“Chicanos will tell you that their culture predates that of the Pilgrims and that Spanish was spoken in America before English,” Salazar wrote. “So the ‘problem’ is not theirs but the Anglos’ who don’t speak Spanish.”
Ruben Salazar was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and the news director for KMEX-TV, when he was killed by a tear gas projectile shot by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officer during the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War held on August 29, 1970 in Los Angeles.
Salazar was well respected and well known in the Los Angeles Mexican American community based on his years of work writing for the Times, prior to him moving to KMEX, a Spanish language station, and only doing a weekly column for the Times. In his death he became a symbolic hero to the community.
I’ve read a couple of articles about him, and watched part of a documentary about him as well. My favorite is the article written by a current LA Times’ reporter, Robert J. Lopez.
Lopez explains his motivation in writing this article:
Salazar was a pioneer whose award-winning journalism opened the door for a generation of Latino reporters like me. I felt a responsibility to focus attention on a grave injustice. But most of all, I was hoping to break news that might shed light on a killing that remains a source of speculation and suspicion to this day.
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Because we’re on the eve of Hispanic Heritage Month, I think it’s a good time to understand how important the Moratorium was in the history of the Los Angeles Mexican American community. The Chicano Moratorium event in Los Angeles took place in the traditional Mexican American community of East Los Angeles. It was a march to protest the Vietnam War, and the outsized death rate of Hispanics and Latinos fighting in the war. The march was well attended — at least 20,000 people, and was one of the largest civil rights protest in Los Angeles’ history. Of course Ruben Salazar was there to cover it for both the station, and the Times.
This summary is from another LA Times’ article, written by Louis Sahagun, about the moratorium itself. It’s also well worth the time to read it.
The massive demonstration was seen as an extraordinary achievement of the Chicano civil rights movement, a new force on the political scene that, much like Black Lives Matter today, focused attention on fundamental problems in basic institutions in American society — the education system, the administration of justice, the political process and military service.
But much of the sympathy and concern it generated erupted in anger that transformed East L.A. into an urban battleground.
Later in the same article.
“Organizing the massive demonstration of Mexican Americans’ opposition to the Vietnam War was a huge achievement for the Chicano movement,” Mario T. Garcia, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, said. “But it turned into a riot, which had the ironic effect of tagging the movement as violent even though deputies had caused most of the trouble.”
“The Chicano movement,” he added, “never fully recovered.”
www.latimes.com/...
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Ok, now back to Mr. Salazar. He was born in Mexico, and immigrated to the United States as a young child. After working in Texas, and elsewhere in California, he was hired by the LA Times in his early 30s. He covered foreign affairs including the Vietnam War, and the 1965 US occupation of the Dominican Republic. He was also the Times’ bureau chief in Mexico. Returning to the US at the end of the 1960s he covered the Chicano movement and the Mexican American community. After 10+ years at the Times, he left to become the news director of KMEX-TV, while continuing to do a weekly column at the Times. Salazar had an hour long, Spanish language, news broadcast on KMEX each weeknight that drew one of the largest viewerships in the city. He was clearly a trusted reporter by the community.
His weekly column at the Times, according to Lopez had changed from his prior work at the paper.
His columns were a radical departure from the straightforward news articles he had written as a reporter. In his first column, he offered an unapologetic explanation of why Chicanos resented being told by whites that speaking Spanish was a problem. “Chicanos will tell you that their culture predates that of the Pilgrims and that Spanish was spoken in America before English,” Salazar wrote. “So the ‘problem’ is not theirs but the Anglos’ who don’t speak Spanish.”
It was Salazar’s recent work, which included covering police brutality that he was doing at the station, along with the weekly column that led to law enforcement visiting him at the station to warn him that he was damaging their reputation. This, he confided to friends, led him to believe that the police were monitoring him. This isn’t surprising at all in my mind just based on the history of the LAPD and LACS. To this very day there are credible allegations of civil rights violations in their policing of people of color.
The dynamics that led to Salazar’s death are probably familiar to all of us. Years of unjust treatment by law enforcement, neglect by local government, and with the Vietnam War hanging over the heads of all the young men and their families. The 3 mile march was peaceful and marchers ended up in a local park to unwind. Police were there, and soon enough a local shop owner called them to say teens had stolen some soda. Later the owner would say he was just threatened. But the escalation of events had started. Police show up, bottles are thrown at them, and then all hell breaks lose in the neighborhood.
Another call is made to the police to say that armed men are in a local bar. It was the bar that Salazar and a friend stopped into to take a break. Sheriffs showed up and fired the incorrect tear gas canister through the curtained doorway. It was a canister designed to penetrate plywood. It hit Salazar in the head, and killed him.
In the aftermath of his death there was righteous outrage. The sheriff’s office said it was an accident, that they didn’t know he was in the bar. We won’t ever know if that is true, and the county settled with his family for $700,000; one of, if not the largest settlement ever paid out by LA County at the time.
Salazar became an icon, and a martyr to the Chicano movement, and the local Mexican American community.
Separate investigations done by the county and the FBI have since concluded that his death was an accident.
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Here’s what the author, Robert J. Lopez said about his 25 year long investigation in to the death of Ruben Salazar:
My conclusion? When sheriff’s deputies descended on the Silver Dollar 50 years ago, they didn’t think about whether their actions would result in injury or death. They didn’t care who was inside that bar.
This incident would not have played out the same way in a white neighborhood. But this was East Los Angeles, a Mexican American barrio. Sheriff’s deputies were never held accountable for their actions.
In the end, Salazar died from the very type of law enforcement abuse he was trying to expose.
www.latimes.com/...
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This diary is my contribution to Hispanic Heritage Month, which starts in the middle of the month.
I want to bring one other item to your attention — the work being done by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to encourage and enlighten the industries that inform our cultural perspectives, to expand how they portray Hispanics in their books, movies and television shows.
Taxpayer dollars flowing to an exclusionary industry, particularly in the form of production credits, deserve special attention. Why should we subsidize exclusion?
