The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (16 page)

“I hope I don’t make the same mistake twice,”
⁹
Chavez wrote Ross. “In CSO, remember all the plans that were made (mostly by me) which were dependent on the success of our new membership dues and the insurance and so forth. Well, here too I’m planning (dreaming) of having enough money to get help on the organizing of the workers. And as before, everything depends on the insurance program and the credit union, at least to begin with.”

Liberated from the constraints of working for the CSO board, Chavez plunged ahead. Right or wrong, he acted decisively. He did not waste time on lengthy consultations and deliberations. By the end of January 1963, he had hit bottom financially. He decided to start collecting dues even though the insurance would not start until March—if he finalized a deal. He borrowed ten dollars from his brother Richard to buy stamps to mail bills. When he ran out of stamps, Chavez instructed Huerta to call on members in the northern end of the valley and tell them to send in dues. He realized he was asking members to pay dues on faith, but he had no choice. “I know this is the risky part
¹⁰
of the whole damn thing,” he wrote Huerta, “but we must take risks if we are going to move forward.”

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 fear
¹²
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 agreement
¹³
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 house
¹⁴
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 meeting
¹⁵
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 Joaquin 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.
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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 tone
¹⁹
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.