Читать книгу Trampling Out the Vintage - Frank Bardacke - Страница 16
ОглавлениеApril ’62 to March ’65
Once in Delano, the first thing I did was draw a map by hand of all the towns between Arvin and Stockton, eighty-six of them, including farming camps. I decided to hit them all. I wanted to see the San Joaquin Valley as I’d never seen it before, all put together. Of course, I knew the area, but I never had seen it with the idea of organizing it.
—Cesar Chavez, 1975
If, as John Soria believed, Cesar Chavez was a little crazy to think that he could organize Ventura County, then trying to organize the entire Central Valley would have to be judged absolute madness. In Ventura a few families seemed to own everything in sight—but everything was in sight; the place was small, it had edges. But 250 miles separate Arvin from Stockton, in a valley sixty miles wide at its midsection—an area so vast that John Muir did not call it a valley at all but named it the Great Central Plain. Hundreds of thousands of people worked the fields of the Central Valley, but just how many hundreds of thousands nobody knew for sure.1 And although power there was shared among many more farm corporations and farm families than in Ventura, those corporations and families, taken together, had nearly complete control over the provincial politics of the small agricultural towns. Oil was agriculture’s only economic rival in the Great Central Plain, and it was a measure of the awesome power of Chavez’s chosen adversary that the extensive oil fields around Bakersfield were but a minor money-maker compared with the the cotton, tomatoes, grapes, and orchards of the Central Valley.
If enough people get together they can do anything, Chavez had told Soria driving down the road in Ventura. In the Central Valley in the spring of 1962, he had another driving companion: Jim Drake, whose Renault and gasoline credit card had been made available to Chavez by Chris Hartmire of the California Migrant Ministry. Developed nationally out of liberal Protestant charity work during the Depression and later coordinated by the National Council of Churches as part of its nascent civil rights mission, the CMM had, since the mid-1950s, become increasingly frustrated with what it viewed as the limits of Christian charity. Rather than continue to alleviate the symptoms of poverty, its small paid staff in California wanted to change the social structures that made people poor. They were not sure how to do that, but decided to start by trying to organize farm workers. Drake had just been hired, at $500 a month, by the CMM to set up a community organization in the small town of Goshen, less than fifty miles up Highway 99 from Delano. Hartmire, whom Chavez had helped train a few years earlier, knew that Chavez would put the car, the driver, and the credit card to good use.
Jim Drake was one of many Christian activists educated at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. His father, also a UTS graduate, worked in a public school in the oil-field country outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he taught the children of migrant families, who followed the wells. In 1947, when Jim was ten, the family moved to Thermal, California, in the Coachella Valley, where his father taught in the local junior high school. All of the growers’ kids were in one class, and the Mexicans, Negroes, and Okies were together in the remedial class. Drake’s dad taught the remedials. Like his father, Drake did not want to be a minister—“I didn’t want to be separated from the people,” he said—and soon after he earned his degree he and his wife, Susan, moved back to California to organize farm workers.2
“I really thought Cesar was crazy,” he told Jacques Levy. “Everybody did except Helen [Chavez ’s wife]. They had so many children and so little to eat, and that old 1953 Mercury station wagon gobbled up gas and oil. Everything he wanted to do seemed impossible.”3
“Crazy” back then was a measure of the Chavez will—and his will was part of the reason so many men and women circled around him. People, poor people especially, are not going to throw in their lot with one who is easily deterred. To lead one must be steadfast, even when unyielding determination may seem somewhat ridiculous. And Chavez’s will was no less powerful, seemed no less outrageous to his compatriots, than did the will of his famous contemporary in the Caribbean, Fidel Castro. Castro’s wild boast that “the days of the dictatorship are numbered” to a dozen would-be guerrilla fighters in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra after sixty-eight of their comrades had just been gunned down was nearly matched by Chavez’s quiet plans to change the face of California agribusiness as he rode around the Central Valley with hardly enough money to buy his own dinner.
Whence this confidence and will? Gandhi was born into the prosperous merchant caste. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the son of a preacher with his own established church. Che Guevara was from the solid middle class with a medical degree in his pocket. Fidel Castro, perhaps the most willful and confident of them all, was from a wealthy, land-owning family, a light-skinned man in a world where whiteness mattered, a successful lawyer, and an excellent athlete. But Chavez? Chavez was a victim of the migrant trail, a small dark-skinned man, a failure in school who lacked the athletic prowess that could have impressed his childhood peers. He did have his faith, however, his sure belief in the righteousness of his cause, and by the age of thirty-five, when he decided to “organize the San Joaquin,” he had a long string of adult successes to sustain him. He had worked himself out of the fields. He had been the director of the most powerful Mexican American organization in the United States. He had earned enough money, $150 a week, so that Helen did not have to work outside the house. He was no longer a worker; he was a professional organizer.
And was his project really so mad? A new wind was blowing. Chavez and his cohorts could feel it at their back. The whole country was alive with possibility, led by the young African American demonstrators who were battering down the walls of segregation in the South. Chavez was not the only man thinking big. And those thinking about farm workers were particularly optimistic. Paul Taylor and Varden Fuller, at the time the two most respected scholars of agriculture in California, believed that the growers were now on the defensive, that farm worker unions were on the way.4 And Chavez had a plan. He would organize the home guard, farm workers who had been ignored by AWOC: the Mexican American families who worked the fields and made their homes in the Central Valley. And rather than organize them primarily at the point of production, around the issues they faced at work, he would organize them in their communities, around the issues they confronted off the job. Sustained by his religious convictions, using the techniques of community organizing that he had perfected over the previous ten years in the CSO, he set out to build something new, part union, part mutualista—a Central Valley Farm Workers Association.
“We always thought it would be different from a union,” said Jim Drake. “If somebody died, the family was going to be helped. If somebody needed tires, the association could help. If they were having trouble with immigration or welfare, the association would help. We would have a radio program. El Malcriado would be a community paper, not a union paper . . . ‘Union’ was not a popular word. We wanted to be much broader than that. We wanted the whole family to be part of the union.”5
The organizers of this new Farm Workers Association were quite conscious of the role the mutualistas had played in Mexican American history, particularly in the 1920s and early ’30s. Chavez had read about them in the few books he could find about farm worker history, but he and the other founders didn’t need books to know about mutualistas, as some were still around. Gilbert Padilla was even a member of one of the oldest groups, Sociedad Progresista, which had started in nineteenth-century Mexico but by the 1960s was little more than a burial society. “We had groups in Selma, Hanford, Tulare and Visalia,” Padilla recalled, “and when a member died the Progresistas would give the family one hundred dollars and send over a uniformed honor guard to stand watch at the funeral. It was the same sort of thing we were trying to do with the FWA life insurance plan.”6 The one other early FWA program, the credit union, was also a more up-to-date version of the loan policy maintained by many mutualistas in the 1920s, and the entire approach of the new association was based on the old mutualista idea of building community and power through mutual self-help.
But Chavez was nothing if not eclectic and pragmatic, and the association was not merely a new mutualista, or a new version of the CSO. This was three years after the Oxnard effort. Chavez was no longer supervised by Fred Ross or paid by Saul Alinsky. The FWA was a community organization, but it did not fit the Alinsky mold. Starting a major organizing drive without outside funding was one clear departure from the Alinsky protocal; so was Chavez’s early emphasis on avoiding conflict and publicity, and so, especially, was the role of principal organizer.
Soon after setting up house in Delano in the spring of 1962, Chavez started driving up and down the Central Valley, visiting old contacts and making new ones. He urged some of the old CSO activists to join this new effort. He surveyed workers on what wages they wanted to earn. He collected relatively high dues of $3.50 a month ($1 of which would pay for members’ life insurance premiums as soon as he could sign up three hundred people), and he helped the new members with the various problems they had with government agencies. Chavez was an organizer, in the most direct sense of that word: he was trying to put together an organization. At the first FWA convention, held in Fresno in September 1962, about six months after the organizing effort began, the group had fewer than fifty voting members. Chavez, running unopposed, received sixteen votes for the position of head of staff, or general director.7 Jesus Martinez, like a typical bombastic leader in Chavez’s menagerie of political types, gave a dynamic, charismatic speech, and was elected president. But when he failed to show up at the next two executive board meetings, the board, acknowledging that Chavez was not only the organizer but also the leader of this barely surviving outfit, abolished the position of general director and named Chavez president. Three months later a second, even smaller, National Farm Workers Association convention approved the change.8
It seemed reasonable. As Gilbert Padilla later explained, “We weren’t going to do that CSO thing again where we were the organizers, we did all the work, but we weren’t the leaders of the organization.”9 Less than a year had passed since Chavez had left the CSO, disappointed in the people who had refused to follow his direction. Often taking jobs a few steps up from the fields—as railroad workers, small shop owners, low-level government employees—the CSO leaders, Chavez felt, had turned their backs on the bulk of the people in their communities. Some had even taken jobs in the new Pat Brown administration. Now, cut off from all the resources of the CSO, he was starting a new, still fragile organization, and he was not about to turn over the leadership to some slacker just because he had given a good speech at a meeting.
Nevertheless, Chavez was defensive about merging the positions of general director and president. He always left out that detail when he recounted the history of the UFW, claiming he had been elected at the first convention. He wasn’t so worried about the lack of a formal vote; what bothered him was the problem of developing leadership in his new organization. Identifying and developing new leaders had been his most important job in the CSO. But now, so early in the FWA game, could he both lead and stand back enough to allow new leaders to emerge? For the previous ten years he had been schooled by Alinsky and Ross to believe that that would be very hard to do.
Such questions were much in the air in 1962. Similar discussions were going on within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and activist church organizations. Henry Anderson, who had worked with Norman Smith to keep AWOC going after the AFL-CIO cut its funding, wrote a long paper, “To Build a Union: Comments on the Organization of Farm Workers,” mimeographed copies of which were circulated among the various groups trying to organize in the fields at the time. Anderson, a democratic socialist, insisted that any successful farm worker union had to be democratically structured, with independent locals and in control of its own destiny. The organizers could legitimately come from outside the farm worker community, he argued, but the leadership of the new union must come from the farm workers themselves. Anderson had not read Alinsky, but nevertheless he argued in classic Alinsky style that the organizers must find and develop the leaders and then move on: “What is needed is someone to alter conditions in such a way that the natural leadership of the farm labor force is liberated. This someone must be keenly sensitive to the danger of his overstaying his visit. He must be as nearly without personal ambition as one can be and still be human.”10
Thus, Anderson, too, based his democratic theory—the hope that common people can collectively run their own lives—on the existence of a most uncommon organizer, one who was without ambition, almost a saint. Soon enough, however, Anderson, enthusiastic about Chavez’s leadership of the new farm worker movement, abandoned some of his earlier formulation. With Joan London he wrote a book in 1970, So Shall Ye Reap, celebrating the new leader’s arrival. The farm worker organization was democratic, they argued, because Chavez and other leaders had been farm workers, and because they were independent and not beholden to other union officials. Chavez was fully in control and indispensable, Anderson reported, but still looked forward to a time when he could “go to the mountains or some place where it’s quiet, and read all the classics in Spanish and English.” Not wanting to stay around (even as he did) was a good indication that Chavez sought power not for himself but for farm workers. And, besides, how could such a man be power-hungry:
He enters a public meeting so unobtrusively that one is hardly aware of his presence until he is introduced to speak. He never raises his voice in public utterances, any more than private. He brushes a persistent shock of hair from his forehead, and talks conversationally whether the gathering is large or small, broadcast, televised, or unrecorded. He makes little jokes as he goes along, but unless one is familiar with the farm workers’ universe of discourse, one may not realize they are jokes, they are invariably understated.11
Chavez was precisely the kind of leader who could build a space where other leaders could thrive, because “in the course of becoming a man himself, Cesar Chavez has been a maker of men.”12
In retrospect it is not surprising that Chavez and the FWA would wander off the established organizational charts when it came to the relationship between leaders and organizers, as the whole nature of the new association was unmapped and somewhat vague. No one thought of the FWA as an organizational stepping stone—a transitional form—on the road to becoming a regular American union. Such a union was understood as something to be avoided. Chavez shared the Alinskyite critique of postwar unionism, and he had not been happy with what he had seen of the United Packinghouse Workers Association in Oxnard or of the 1960–61 lettuce strike in the Imperial Valley. Dolores Huerta had spent a short time working in Norman Smith’s early AWOC, and had left in disgust over his organizing methods and lack of interest in Stockton’s Mexican American community. Unions, they agreed, were too bureaucratic, too focused on the workers’ experience on the job while ignoring other problems, and too caught up in a culture of strikes and confrontation. Besides, unions had a mixed legacy in the fields. They had a long history of either ignoring the struggles of farm workers or of getting involved only intermittently, of being here today and gone tomorrow. Worse, contemporary union efforts in the fields were being led by Anglos, most of whom didn’t speak Spanish and some of whom were out and out racists. Early on, the FWA leaders came to consider the revived AWOC, under the leadership of Al Green, to be a primary adversary. A conventional union was not the goal, it was, as currently constituted, a rival form of organization.
The FWA had a stamp, used on many of its leaflets: “The Farm Workers Association is not a Union.” Other leaflets began with the admonition: “Este movimiento se hace enteramente por los trabajadores y no es afiliado a ninguna unión, sindicato, or partido político: “This movement is made entirely by workers and is affiliated with no union or political party.”13 Certainly Chavez wanted the FWA eventually to sign collective bargaining agreements—in a letter to Dolores Huerta before the first FWA convention, he called such agreements his “main purpose.” Yet labor contracts did not represent the essence of what he was building. The emphasis was on self-help and mutual assistance; the FWA’s first program, the group life insurance policy, was exemplary of the kind of programs the FWA had in mind.14
Likewise, the FWA’s founders did not casually choose the term “association.” If they had wanted a new mutualista, they would have called the group a sociedad. The closest model for what they were trying to build was probably the Agricultural Workers Association of Father MacDonnell and Father McCullough, which enjoyed a brief life from the fall of 1958 to the spring of 1959. The FWA was not run by priests, but it was led by an ex-altar boy, and its goal of combining mutual self-help programs with collective bargaining agreements was a central feature of Pope Leo XIII’s concept of Catholic unionism. The religious character of the FWA was written into its official Statement of Purpose, which begins: “As Christians and workers we wish to realize the ideals of the Church in our lives and in the world in which we live.” Most of what follows are quotes from Pope John XXIII: “Economic progress must be accompanied by a corresponding social progress”; “Workers must be paid a wage which allows them to live a truly human life and to fulfill their family obligations in a worthy manner.” The Statement of Purpose emphasized that John “explicitly expressed his approval of labor unions.” The executive board even asserted for the FWA a retroactive endorsement from the departed pope: “Pope John reserved a special place in his thoughts . . . for Christian associations of workers who endure great difficulties in their endeavor to promote the material and moral interests of the working people. As members of the Farm Workers Association, we draw strength from his blessing.” The board members concluded with a one-paragraph summary of their program:
The Farm Workers Association has had experience in developing cooperative efforts among farm workers. It operates a credit union, an insurance plan, and a small consumer co-op for its members. In addition, the officers and staff have been authorized by the members to act as their representatives in negotiations with employers, although, unfortunately, employers have not responded to requests to negotiate.15
Most people joined the FWA as families. Jessie de la Cruz, daughter, wife, and mother of farm workers, who worked in the grapes and the cotton herself, was, along with her family, one of the first women members of the new association. She later became director of the Parlier field office and hiring hall, and her memory of how she was recruited to the FWA is typical.
We were living in Parlier at the time . . . There was a group of men who came to our house and one of them I later learned was Cesar Chavez. He started talking about the union, getting other members to join. I was in the kitchen making coffee to offer them, and he told my husband, “Your wife has to be here. She works out in the fields, too, so she needs to hear what we’re talking about.” So I got the coffee and then I sat down and I listened. And I liked what I heard. So after that I did join.
The experience could not have been more different from the way an AWOC organizer had treated her just a few years before. AWOC was also trying to recruit her husband, and only men were invited to the meetings, held in a bar in Fresno. One time Jessie drove to the meeting with her husband and had to wait in the car until the discussions were over.16
From the beginning, the FWA set out to organize the “home guard,” the Mexican American families whose roots went back to what is called “the first wave” of Mexican immigration to the United States, at the onset of the Mexican Revolution. These farm worker families of the Central Valley, who generally called themselves Mexicanos or Mexicans, had not been too active in the strikes of 1960–61. That upsurge had featured others: Anglo fruit tramps, both single men and families; Mexican and Filipino male workers, mostly migrant and either single or separated from home; and, on a few significant occasions, braceros, all males and all, by definition, away from home and family. The settled Mexican families who peopled the colonias and barrios of the Central Valley had held back. They had more to lose in strikes. Many of them didn’t migrate at all; some migrated short distances only during the summers, usually working for the same employer or the same group of employers year after year. If they struck and lost, they could more easily be blacklisted than their less-settled fellow workers because they were well known to their employers, foremen, and contractors. If blacklisted, they would have to uproot themselves and move to other areas, and moving around, following the crops, was precisely what this particular group of people had stopped doing. Moreover, many of these families had participated in strikes in the early 1950s, and still felt the effects of those defeats. Perhaps most important of all, in these families the mother and wife had enormous authority and influence, and as their first commitment was to the well-being of their families, these women often restrained their men. It is not that the women were less militant than the men; once they committed to a struggle, they were likely to be dogged in pursuing it. But the farm worker women tended to be more cautious, as did the men whose families were working alongside them in the fields, or whose families were close by. Chavez’s decision to focus on the families meant that he would have to take these mothers and wives seriously, and that success or failure would depend, among other things, on his ability to recruit significant numbers of women.
It is symbolically perfect that two out of four on Cesar’s original team—Helen Chavez and Dolores Huerta—were women. They were not mere feminist window dressing. True, Huerta would later become an important part of the UFW’s appeal to its middle-class feminist supporters, but in 1962 there was no women’s movement to consider. And Helen Chavez hardly ever allowed herself to be put forward to dress up anything; she preferred to take a back seat. These two women presented two contrasting modes of female participation in the FWA and were its authentic cofounders. Without them there would have been no initial attempt to organize the association, just as without the support of women farm workers the FWA might have died in its infancy.17
Leaving the CSO, like many of Chavez’s other sacrifices for the good of the cause, was harder on his wife than it was on him. Although he gave up considerable status and resources, Cesar continued to do what he had done before: organize, travel from one community to another, talk to people. More was required of Helen. When the family moved to Delano, she went back to work in the fields. She was thirty-four years old, and twelve years had passed since she had picked her last string bean in a field outside of San Jose. In the intervening years she had had eight children. Although Chavez’s CSO salary allowed her to remain at home to manage the household, her husband was often away and was not much help. And “home” kept shifting. In the CSO years, the Chavez family lived in six different cities: San Jose, Madera, Bakersfield, Hanford, Oxnard, and Los Angeles. In each new place it was left to Helen, with several young children in tow, to establish a home. With the loss of the CSO salary, and only their meager savings and Chavez’s unemployment checks to sustain them, the family needed money, so it was back to the fields for Helen, back to the life of a farm worker mom: getting up at 4 a.m. to lay out breakfast and lunch for the kids; carrying Birdy, the youngest, still asleep, over to his aunt Teresa’s; arriving in the fields by six for a full day of physical labor; going back to Teresa’s to pick up Birdy; returning home to make dinner; cleaning up the kitchen; getting everyone ready for bed.
The only way she could do it was by moving to Delano, where her two sisters and two brothers still lived. Helen, not Cesar, was the one who chose Delano.18 Chavez’s brother, Richard, lived there, and that was part of the reason for the move, but Delano had been just another stop on the road for Chavez’s parents, who had finally established a permanent residence in San Jose, while Helen’s family, the Fabelas, had made Delano their home. As young adults they had come from Mexico in the mass immigration of the 1920s, and had settled there in the early thirties, after stops in Brawley and McFarland. Helen, the second of their five children, started working in the Delano fields with her mother when she was seven years old and remembers walking to local ranches to pick cotton and grapes. When she was twelve her father died, and she and her older sister, Teresa, had to take on more responsibilities. A few years later they both quit school and became full-time field workers. When there was no work in the fields, Helen clerked in Delano stores. When she returned home in 1962 with her husband and eight children, Teresa was still in the vineyards working as a crew pusher (a low-level supervisory job that allowed her to watch Birdy while she worked), while their younger sister, Petra, labored regularly in the table grapes.
Through the years, most of Chavez’s family had gotten out of the fields, but Helen’s had not. Even though her return to the fields did not last long—a year later she was working full-time as the FWA bookkeeper for $50 a week—she always remained much more a part of Delano farm worker life and culture than her husband. Cesar’s class position had shifted throughout his life, first down, and then up. Helen’s family had never risen high enough to own land, and never fallen low enough to be true migrants. They were settled Delano farm workers, and although Helen was carried along by the changing status of her husband, she also lived in the world of her two sisters until the family moved to La Paz in 1971. Virginia Hirsch, a volunteer who arrived in 1966 to set up the association’s legal office, called Helen and her sisters and their women farm worker friends “the chewing-gum chorus . . . They would always come to the meetings and sit together on the side, chewing their gum, talking about their kids. Helen was very down to earth and pure working class. Chavez was out there, operating in wider and wider circles, on his way to becoming an important man, but Helen remained very much at home among farm workers.”19
Even into the late sixties, male UFW organizers still joked (or half joked) that the first people they had to organize were their wives. What they meant was that organizing took up so much time and energy that they couldn’t be around home much, and the wife had to be so convinced of the righteousness of the cause that she would gladly accept the absences, or at least put up with them. Such an attitude led to some strained marriages, and, quite often, to separation and divorce. Later in her marriage, Helen moved out for a while, but before then she doesn’t seem to have made much fuss. She often complained directly to Cesar about his deserting the family and “putting on airs,” according to Virginia Hirsch, but the complaints rarely escalated into serious trouble. Helen was raised to work hard and to take care of her family, and that is what she did. In the CSO years, she addressed envelopes and postcards, and sometimes wrote letters or the daily work reports, which Chavez dictated. She always helped out with the financial records, which led to the bookkeeping job. Later she took on the task of credit union manager, and then, as the union won some contracts, she became a primary administrator of some of its social service projects, and the center of the union’s financial operations. Always she had the primary, almost exclusive, responsibility of raising the eight children. She suffered without public complaint through Cesar’s absence for all but two of her children’s births, his early exit from their daughter’s wedding, the forgotten anniversaries, his not being able to find the time to take a sick child to the hospital. Reports of such incidents come not from Helen but from the kids or from Chavez himself, who had the audacity, on occasion, to cite his neglect of family obligations as examples of his sacrifice, his willingness to give up regular family life for the sake of the cause. Their marriage arrangement was no doubt more a matter of traditional patterns of Mexican family life than it was a result of Cesar’s “organizing” Helen. But whatever the marriage’s private secrets, publicly Helen was Chavez’s great enabler, an organizer’s wife made in heaven.
While Helen broke no cultural mold and offended no 1950s sensibilities, offending sensibilities was the specialty of the other female member of the original founding four, Dolores Huerta. Ms. Huerta, a true Ms. before the term came into use, turned the cultural norm of supportive wife and nurturing mother inside out, though less out of rebellion than as an extension of her upbringing by a mother who, like so many others, lived outside the supposedly standard female roles of her time. Alicia, Dolores’ mother, a second-generation New Mexican Hispanic who was twice divorced and thrice married, was often the breadwinner of her family, while her relatives, especially Dolores’s grandfather, became her children’s primary caretakers.
The fortunes of mother and children fluctuated widely. Alicia grew up comfortably as the daughter of a coal miner turned store owner in the booming coal town of Dawson, New Mexico, and graduated from high school, which was unusual for a Hispanic woman in the 1920s. Against her father’s wishes, she moved down in class and status by marrying a first-generation Mexican coal miner, Juan Fernández, who fathered her first three children (Dolores was the second). The marriage broke up in the early thirties when Alicia was in her third pregnancy, and like many others she left the slumping boom town of Dawson and took off for California. She and her three children settled in Stockton, where her father, no longer well off, soon joined them. The Depression years were tough on the family. Alicia worked as a waitress during the day and sometimes did a double shift at night in the canneries. During World War II, her class trajectory pitched upward again with her marriage to James Richards, the new owner of a skid row hotel bought at a bargain price after its original owners, Japanese Americans, had been interned. Alicia managed the hotel, had a child by Richards, and then divorced him, but kept the hotel and soon leased another. By her third marriage, to Juan Silva, she had become a successful Stockton businesswoman, living in an integrated, relatively well-off neighborhood. Dolores, thoroughly bilingual and bicultural, enjoyed some of the accoutrements of American middle-class life—dancing, piano, and violin lessons—and a spot in the Stockton High School orchestra, with the prized position of majorette.
Dolores’s high school graduation was followed by two years at Stockton Junior College, marriage to an Anglo high school classmate, two children, clerical work, separation, divorce, and return to her mother’s home. Mother and daughter remained close. They participated in various Mexican American social service projects and belonged to the women’s division of El Comité Honorifico, helping to plan community celebrations of Mexican holidays. With her mother’s support, Dolores returned to college for a teaching credential. She met her second husband, Ventura Huerta, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, while doing community work. They were married in 1955 and had five children—the last arrived just as they were getting divorced. Both continued to be active in community affairs, but the extent of Dolores’s activity disturbed her husband. He disapproved of her haphazard child-care arrangements but was unwilling to do extensive child care himself. Despite his harsh reproaches, Dolores found more things to do outside the family, and her public commitments shifted away from conventional female community work. She joined the Stockton chapter of CSO and threw herself into its two main activities: citizenship classes and voter registration drives. She then worked with the Mission Band’s Agricultural Workers Association, but she never was completely comfortable there, because Father McCullough focused his efforts on male farm workers and didn’t think that farm worker organizing was a proper role for a woman. When the AWA shut down in favor of AWOC, she joined the latter’s paid staff, but didn’t last long there, either.
As she moved from one organization to another, her knowledge of politics and joy in public life deepened. In 1959, after she left AWOC, Fred Ross, who had brought her into the Stockton CSO four years earlier, added her to the short list of paid CSO staff. In a brilliant move, he hired her to be the CSO lobbyist in Sacramento. She was a pioneer in the state capital, for there were no other Mexican American women lobbyists. By the age of thirty, Huerta had found her vocation. She mastered the intricacies of the legislative process. As she testified at hearings and committee meetings for extending old-age benefits to noncitizens, disability insurance to farm workers, and against the abuses of the Bracero Program, she sharpened her sense of social injustice while maintaining her basic middle-class optimism about the possibilities of social change. She remembered, and reconsidered, the poverty of her early youth and the systematic discrimination against Mexican Americans and African Americans at Stockton High School. She also remembered the example of her mother and the relative lack of gender discrimination in her upbringing. When asked to tell her own story later, she rarely failed to mention that her mother never made her cook for or take care of her brothers, and that from a young age she was taught to assume that women were just as capable and valuable as men. When looking back at childhood for examples of injustice, she typically told a story about high school that combined both anger at the racist and sexist assumptions of her teachers and pride in her own abilities and powers: a teacher had said that her essays were so good that he did not believe she could have written them by herself.
She had not been cheating then, and she was not cheating now as she talked before the state legislators. She was just being herself, and it was exciting and worthwhile. Her only problem was she had all those children, didn’t have a wife like Helen, and her husband was unwilling to become one. Soon, she and her husband were together only off and on. Dolores made child-care arrangements with relatives and friends, hired babysitters, and managed the best she could. Even though she had the help and example of her mother, she was still torn by the conflicting obligations of family and public life. “My biggest problem was not to feel guilty about it,” she said in 1974. “I don’t any more, but then everybody used to lay these guilt trips on me, about what a bad mother I was, neglecting my children.”20 One person who didn’t guilt-trip her was Cesar Chavez, who became national director of CSO while Huerta was working in Sacramento. Chavez respected her dedication and accepted her unusual choices. Here was a will to match his own. “When it comes to organizing all the farm workers, I’m a fanatic,” he told Jacques Levy, “and I look for other fanatics, the ones who really want to get the job done. The desire to win has got to be very strong, or else you can’t do it.” 21
Those were the words, that was the idea, that Huerta needed. Here was a way not only to make sense of her internal struggles but to resolve them. Rather than urging her to cut back on her public life, Chavez asked her to give more. When Chavez left the CSO and moved to Delano, Huerta continued to collect her CSO paycheck but spent much of her time talking to farm workers about the FWA. Combining the two activities soon proved impossible, but rather than stick with the substantial employment possibilities provided by her class background, college degrees, speaking skills, political experience, and teaching credential, she quit her job with the CSO and moved deeper into poverty, working as a unpaid volunteer for the barely surviving FWA. Living on child-support payments from the fathers of her children and unemployment insurance, she worked at organizing the Farm Workers Association in the area around Stockton and in the northern Central Valley. It was a terribly difficult time, with neither a reliable car nor regular child care, but with Chavez’s encouragement and support (they exchanged frequent letters and work reports), she continued. Finally in 1964 she left Stockton and moved to Delano, joining the small, relatively isolated FWA family. Although she earned only $5 a week there, her child-care problems would become a collective responsibility. Helen’s sister Petra virtually adopted Peanuts, Dolores’s youngest child. Laurie Head, Dolores’s eldest child, took major responsibility for her younger siblings with significant help from Virginia Hirsch, Doug Adair, and other FWA volunteers. With the association helping to raise her kids, and with Chavez’s ideas about sacrifice easing her mind, her decision to bet everything on Chavez and the FWA eventually led her to a series of monumental accomplishments, and justified every painful sacrifice. As she told a newspaper reporter in 1974, “You have to make a decision, when working with people, the people have the priority, and the family must understand.”22
Helen Chavez and Dolores Huerta were not the only women in the early FWA. Those who rounded out the chewing-gum chorus included Helen’s sister Petra, Rachael Orendain, Gloria Terronez, Esther Uranday, and Josefina Hernandez. All but Petra were married to men who were FWA organizers or activists, and the women’s style of participation was much closer to Helen’s than to Dolores’s. They managed their families, freeing up their husbands’ time; they organized and ran the community barbecues, which were a major source of funds for the FWA and an important organizing tool; they talked up the association among other farm worker women. The participation of so many mothers and wives gave the FWA moral weight, signifying that the association was not just another hit-and-run organizing attempt. Although the FWA demanded a sacrifice—there were dues to pay and meetings to attend—joining up became the right thing to do.
It helped that men of God also came to the FWA’s aid—not primarily from the Catholic Church, whose Central Valley parishes were almost completely dominated by growers and their families, but rather from the small outpost of Protestantism, the Californian Migrant Ministry, which itself was supported by, among others, the Alinsky-linked Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation. The CMM director in 1961, Chris Hartmire, was chiefly responsible for the long-lasting, intimate relationship between the ministry and Chavez, with whom Hartmire was closely associated until 1988. Five years younger than Chavez, Hartmire was a product of the affluent Philadelphia suburbs. His dad made a good living working for DuPont while his mother stayed home raising the children. Although Hartmire regularly attended Sunday school, actively participated in church youth groups, and went to Presbyterian summer camps, he never felt any particular religious calling. He got a scholarship to Princeton, where he majored in engineering, but it was while working at a summer camp for poor kids from New York City, Trenton and Newark, that he “got hooked on working with people.”23
After three years in the Navy, he enrolled in Union Theological Seminary and worked in the East Harlem Protestant Parish, which by the late 1950s had become a laboratory for Protestants who were trying to rethink their mission to the poor. Always a good student, he did well in biblical studies (“he came to know the Bible like a Baptist,” said one admirer), but his most important intellectual sustenance came from the prison diary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the upper-class Lutheran minister who in World War II Germany had attempted to help Jews escape the Holocaust and joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.24 Thrown in jail in 1944 when the plot was uncovered, Bonhoeffer based his resistance—so atypical of the mild German Protestant response to fascism—on his belief that Christians had to learn to live in reality, and respond to the evil conditions of the world. He knew that political action was fraught with moral difficulties: even helping Jews escape required killing other Germans. Contemporary Christianity did not provide much moral guidance in such decisions, so Bonhoeffer resurrected an idea he found in the sermons of the first politically inclined Lutheran, Martin himself, who spoke in defense of “bravely sinning.” To fight evil in the world, one might have to sin, and one had to be brave enough to accept that, Luther argued.
Even though the intensity of the contradiction between a strict religious morality, which sees human action only in terms of its own immediate intrinsic meaning, and the political world, which requires some calculation of ends and means, diminished greatly between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries as religious sensibility weakened, it was still alive for Bonhoeffer as he sat in Hitler’s jail. And it was still intense for the young Chris Hartmire, who as a seminary student sought to mesh his intimate devotion to the New Testament’s other-worldly ethics with his own overwhelming impulse toward action in the world. Bonhoeffer, who was executed shortly before the Allies liberated Germany, became Hartmire’s chief hero and intellectual inspiration. Over the next twenty-eight years, as Hartmire threw himself into the difficult choices involved in giving full support to a union involved in a necessarily messy struggle to establish itself in the California fields, his respect for Bonhoeffer grew, and he came to rely on the idea of “bravely sinning.”
In 1961, however, when at the age of twenty-nine he was about to start on the main journey of his life, the choices did not seem so fraught with moral danger—although they were difficult and tricky enough. After he got his feet on the ground, Hartmire could see that the Migrant Ministry’s change from “cookies for poor farm worker kids to community organizing” had led the organization into a new fix. How could people like him—well-meaning middle-class white clergymen—organize poor communities? Hartmire didn’t share Alinsky’s optimism, and even arrogance, about the role of the outside organizer. The Migrant Ministers wanted to change the nature of power in the Central Valley, but they didn’t think they were the people for the job.
We were there in the fields, and we saw all these horrible things happening. And nothing changed. Vacation Bible schools didn’t change it. Movies for braceros in English didn’t change it. Our churches and our community organizations didn’t change it, not substantially. And then Chavez came along and offered this practical way to bring about this change that we all in our hearts wanted but we didn’t know how to do. And we would have mucked it up if we had tried. It was almost like a relief, like thank God we can support this guy and his efforts and contribute to the change we all know has to come about.25
The support started slowly. In the early 1960s, the CMM had a budget of about $100,000 a year. It bought the FWA its first mimeograph machine and Cesar some meals and gas. When Migrant Ministers were assigned to be trained by Chavez, they worked as his assistants. Although Chavez pointedly never took money from the CMM for his own salary, the Migrant Ministry would sometimes pay the salary of other FWA organizers. This began in late 1964, when Chavez went directly to Hartmire and asked him to hire Gilbert Padilla. Next, Jim Drake and another CMM staffer, David Havens, began to function as FWA staff working under Chavez’s direction, an arrangement later formalized into a system of “worker priests.” At one time in the mid-sixties there were twenty-six of these worker priests, most of them with little religious background at all, working under the UFW’s direction.
Meanwhile, the CMM’s own organizers began to work “the other side of the street,” raising money and awareness in the affluent Anglo churches. The Migrant Ministry, Hartmire asserted, had two tasks, “to help low income people deal with their own problems in organizations of their own; and to provide continuous interpretation of the needs and actions of the low income people to established citizens (churchmen and others) so they may understand and respond humanely.”26
Part of what made Hartmire so happy about this formula was the particular presence of Chavez. Religious folks could trust him. He was a trained community organizer, and he was also an authentically religious person. The progressive middle-class church would have little trouble understanding and appreciating his organizing efforts. Church activists put up with Alinsky’s vulgar style because he seemed to have an organizing theory that worked, and they suspected that their own Christian ethics were not completely adequate for dealing with the political world. But Alinsky was not an appealing figure. Hartmire called him a “loudmouth bitcher and complainer.”27 How different was Chavez’s style: just as calculating and skilled as Alinsky, but also deeply spiritual. Telling the world about Cesar Chavez, explaining his efforts at organizing farm workers to “established citizens,” would be an easy, welcome task. For Hartmire, Cesar Chavez was the answer to a prayer, and he gave Chavez nearly unconditional support, rarely questioning his judgment and never meddling in internal FWA affairs. “The Church is the one group that isn’t expecting anything from us,” Chavez later told the writer John Gregory Dunne. “They’re not doing any politicking among us. All the other groups, the unions, the civil-rights groups, they all want something in return for their support. Not the Church.”28
Although the FWA was a family affair, there was always a first family: Chavez, Helen, Richard, Manuel . . . and Dolores Huerta. Dolores would seem to be out of place in the early years, as she was a Chavez by neither blood nor marriage. Close to Cesar, she nonetheless held a position similar to that of Gilbert Padilla: a cherished associate with whom Chavez had worked for ten years before he founded the FWA. But even at the beginning, Dolores got closer to the Chavez family than Gilbert. Padilla was married, and his first wife was dubious about all the time he put into politics; she was certainly not part of the organizing team, and she kept her husband away from the Chavez family. Huerta was mostly estranged from her two husbands in the CSO years, and she divorced the second one as she joined the FWA in Delano in 1964. Then, in 1972, she married Richard Chavez, after what had been, to insiders, a scandalous affair begun while Richard was still married. Sally, Richard’s wife was a friend of Helen’s, and she complained to Cesar, who could do nothing to stop the virtually open liaison. Besides, it made perfect political sense. Dolores was part of the inner core but the only nonfamily member; Richard was married to a woman who resented all the time he spent working for the union. Both problems were solved simultaneously by shuffling the marital deck.29
Richard, two years younger than Cesar, was his true lifetime companion. As children they had planted and cultivated their first garden, trapped gophers, worked at their father’s gas station, gotten in and out of trouble on the homestead, watched as it was destroyed, experienced the migrant trail, shined shoes, collected tin foil, worked in the movie house, shelled walnuts, picked raisins, and done all manner of farmwork. After World War II they got married within two months of each other, moved their new families into the same house, tried sharecropping together, moved to Crescent City together, and eventually settled across the street from each other in San Jose. In all their lives, it was only in the CSO years, from 1952 to 1962, that Cesar and Richard Chavez voluntarily spent any significant amount of time away from each other. Even then, Richard became a local leader of the CSO in Delano, where he worked as a journeyman carpenter. And although Cesar’s regular explanation for his decision to start the association in Delano—that he knew Richard wouldn’t let him starve there—was mostly a fiction, the core truth of it was that moving there meant Cesar and Richard would be reunited.
It also meant the return of cousin Manuel, who was two years older than Cesar. Manuel Chavez had been a late-comer to the childhood union of Richard and his brother. Manuel’s family lived near Cesar and Richard’s in Arizona, but the three boys didn’t become close until Manuel’s mother died when he was twelve. He was the youngest child, much younger than his brothers and sisters, who were already married, and at first he was passed around among some of his elder siblings. That didn’t work out—Manuel was troublesome even then—and soon he was living with Richard and Cesar. Their household was already in crisis when Manuel arrived, and he became a guide for the boys to life’s harsh realities—not a big brother, for Cesar was already that, but a wild, more worldly-wise junior partner. The three stayed together through the migrant years, with Manuel often getting into trouble and even spending time in jail for fighting. He went into the Navy before Cesar, came out as Cesar went in, and then joined the two brothers for the move to Crescent City. After that he went to the Mexican border and became a petty thief and con man, doing time in county jails for assault, disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, auto theft, and nearly two years in federal prison for selling marijuana. He left his most legitimate job, selling used cars, which he did off and on, to become an organizer for the FWA.30
The three of them made a handsome picture, their faces revealing nearly the full racial heritage of the Mexican American people. Manuel was a güero, white, taller than the other two, with the looks of the European conquerors. Cesar was an Indio, with dark skin, high cheekbones, straight black hair, and a short, thick body. Richard was taller than his older brother, and his face suggested an even earlier heritage: his eyes became a horizontal line when he smiled, and for many years he sported a stringy, Fu Manchu mustache and beard. But their physical differences only hinted at the moral and political drama embedded in the way these three companions had learned, over time, to get along and to not get along. Cesar in the lead: practical and imaginative, moral and cunning. Richard only practical, so deep into the way things are that he couldn’t imagine a different way that they might be. Manuel was only cunning. Together, though, they lacked few political skills or sensibilities.
Richard was a careful, likable man—“sweet, sweet Richard,” as one staff member called him. So sweet that he couldn’t say no to Cesar, who could say no to just about anyone. While Cesar was organizing the CSO, Richard learned to build houses and built one for himself, which Cesar later used as collateral on a loan to start the credit union. Richard was reluctant but went along. It wasn’t that he was worried about losing his house (he could build another); he just didn’t take to all the commotion, preferring a quieter life and never asking too much of himself or of others. It was his great weakness as an organizer. Richard always thought that Cesar expected too much of ordinary human beings, that Cesar tried to get more out of people through moral persuasion than people were willing to give. Cesar often said that he couldn’t understand how a man would choose to spend his free time cutting the lawn when there were so many more important things to do. Richard liked to cut the lawn himself, and he even took up golf. Richard counseled Cesar to be more conservative about his hopes, and he always pushed for what he called “realism,” for keeping the association’s, and then the union’s, goals practical, sensible, down to earth.
Nobody ever called Manuel “sweet, sweet Manuel.” Chris Hartmire called him a “charming scoundrel.” Virginia Hirsch dubbed him “one of the great bullshitters of all time.” And even some who never took to him—such as Gilbert Padilla, who finally concluded that he was “just a petty crook,” or Marshall Ganz, who eventually called him the “evil twin in a Shakespearean drama”—spent a good deal of time sitting right beside him, scheming, listening, joking, plotting. No one was ever sure which of his stories to believe, and everyone knew that most of his tales involved wild exaggerations. Typical was his oft-stated boast that he had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy for punching an officer, although his Navy record states that he was discharged honorably.31
Manuel got in more than enough trouble with the law to back up his expertly crafted, humorously malevolent self-portrait. Typical was the scrape that sent him to jail in the spring of 1964, while he was a part-time organizer for the FWA. Working for a Bakersfield company, he delivered produce to local markets in Taft, and instead of turning in all the checks he received, he forged the endorsements on some of them and cashed them at a local bar and low-ball club. Records delivered to the court showed that he had forged at least twenty-one checks, amounting to more than $1,200, over about a month and a half. Since he was already on probation—the court report states, “His rather lengthy criminal record . . . occupies two and one-half pages of the standard forms used by the Sheriff ’s office”—he was denied further probation and the judge sentenced him to 180 days in jail.32
Ultimately in the UFW, Manuel survived only because he was Cesar’s beloved cousin, his primo hermano in farm worker Spanish. And Cesar did not merely tolerate Manuel’s peculiar skills; he used them and even at times enjoyed them. “Sounds like a job for Manuel” was a common phrase among top FWA officials whenever the organization found itself in a fix that was best handled by means of some sort of undercover action. Those assignments always came directly from Cesar, however, and only a few other people were privy to exactly what Manuel had been assigned to do.
Cesar loved Manuel and not just because he often depended on him in times of crisis. Marshall Ganz has a theory about why that was so: Cesar admired Manuel’s shrewdness, his cunning, his ability to make a calculated assessment of exactly what it would take to get someone to do something. Ganz remembers sitting with the two of them for hours, listening to Cesar question Manuel on exactly how he got people to buy used cars. What was it that turned the trick, that convinced the prospective buyer that this was the car for him? Manuel would tell the stories, and Cesar would try to convert the stories into a method, a science of persuasion. But not all Manuel’s cunning involved persuasion. Some of it was outright fraud and violence. Ganz was amazed at how deftly Cesar seemed to pick and choose among Manuel’s questionable methods without becoming morally tainted himself.33 He was convinced that Cesar would not allow Manuel to cross the line into pure malevolence. The problem was what would happen when Manuel was too far away to be held accountable? When weeks or months would go by without his having to report to Cesar? Manuel operating on his own was not a pretty picture. If Cesar was both the serpent and the dove, Manuel was all serpent.
It is not entirely clear how much of a role Manuel or even Richard played in the early years of the FWA. Fundamentally both made their mark as companions to Cesar. They helped him maintain his balance and surrounded him at work with the confidence and security of family love. He could trust them as no others. Certainly, neither man was as skilled at organizing as Gilbert Padilla. Nor as enmeshed in the local farm worker community as Julio and Josefina Hernandez, a CSO couple who became stalwarts of the new association. Nor as politically savvy as Dolores Huerta. Nor as able to provide money and political support as Chris Hartmire. Perhaps the best indication of Manuel’s importance to the organization is the assignment Chavez gave him after Manuel returned to Delano from prison in the fall of 1964: helping to sell ads for the FWA’s newspaper, El Malcriado. Manuel did the job. He got the biggest, most lucrative ad that the paper ever had: a furniture store ad that filled the entire back page for several months. Bill Esher, the paper’s editor, had talked to the store owner but never gotten anything out of him. He was convinced that Manuel had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.34
Building an association of farm workers, Chavez was convinced, meant simultaneously building the farm worker community. Not community in the abstract, not creating just some kind of good feeling among people, but lasting social structures in which farm workers would exercise institutional power. Chavez told all who would listen that farm workers, collectively, needed not just a credit union nor even just a trade union, but land of their own, medical clinics, recreational halls, radio stations, and newspapers. He decided it was time to establish the newspaper in the fall of 1964. He had read about the Los Angeles newspaper of the Magonistas, Regeneración, and the influence it had had on the first generation of Mexican immigrants. He knew how important newspapers were in the Mexican Revolution, appearing one month, shut down by the Porfirista government the next, and then reappearing under related, often amusing, names. Chavez had stored away the name of one of those revolutionary papers that particularly delighted him and was determined to use it when it came time to set up his own newspaper, El Malcriado. It means, literally “the ill-bred one”—colloquially, “the brat,” “the bad boy.”
The name was a peculiar choice for the ex-altar boy. Cesar was not openly a malcriado—that would be Manuel. Cesar did everything he could to make his organization respectable and keep his own image clean. One of Chavez’s early enthusiastic Catholic supporters, the Jesuit director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, James Vizzard, tried to correct what he considered this unfortunate choice of a title for the FWA newspaper. In a favorable article in the July 1966 Progressive, titled “The Extraordinary Cesar Chavez,” Vizzard translated malcriado as “the disadvantaged.” The translation, totally in error, fit the proper Catholic view of this new leader of the poor, a view that Chavez usually promoted himself. And yet El Malcriado was Chavez’s choice, and his alone. It is probably best understood as another warning to those who would understand him too quickly. His project was nothing if not serious and moral, and yet it was leavened by humor—a sense of humor, however, that was usually purposeful, used to embarrass and skewer enemies, and rarely self-deprecating.
Chavez’s first recruit to the newspaper was a cartoonist, Andy Zermeño. Chavez needed Zermeño because the culture in which he was going to start a newspaper was primarily oral and visual, rather than literate. Great storytellers enchanted small farm worker gatherings; some farm workers played musical instruments, and a few earned extra bucks playing in the bars at night. Traveling working-class theater, carpa (tent shows), and Mexican circuses still occasionally came through the small valley towns and were always well attended. Mexican music on the radio provided daily entertainment, and going to the movies was the special treat. Certainly there were some farm worker intellectuals, who kept up with various Mexican newspapers and magazines, but most people who read at all were devotees of illustrated pocket-book romances, adult comic books, and the sensational Mexican newspaper Alarma, which featured horrid photos of automobile accidents. If Cesar’s paper was to have an impact, it needed a good cartoonist.
The characters who dominated the early issues of El Malcriado—Don Sotaco, Don Coyote, and Patroncito—were conceived in a series of extended conversations between Zermeño and Chavez, and then brought to life by the power of Zermeño’s pen. Don Sotaco, in a simple line drawing, stands alone on the cover of the first issue. Pictured from above, he appears short; under a slightly oversized hat pulled down upon his large, ridiculous ears, are a pair of sad, woeful eyes looking up in an attitude of defeat. Miserable compliance is exactly the mood, reflected in his despairing frown, sloping shoulders, and arms gently folded behind his back. Don Sotaco is the victim perennial, taken advantage of by all. His chief antagonist, Don Coyote, the labor contractor or smuggler, who appeared alone on the cover of the second issue, this time viewed from below, is tall, sharp-featured, and angular, with square shoulders and a menacing look above his hatchet chin. All that’s missing is the tail of a cartoon devil. Patroncito, the fat, jolly, smirking boss, appeared later. He is often shown surrounded by beautiful women, smoking a cigar, his pockets stuffed with money. Sometimes he is hoodwinking the government, other times he is outwitted by Don Coyote, but only on small matters. Despite his firm hold on power, Patroncito never merited a full-page cover.
Chavez “came up with Don Sotaco, a farm worker who didn’t know anything,” Zermeño explains. “We wanted [farm workers] to identify with this character and show that if you didn’t know your rights, you would get into a lot of trouble.”35 Decades after the fact, Chavez said of the original characters, “We could say difficult things to people without offending them. We could talk about people being cowards, for example. Instead of being offensive, it would be funny.”36
Portraying the farm worker (or any worker) as a loser is not unprecedented among those who have tried to organize them. Don Sotaco is an updated Mexican American version of the famous Wobbly cartoon character Mr. Block. That misguided worker, whose head was a block of wood, was constantly being fooled by the boss’s false promises, losing every time. The Wobblies’ intention was not that different from Zermeño and Chavez’s: they, too, were trying to offer a critique of a certain kind of foolish worker without directly insulting people. But Mr. Block is not the only worker in the Wobbly cartoon portfolio. Even more prevalent is the large, muscular, proud worker, much taller than the bosses or the police, whose inherent but as yet unleashed power promises to sweep away all oppressors. Mr. Block and the powerful Wobbly worker are on the stage together; the audience is offered a choice of how to view themselves.
In Zermeño’s cartoons there is just one kind of worker, Don Sotaco, and he doesn’t stand up to the boss until issue 49, in November 1966, almost two years after his appearance on the first El Malcriado cover. For much of that period, many of the farm workers who were reading the paper had been on strike, waging an intense battle with their bosses. Counter examples to Don Sotaco were everywhere, but the cartoon character continued to take it on the chin. Although farm workers were neither uniformly Don Sotacos nor uniformly in struggle, Chavez saw himself as working with the Don Sotacos of the world. His job was to pull the veil from Don Sotaco’s eyes, help him see the importance of self-organization, show him how to unite with others, and inspire him to take the world stage. Chavez did play that role for many people, and although most were not as down and out as Don Sotaco, they could still recognize themselves in the humorous caricature. But those farm workers with a sense of their own power before Chavez ever arrived did not see themselves in the cartoon figure, and did not need Chavez to lift their veils. They were willing to struggle alongside or in alliance with Chavez, willing even to do so under his leadership, but they owed him no deep debt. Such workers were not as loyal to Chavez and his organization as those whom Chavez had enlightened, and Chavez was never completely comfortable with them.
Yet Cesar Chavez should be understood as more than just the man who liberates and redeems Don Sotaco. The man who conceived Don Sotaco was also the man who named his newspaper El Malcriado. Rarely are those who bring sight to the blind also malcriados, whether secretly or openly. But here, Chavez seems to be one, as his invention Don Sotaco does not stand alone in representing farm workers. There is his newspaper too: the farm worker not as submissive victim but as mischievous boy.
Chavez never intended to be the editor of the paper. He was sure that any antigrower farm worker newspaper would eventually be sued (he turned out to be right), and he didn’t want those suits to be filed against the FWA. He also didn’t think his organization needed a paper so much as the whole farm worker community did. Unlike Lenin, he did not want a newspaper that developed a political line but one that could indirectly teach a point of view, and if enough people were influenced by this alternative way of understanding the news, those readers would form a community. And a community of readers was one step closer to a community itself. Chavez wanted El Malcriado to be closely linked to the FWA but separate. He looked around for an editor who would be loyal enough to trust, but would also have the spirit of a mildly mischievous son. His search led him out of the farm worker community to a man he would affectionately call “our first gringo.”
Bill Esher’s romantic idealism included a strong streak of independence, not an unusual combination. He had been a maverick editor of his high school paper, attended journalism school at Syracuse University on scholarship, and simultaneously worked at the daily Syracuse Post-Standard at night. By 1959, after two years in college, he had had enough. A fan of beat poetry, Jack Kerouac, and West Coast jazz, he bought a 1951 Ford “woody,” fixed it up so that he could sleep comfortably in the back, and took off for California. On the way he passed through the South and wrote some stories for the Post-Standard about “the still-quiet-but-about-to-explode civil rights movement,” and then spent a few months in the Mexican desert sleeping under the stars. He knocked around in California and elsewhere for a while before encountering Citizens for Farm Labor in San Francisco. There he met Wendy Goepel, who was working for Governor Brown’s Farm Worker Health Service, pretty much fell in love, and started to do what he could to help farm workers.37
Bill Esher, like most everyone else who would become a member of the FWA family, did not do things halfway. His first independent project was remarkable enough: organizing the West Oakland Farm Workers Association. Using an old bus that had been donated to Oakland’s Catholic Worker collective, the association attempted to circumvent the unscrupulous labor contractors who skimmed off money from farm workers’checks. The association contracted with the growers directly, passed along the full wages to the workers (outside donations paid for the gas and maintainence of the bus), and provided nutritious lunches to its members for twenty-five cents. Esher drove the bus and made the lunches at the Catholic Worker center—he was quite proud of what he could produce for a quarter. For a while he tried to work alongside the others in the bean and onion fields below Fremont, but he gave it up. It was all individual piece rate, and he was surprised to discover that although he was used to hard physical labor, having moved furniture for a living, he couldn’t come close to keeping up with what he had assumed were the unskilled rejects among West Oakland’s poorest people. So he took to sleeping on the bus while the experienced farm workers earned their money.
His West Oakland Farm Workers Association did not last long. The members made the mistake of striking for a higher wage. They lost, were fired, were blacklisted by most of the growers, and were harassed by the Fremont Police. The end came when Esher was out in the fields visiting the crew, and someone snuck up and broke all the windows on the bus.
The next project was even more ambitious: documenting the ways in which braceros were being cheated by the growers. To do that Esher and a friend sought jobs on a bracero crew in the cantaloupe fields outside a small Central Valley town called Pumpkin Center. The amused straw bosses let them have a try at harvesting on the otherwise all-bracero crew. Bill’s friend quit in the first couple of hours, but Bill hung on. The semi-enslaved Mexicans were working by the hour and doing the job, as slaves usually do, as slowly as they possibly could. Still, the two weeks that Esher picked cantaloupes were the hardest workweeks of his life. And when he got his paycheck, he had the documentation he wanted: the pay was about 25 percent short, and the charge for room and board was inflated to the point of fraud. Over the life of the workers’ two-month contract, the growers association was cheating them out of many thousands of dollars. Citizens for Farm Labor took this to the state government and the U.S. Labor Department, but no cantaloupe-picking bracero ever saw any of the money that was coming to him. Instead, only Bill Esher received his back wages.
In the fall of 1964, Goepel told Esher, “I have a friend who is trying to start a newspaper. He has a sort of self-help co-op of a few hundred farm workers. He needs some help. I’ll take you to meet him.”38 The interview went well. Esher was impressed by Chavez and was immediately attracted to Helen and the kids, many of whom still carried their affectionate baby-names: Polly, Tota, Birdy, Babo, Titibet. Chavez quickly decided that Esher might be the one for the job. Three months later Esher moved to Delano. By then Chavez had produced the first issue by himself, figuring out how to do it as he went along. Esher lived with Helen and the kids for a short time, and continued to eat most of his meals with the family even after he’d moved into a rundown motel, the Delano Plunge, and from there into a trailer. He earned extra money working in the grape fields with Chavez on occasional weekends—pruning and stacking wood—and he spent a lot more time with Cesar driving around the Central Valley, convincing small grocery store owners to carry copies of El Malcriado on consignment. It sold for a dime, and the store could keep a nickel.
The two men had a lot of opportunity to talk. What made Chavez so attractive to Esher was his combination of hard, day-to-day work with a large vision of eventual farm worker power. At the beginning, when the association was so small, maybe “vision” was the wrong word. “Fantasy” might be more appropriate, Esher thought. “Chavez had two fantasies of me,” said Esher.
He did that with people. He saw things in big terms. One was that I was St. Francis. Which was totally off the wall. The other was that I was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist. I was going to be Cesar’s propagandist. He would actually talk about that quite a lot. He was half joking, of course. But he had these fantasies for me, and I was not at all surprised when later it developed that he had all these big fantasies for himself.39
In keeping with his grand plans, Chavez renamed the FWA when it merged with a Porterville farm worker group soon after Esher arrived in Delano. Now that there were three small centers of FWA activity—Porterville, Corcoran, and Delano—and perhaps as many as two hundred dues-paying members, the new organization would henceforth be known as the National Farm Workers Association.
Once Esher came on the job, Chavez insisted that El Malcriado officially separate from the NFWA. Chavez had already found a moonlighting jobber who would print a thousand copies for $43.80, and he had sold enough ads to cover the print run. The nickel Esher collected from the grocery stores might pay for the gas needed to distribute the papers. Chavez talked Esher into trying to sell tires, motor oil, and soda for some extra bucks (as was the NFWA style), but Bill quickly gave that up. Wendy Goepel was always there to make sure that they didn’t close down for lack of funds, and when Manuel arrived and sold the entire back page to the furniture store, the paper was able to avert immediate financial crisis.
El Malcriado was, quite naturally, both independent of the NFWA and not. Esher’s Spanish was not good enough to produce a Spanish-language paper, so Chavez translated the entire newspaper for the first few months, as well as writing many of the editorials. And although Esher eventually moved the paper into its own building down the street from the NFWA offices, he continued to be a member of the NFWA family. Although Chavez did not give orders about what should be in the paper, El Malcriado reflected the general orientation of the NFWA’s leaders, as interpreted and elaborated by Bill Esher. That elaboration was significant. Esher featured an extensive letters section (it sometimes made up a quarter of the paper), farm workers’ own articles, and humorous contests (readers were challenged to “name this town” from a photo of a nondescript street in a particularly dreary valley town). Esher changed the slogan on the masthead from Chavez’s choice, “Dedicated to Farm Workers,” to his own, “The Voice of Farm Workers.”
The resultant diversity of opinions ran somewhat counter to Chavez’s editorials, which often called for unity above all else. At first the differences were not paramount. Esher promoted the legacy of the Mexican Revolution (using Cesar’s extensive collection of Mexican revolutionary graphics), emphasized the benefits of joining the NFWA, and publicized the achievements of the organization and its leaders. All the while the energetic heart of the paper remained Zermeño’s cartoons. Only in the fall of 1965, when farm worker strikes were in the process of transforming the association into a union, did differences between the newspaper and Chavez became significant. That’s when Esher noted that Chavez wanted the paper to be both independent and under his control. For a while, Chavez had to put up with what he had consciously chosen to create: a genuine malcriado. But not for long.
