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, Corcoran, and Delano—and perhaps as many as two hundred dues-paying members, the new 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