slave quarters. Pablo was born in one camp, learned to read Spanish in another, fell in love in a third, and lost his mother in yet another temporary home, to severe hemorrhaging that followed the birth of her last child.12
As Pablo came into early manhood, the family’s migratory route shifted from south–north to east–west: three generations traveling together began to follow the cotton from the lower Rio Grande Valley to West Texas, Arizona, and California. In 1960 the entire family came to Tulare County, where most of them settled, working in the wine grapes, tomatoes, and sugar beets. Only Espinoza’s father continued his yearly travels, by this time almost a pilgrimage, back to the lower Rio Grande Valley.
Pablo was quick to pick up on Gilbert’s way of thinking, as he was quick to pick up on everything. Having no more than a fourth-grade education, he had learned mathematics and English while working in a cotton gin, and now he learned politics from Padilla, whom he called “our first professor.” He became a primary spokesman for the rent-strikers. Their strategy was simple. The tenants, organized into formal camp committees, refused to pay the rent hikes. Instead, they paid the old rates into a special escrow account. Next, they organized a seven-mile march from Linnell to Visalia; a couple of hundred people walked in mid-summer heat: residents of the camp were joined by various supporters, including representatives of the American Friends Service Committee (John Soria was one), Citizens for Farm Labor, and Students for Farm Labor, one Sister Immaculada, clad in an all-white habit, and Brother Gilbert, a member of the Christian Brothers order who taught at Garces High School in Bakersfield. A farm worker march of that size, and with that kind of broad support, stirred some liberal California politicians to sponsor an investigation into the Tulare County Housing Authority. Before the summer was over, the rent increases were formally rescinded, and promises were made (and eventually kept) to rebuild the camps.
That summer of 1965, El Malcriado began to promote strikes openly. In its first six months, it had championed the self-organization and self-respect of farm workers, and had encouraged workers to unite and fight for a better life, but its primary focus was on the benefits of NFWA membership. The overwhelming weight of cascading events, however, shifted the paper’s focus. First the rose strike, then a victorious strike of grape pickers, represented by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, in the Coachella Valley, next the rent strike and march, and finally another (unsuccessful) walkout of grape workers. El Malcriado enthusiastically featured them all—and called for more. “How to Strike” read a bold headline in early August, with the following suggestions:
1. Talk to your crew: make sure everyone is with you.
2. Make a strike committee.
3. Come to the association for advice and help.
This method of linking up with rank-and-file militants had been used by AWOC in the strike happy years between 1959 and 1961, but had been explicitly opposed by the NFWA at its founding convention and throughout its first three years of existence. The next issue of El Malcriado made an even greater departure, promoting strikes as the main way of gaining power, and even resurrecting the old Wobbly idea of “one big strike” that would transform the whole relationship between the workers and their bosses. The article is a lovely mixture of the old NFWA approach and El Malcriado’s new attitude toward the more traditional methods and ideology of farm worker struggle.
WHAT CAN ONE MAN DO?
Q. Is there any fast way to make wages and working conditions improve?
A. No. For people to learn their own value and to learn not to be afraid takes a long time.
Q. What is the way it can be done?
A. Through many small strikes and a final grand strike, the people will become strong enough to tell the growers how much they are worth and to get it.
Q. But what can one man do?
A. Everything! The roots of this country, and the roots of the Mexican Revolution, were established by a very few men. It is always a very few men who are responsible for the great social changes in the world. It was one man, for example, Gandhi, who led the huge country of India out of slavery. You, also, are one man.
Q. Exactly how can one man do what needs to be done?
A. One can first learn how to fight and then find ways to struggle against the system that keeps the farm worker poor. For example it was one man that started the action in the Rose Strike this year that led to big wage increases for all the workers in an entire crop.
Q. Where can one man start?
A. By joining together with his fellow workers in the association, which is working toward the big strike.13
“We were the malcriados, the bad boys,” Bill Esher said years later, “and we were thrilled by the strike wave. But Chavez went back and forth. Some days he was the very spirit of the Mexican Revolution, but other days he was a conservative man running a small business, worried about its survival. His Mexican Revolution side welcomed the strikes; his conservative side was worried about them.” Esher acknowledged that Cesar’s concerns were legitimate, but he himself wasn’t much worried by the growing farm worker rebellion:
By the summer of 1965, there was no uniform strategy. Things were out of control, completely. I didn’t worry about that. I was excited by the growth of the movement. I knew the history, that the growers had crushed big farm worker movements in the past, and that the same thing could happen to this one. But at the same time I loved all the action, all the rebellion, and I wanted to encourage it. Cesar was tremendously excited too, but he was also afraid. He was working on two levels: he wanted people to move, to be willing to take on the growers, to strengthen their own self-respect by taking things into their own hands, but at the same time he didn’t want people to do things that would lead to defeats.14
A few months before El Malcriado’s declaration of neo-Wobblyism, the newspaper had moved a few houses down the street, and was no longer being written and laid out in the NFWA office. Chavez was not writing many of the articles and was no longer the translator. Esher still talked over the coming articles with Cesar before he wrote them up; he almost always followed Chavez’s suggestions, and never defied any of his clear directives. But by mid-summer of 1965, Esher was clearly the person most responsible for the content, and Chavez and the executive board didn’t really know what was going to be in the paper until it came out. Sometimes Chavez would criticize an article after he read it, but Esher doesn’t remember any particular criticism of the two neo-Wobbly calls to action. Esher thinks those two articles were possibly influenced by the presence of Eugene Nelson in Delano. Nelson, an old friend of Dolores Huerta’s, stopped by Delano with his daughter that summer on his way to Mexico, and stayed for the next couple of years. Esher and Nelson got along well:
I was familiar with the Wobblies from my old Catholic Worker days, but Gene was the first card-carrying Wobbly I had ever met, although he was a revolutionary artist rather than a worker. He was really enthusiastic about the strikes, as they fit perfectly with his ideas about change. I was talking to him a lot, and those articles sound a lot like him. Of course, you can see Cesar’s influence, too, with the mention of Gandhi. At the time, Cesar and I were both reading the same book about Gandhi, passing our one copy back and forth, and talking it over whenever we got a chance.15
Chavez’s mixed reaction to the growing strike movement would soon not matter at all. Farm workers were not waiting to see on which side of the fence he finally landed. Their strikes increased, in number and intensity. In September they tumbled into Cesar’s own backyard, less than two miles from the NFWA’s office door. Chavez faced a stark choice: would he seize the opportunities created by the growing movement or seek a safe haven where he could wait out what
