by Miriam Pawel
Chavez declared that the first one thousand people to pay dues would be founding members “and will be placed in the archives of the Farm Workers Association for posterity.” Their names would be displayed on scrolls in the organization’s headquarters, though no office yet existed. He also appealed for members on pragmatic grounds. “Let’s face it,11 most of the workers will only join the association if they see that they can get immediate benefits,” Chavez wrote in one of his periodic newsletters. “Only a small percentage of the people involved will really understand, at this point, what we are trying to do . . . you and I, maybe, can understand about causes, but most of us don’t. So the insurance benefit is simply that something which we hope will encourage people to join and pay their monthly dues.”
When the dues notices went out, membership plunged from 498 to 160. Chavez had promised the insurance company he could deliver 300, and he had promised the members life insurance as of March 1. By mid-February, the membership had inched up to 227. Chavez investigated more costly insurance options as a fallback. “I’m almost certain that we will get the coverage one way or the other,” he wrote to Huerta. “Still the gut tearing fear12 of being refused by the Insurance commissioner looms large over me, especially when I lay down at night.”
With three days till the deadline, he went to church on Ash Wednesday and pledged to give up smoking for Lent. He suggested his family do without television, an idea they rejected as excessive sacrifice. Soon he suffered the physical pains of withdrawal. When Hartmire stopped by Delano, Chavez told the minister the association had seven hundred members, with a potential of thirteen hundred more; he “overdramatized,” Chavez confessed to Ross, because he didn’t want outsiders to know the truth.
On March 1, Chavez signed an agreement13 with California Life Insurance, switching to a more expensive plan because he had only 253 paying members. When the first member collected on his policy a few months later, after his spouse died, Chavez presented the $500 check at a free barbecue for FWA members.
A little more than a year after he had moved to Delano, Chavez had stabilized the dues-paying membership of the FWA at around three hundred, sufficient to draw a $50-a-week salary. He was ready to move on to the next item on his list: a credit union. Members would be able to obtain small, low-interest loans to tide them through the lean winter months, credit they could not qualify for at banks. For Chavez, the credit union would help break the workers’ dependence on labor contractors, often the only source of cash. And the credit union, like the death benefit, would bind members to the association year-round, even if they only worked in the Delano area for a few months. To keep up their insurance and to qualify for the credit union, they would have to pay dues all year.
When the federal government rejected his application for a credit union charter, Chavez called on political connections in Sacramento and obtained a state charter. But he lacked the requisite capital to start making loans. He turned once more to his family for help. His brother Richard was comfortably established as a carpenter and builder. Richard had bought a small house in Delano in 1955, taken out a construction loan, and added on to build his family a cozy two-bedroom home. Richard’s house14 already functioned as an auxiliary office for the FWA since he had the only telephone. Now the house became collateral as well. On October 25, 1963, Richard took out a $5,600 mortgage against his house and lent $3,500 to jump-start the credit union. Next, Cesar needed someone trustworthy to run the bank. He persuaded Helen that she could learn enough accounting and drafted her as the credit union’s manager. The credit union opened for business at the end of 1963, offering savings accounts to FWA members and loans at 1 percent interest per month. They had no rules and required no collateral. They made what they called “face loans”—they trusted people who had honest faces.
Chavez had much to celebrate as he presided over his association’s annual meeting15 on January 26, 1964. The organization had survived sixteen months, delivered life insurance to workers who had lacked the means to properly bury their loved ones, established a credit union, and held on to its core membership. Farmworkers from hundreds of miles away began arriving in Delano at 5:00 a.m. for the one-day convention. They warmed up with menudo for breakfast and admired the colorfully decorated church hall. Crepe paper decorations hung from the ceiling, fresh flowers were arranged around the room, and musicians provided live entertainment. A ten-by-twelve-foot black eagle flag faced the officers, and a smaller version hung on a side wall.
For the first time, Chavez reached for help outside his immediate circle. Two idealistic young people from the East Coast, products of an entirely different world, became frequent visitors in the Chavez home. One plugged Chavez in to important networks beyond Delano, and the other helped spread his message. Soon a stream of young people would flock to Delano, enchanted with the cause and wanting to be of service. In 1964, Wendy Goepel and Bill Esher were the vanguard.
Goepel had grown up in a religious family in Hackensack, New Jersey. She was the first in her family to go to college and came west as a seventeen-year-old Mount Holyoke College sophomore on a Migrant Ministry summer internship. She fell in love with the foreign world of farmworkers. She met Chavez and Ross during the summer training and later stayed in Huerta’s mother’s boardinghouse. Goepel kept in touch with all three when she transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. She started graduate studies in sociology at Stanford, then quit to work on a California health department farmworker initiative. She found lots of reasons to stop by Delano, where she slept on the Chavez couch, displacing the two youngest boys, who moved to the floor.
In the summer of 1964, Goepel supervised a state-funded migrant health study. She hired Helen Chavez as an interviewer to survey farmworkers about health, housing, and economic conditions. The same summer, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and appointed Sargent Shriver as its first director. Millions of dollars in federal grant money to help poor people suddenly became available, and California wanted its share. Gov. Pat Brown hired Goepel to write grant proposals. She worked on a half dozen grants, but her personal priority was getting money for Chavez’s association, which he now called the National Farm Workers Association, or NFWA. She spent days riding around the valley with Chavez, filling in details that would help craft a strong pitch. She attended house meetings and listened to workers’ stories, then ended the day back at 1221 Kensington, eating Helen’s corn tortillas at the red Formica kitchen table.
Chavez, the pragmatist, was willing to jettison one of his cardinal rules: don’t take outside money. The application submitted to OEO asked for more than $200,000 to create seventy staff jobs, sixty-three for farmworkers who would work in the credit union, start a cooperative, and run a gas station. Chavez, as director, would receive a salary of $15,000.
With the credit union established, Chavez talked to Goepel about his next dream—a newspaper for farmworkers. “I’m still trying to get someone interested in being crazy enough to give up eating and join me to develop the newspaper,”16 he wrote to a friend from the CSO. Goepel knew just the person.
“I’m writing because I hear you need some help with your newspaper,17 and I want to work for you, and the whole thing that you are doing captures my imagination very much,” wrote Bill Esher, a tall, dreamy-eyed activist with strong opinions, a big heart, and a willingness to try anything. Esher had grown up in New York, moved to San Francisco after college, and met Goepel through the Catholic Worker movement. Drawn to the farmworker cause, he had tried operating his own labor contracting service. He picked up workers in Oakland, loaded them on an old bus, handed out sandwiches his girlfriend made, and drove them to jobs in San Jose. The workers became militant in their demands and were blackballed, and the project collapsed.
While Esher’s friends headed south to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, he decided to pursue a civil rights fight closer to home. He became the only non-bracero on a cantaloupe crew in the San Jo
aquin Valley, filling ninety-pound bags with ripe melons as he carefully documented how the foremen cheated workers out of 25¢ an hour. Esher needed a place to stay while he worked in the fields, so Goepel let him sleep in the Bakersfield office that Helen Chavez used for her survey work. Esher liked Helen and heeded Goepel’s urging to get in touch with Cesar about the newspaper job. Esher had worked nights on a newspaper in Syracuse, New York, in college and was confident he could produce a paper for farmworkers. Chavez asked Esher how much he needed, and he said only enough to eat. Goepel arranged to pay Esher $50 a week and procured an ancient trailer that Esher parked in Delano and called home. He became the first editor of El Malcriado, the farmworkers’ newspaper.
Chavez picked the name and explained its significance: “The meaning is ill-bred.18 Also applied to children who speak back to their parents. During the [Mexican] revolution, one of the peoples’ papers was called El Malcriado, and successively others since then have taken this name when they fight for the people.” His intuition that a newspaper for poorly educated farmworkers could serve as an effective organizing tool quickly proved true; demand was so high they increased the print run from one thousand to three thousand copies. Workers who couldn’t read heard the latest news from friends. Each story that exposed wrongdoing or reported a small victory won Chavez more converts.
They sold each issue for 10¢ to farmworkers and mailed subscriptions for $2 a year to supporters. Abe Chavez responded enthusiastically, buying a subscription for himself and offering to sell several more. “I liked the general tone19 and believe that a constant reminder to the worker as you have done in this issue will show how other people benefit by their poverty and hardship. Short, brief concise examples of how they are getting screwed out of their rightful share of their labor will arouse their concern and will enable you to work to help them improve their lot.”
Esher found no shortage of such stories, which he reported and wrote and found someone to translate into Spanish. His first sustained crusade used information the NFWA had been collecting about systematic cheating of sugar beet workers. One labor contractor, Jimmy Hronis, had a particularly bad reputation, and El Malcriado began a campaign to expose him as an unscrupulous employer. The stories triggered state hearings and fines against Hronis. Farmworkers were astonished.
Chavez affectionately referred to Esher as “Guillermo Ceniseros,” a quasi-literal translation of William and ashes. Esher took many meals with the Chavez family and became fond of the children. Occasionally he and Cesar picked grapes together, usually jobs arranged by Helen’s sister. Esher did the layout on each issue, drove to Fresno, and slept in his car while he waited for the printer to run off the paper: a thousand copies for $43. Each time a new issue came out, the two men drove around distributing the paper to small stores that Chavez selected. They picked up the extras from the prior issue along with the nickel profit for each copy that had been sold. Esher designed a special hook that would hold ten copies and could be hung near the cash register. Chavez didn’t like to drive, so Esher took the wheel and Chavez told him stories about his life. He talked about the CSO, about lessons he had learned, and about his ideas for a co-op for members. In spare moments, Esher helped Chavez experiment by selling tires and oil; members could buy tires for $7.99 plus a used tire; an extra $1.50 bought whitewalls.
Between the insurance program, the credit union, and the newspaper, the NFWA had outgrown its temporary home on Kensington Street, where Chavez would move the red Formica table from the kitchen to the living room to double as his desk. He had no phone, so people had to come find him in person. Even without the constant stream of visitors, there was scarcely any privacy with nine people plus frequent guests crammed into the two-bedroom house. When Huerta finally moved to Delano in the summer of 1964 with five of her children, they all stayed with the Chavezes until she found a house to rent.
For his first office,20 Chavez located an abandoned Pentecostal church on the far west side of Delano, where the streets ended and the fields began. Richard Chavez helped with plumbing and wiring, built cabinets and shelves, and partitioned off rooms. Supporters pledged to raise money for the $50-a-month rent. The grand opening of 102 Albany Street on September 26, 1964, featured refreshments, door prizes, and a raffle to raise money for the $850 in construction materials bought on credit. Helen and her sister donated plants, Goepel provided curtains, Huerta contributed vases, and Katy Peake delivered a conference table, chairs, and a filing cabinet. At the front entrance was a counter, like in a bank, and behind that two small offices, one for the credit union and one for El Malcriado. Chavez’s office was just inside the front door, to the left, with a wooden desk that his brother had built. Chavez announced the office would be open from 9:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday, with an hour closed for lunch. He finally had the problem clinic he had always wanted.
One person missing from the celebration was Manuel Chavez. Cesar had delighted in the companionship of his irreverent cousin, who had traveled the valley talking up the association and gathering pledges. “Manny the Mostest21 is tearing around while I’m here banging away on the teclas [keys],” Chavez had written to Ross. Manuel bragged22 that he had never held a job longer than seven or eight months, but he stayed with the farm workers association because no one—not even Cesar—could tell him what to do. Manuel liked money, and even while working for his cousin at $50 a week, he always seemed to have plenty to spend. “Money’s to roll, that’s why they make it round,” was one of his favorite sayings. By mid-1963 he had taken a job as a salesman at a grocery store and was helping Cesar in his spare time.
A year later, Manuel was arrested23 and charged with grand theft for cashing forged checks. His prior arrest record included time in federal prison for selling drugs and arrests for assault, disturbing the peace, and grand theft auto. The court was not inclined to leniency. At his sentencing, he said he had run up gambling debts, cashed checks to cover his losses, and intended to repay the money he stole from his employer, the Bakersfield Produce Company. He pled guilty to grand theft and was sentenced to prison in June 1964. Cesar missed him. Esher’s office was kitty-corner to Chavez’s, and the editor would see his boss there late at night, writing to his cousin.
Manuel Chavez was replaced as secretary-treasurer by Antonio Orendain, the only immigrant in the leadership of the association. Orendain was building up a following of his own through a television show he hosted. He had persuaded a local Hanford station to donate a fifteen-minute slot during which he delivered news in Spanish. He collected newspapers from all over Mexico by mail and read small items about different places. Little stories from workers’ hometowns generated great interest, no matter how dated the news. As the NFWA grew, Orendain began mixing in news of the association. He worked as an irrigator during the day, then rushed each afternoon to the studio, where he donned a clean jacket and hid his muddy boots underneath the desk. His broadcasts reached farmworkers across a wide swath of the San Joaquin Valley, and the mustachioed Mexican became a familiar face.
During its second full year, the NFWA had more than doubled its income.24 The association reported collecting $12,947 in dues in 1964, another $771 in donations, and $2,414 in miscellaneous income, for a total of $16,133. Expenses had also doubled, to $15,487, including salaries for Chavez and Huerta, who each earned $65 a week. The other major expenses were $5,701 in insurance premiums, $1,229 in travel, and $447 for postage. Chavez decided he had built a sufficiently strong base to reveal his true agenda. He began to lay the groundwork for his first strike.
“The most exciting thing25 is our drive to get a contract this summer,” he wrote to Ross in early 1965. “We have chosen McFarland rose industry for our efforts. Things look very good but still I can see all of the many problems we will have to overcome. If we are successful we will have something to crow about. If not we will probably lose a lot of ground, but I’m all for the risk . . . We need the fight right now.”
On April 11, 1965, forty ro
se grafters met with Chavez, detailed their grievances, and asked for help in organizing a strike. Highly skilled and difficult to replace, rose grafters were what Jim Drake called “the watch makers26 of agriculture.” Their work also was time sensitive, so they had significant leverage if they walked out. At a second meeting on April 20, they agreed to strike two companies—Mount Arbor and Conklin. On Sunday afternoon, May 2, they met and took the strike vote. Workers were handed slips to mark an X in the box that said “I agree to strike my employer, Mount Arbor nurseries.” Then Chavez had them all swear on a crucifix27 not to break the strike.
Chris Hartmire was sent to speak with the owner of the Mount Arbor nursery and urged him to recognize the union, to no avail. Drake was detached to work full-time on the strike along with Chavez, Huerta, and Padilla; Hartmire agreed Drake was “on vacation,” knowing how outraged the churches that funded the Migrant Ministry would be to learn that one of their organizers was leading a strike.
“With the strike in the roses in McFarland, the Association has declared open war against the growers of California whose cruel exploitations must end after more than a hundred years,” declared El Malcriado.28 The workers struck on May 3. When Huerta saw lights on in a worker’s house the first morning, she blocked his car with hers so that he could not go to work. On the fourth day, the grower offered a raise; the workers decided to go back without a contract.
El Malcriado reported the strike as a great victory nonetheless, and the strike spurred more outside interest in the union. Helped by El Malcriado and friends like Goepel, news was slowly making its way out of the valley to the cities. Anecdotes about the short, quiet, determined leader with big plans drifted north into political circles in Sacramento and west into the activist communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Progressive labor advocates who longed to do something for farmworkers murmured about Cesar Chavez, the new hope.
