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, muscular, proud worker, much taller than the bosses or the police, whose 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.