. Oh, the place was clean. I mean really clean. But the room was damaged. The bath fixture was missing the glass. The countertop had a tear in the laminate. I could go on with the catalog but I won't.
There was cell service in San Luis; I saw the tower. I think the tower was there to serve the more populous San Luis, Mexico.
San Luis is hemmed in on three sides
This is a town on the edge in more than one way. San Luis is hemmed in on the west by the Colorado River, which forms a border with Mexico. On the south is the land border, a kind of surveyor's straight line, made by the Gadsden Purchase of land from Mexico in 1854.
To the north it is hemmed in by vast, vast fields of lettuce. And, of course, somebody's got to pick the lettuce. It isn't being done by machine, although there's a huge human machine involved. Marcela Gomez, San Luis Community Fund consultant, likes to call the somebodies "agricultural workers". We used to call them "lettuce pickers."
I'm not making fun of this. It's a serious business. The lettuce pickers were heads down. Leaves were flying as they trimmed off the excess lettuce with sharp knives, so it comes to you in the supermarket as a green bowling ball.
Marcela's fund is trying to scrape together $100,000 for the usual support low-paid agricultural workers need: health, education, the utility bills. The utility bills? Yep, the utility bills.
There's not enough money to go out to eat for the campesinos slaving away in the lettuce fields. I went across the street from the motel to the King Market, not for the lettuce but for some breakfast stuff. There were no cakes, no pies. No Mexican bakery stuff like pan dulce. Instead, there were 50-pound bags of pinto beans. It's the kind of store where the basics come in large bags and large cans. The signs in the front window were not in English. Not a one. The clerks hardly managed any English. It was late, my Spanish was rusty and I didn't want to offend so I didn't habla the Espanol.
There were enough Mexicans riding around town on bicycles for me to know that it was a "bicycle economy" kind of place. A place where not all the people could afford cars.
The attractions lie across the border
I didn't bring my passport so I couldn't go across the border to eat in the much larger San Luis, or San Luis Colorado, Mexico, towns. They seemed to have more life. It is often the case with border towns that the Mexican counterpart is larger. For example, Nogales, AZ, miles to the east has around 20,000 inhabitants. Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, has about 250,000. San Luis, AZ, has just under 20,000 population. The population diminishes in the summer. Marcela said that a lot of the agricultural workers go north to California because in the summer, "There isn't much work here."
Maybe I'm misinterpreting the milieu here, but Marcela was not using very strong words to describe the abject poverty I saw. Oh, there were paved streets and running water and all the accoutrements of modern America. I drove around the inner suburbs. I didn't see any what they call in Texas "colonias" of tin shacks with no wires running to them. But behind some of the fences and some of the cinderblock walls, the single-wide trailers didn't look like the newest.
San Luis, Arizona, it's a town on the edge in more ways than one.
