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,
