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,
