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.
April to August ’65
There’s no other person who could give better speeches, not Dolores, not Chavez. . . . Camacho was the best and he really had an impact on people. . . . He used to give you a lot of history, and I remember he used to get the bullhorn and he could go for forty minutes to an hour on the bullhorn, and everybody was just observing, just listening. So I learned a lot from that guy.
—Pablo Espinoza, grape worker and NFWA volunteer, 1995
Epifanio Camacho caused a little stir in the NFWA office in the spring of 1965. “A dark-skinned, jovial, high-spirited man whose remarkable body and movements suggest the grace and strength of a panther” is how an early chronicler of the UFW described him. Bill Esher, too, noticed him right away. Camacho had walked into the Delano office looking for help, but he was not helpless himself. He approached Cesar Chavez as an equal, not a supplicant. Chavez was both intrigued and wary. Esher watched them, listened to some of their conversation, and saw Camacho’s “power and emotion” matched by Chavez’s “presence and cunning.” Esher marveled at the skill with which “Chavez cooled him down without losing his respect.” It was, he thought, another measure of Chavez’s organizing genius. Gilbert Padilla saw the encounter somewhat differently. Camacho, a rose grafter in the nearby town of McFarland, had come with a plan for a strike, and Chavez didn’t want to have anything to do with it, but he was happy to sign up a new recruit to the National Farm Workers Association. “Chavez was just playing around,” keeping Camacho on board, without taking what he said seriously. But Camacho kept coming, kept insisting, talking up his plan to everybody in the office. And it sounded like a good plan to Gilbert Padilla. The rose workers were highly skilled; it would be hard to replace them. Padilla told Camacho that if they could get it well organized, they should go ahead and strike.1
There was nothing of Don Sotaco in Epifanio Camacho. A few years older than Chavez, he had been born into poverty on a small ranch in Tamaulipas in rural Mexico.2 At eighteen, both of his parents dead, he had joined the Mexican army as a way of getting off his brother-in-law’s ejido and out of small-town life. He had had only a couple of years of schooling, but he had learned to read, and he remained picado—hungry for more. He liked army discipline, but for reasons he didn’t understand back then, he could barely bring himself to salute his superiors or the Mexican flag. He stayed in the army no longer than he had to, worked for a while as a carpenter, and then, motivated by the cheap detective novels he favored, joined the police force in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas. He liked the tough-guy, macho ethos of police work, and as he believed what he had been reading in the paperback novels, he also saw it as a way of serving the Mexican people. He was not prepared for the petty corruption of the Victoria cops, and when the opportunity came, he moved on to the Tamaulipas State Police, hoping to find there the desired combination of public service and heroic action. What he found instead was more corruption and utter contempt for poor people. Most disturbing was the routine torture of prisoners, through which the police extorted confessions and bribes. His complaints only brought suspicion down on his own head, and soon he felt completely isolated at work. He quit and ran for the border.
In Matamoros, just shy of the Texas border, he scrounged for work and food. A couple of times, arrested as an indigent, he saw the inside of the city jail. Once he spent three days in solitary after he refused the two other choices: pay a small bribe to the guards or clean the jail toilet. In the early 1950s he regularly crossed the border for work, was picked up a couple of times by the migra, and taken back to Matamoros. Once the Border Patrol picked him up in Corpus Christi, where he was digging graves in a Catholic cemetery. His boss, a priest, was so upset at his being hauled away that when Epifanio returned, the priest went back with him to Matamoros and signed the papers that made Camacho a legal immigrant. On June 6, 1955, Epifanio crossed the border legally for the first time.
For three years he dug graves and picked cotton in Texas and more cotton in Arizona. Loaded lettuce in the Imperial Valley. Picked peaches, apricots, and plums—the ladder crops—in the northern Central Valley, raisins outside of Fresno, wine grapes near Delano. Finally, he worked in the roses in what would become his home town, McFarland. Never partnered up with anyone, as most farm workers do, he remained a bit of a loner. His old pickup truck, with its hand-painted Spanish slogans—“To Wander Is My Destiny”; “Don’t Take Me Lightly”; “I Was Once a Virgin, Too”—were puro Mexicano, as was his conviction that his wife should not work outside the home, as well as his romantic, revolutionary rhetoric.3 He was also anticlerical, a viewpoint he shared with many other farm workers—but his complaints against the papacy and the Catholic Church were somewhat more developed than most. His opinions, which had been shaped by that significant strand of Mexican revolutionary ideology that sees the Catholic Church as a central reactionary institution, were reinforced by the strong anti-Catholicism of his wife, Salome, who was a Jehovah’s Witness. Together, the two were different from most of their neighbors: very Mexican and in some ways more culturally conservative. And while Salome was aggressively Protestant, Epifanio was just plain aggressive.
Always willing to fight for what he felt was right, or to defend his acute sense of honor, he frequently found himself in disputes with his bosses. That had started way back in Mexico, when he was barely an adolescent and had hired himself out to a neighboring farmer. The wages were supposed to be one peso a day, but he received only fifty centavos because, according to the foreman, he was only a child. Camacho had been doing as much work as the men beside him, so
