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For close to 40 years, my memories of journalist, Ruben Salazar, have
been of smoke, fire, riots, rampaging police, and his premature death
in East L.A. on August 29, 1970. Seared into my memory is running home
every day to see the Inquest held into his death. What is actually
seared is not the fact that he was killed by a nine-inch tear-gas
projectile, fired into the Silver Dollar Café by a Los Angeles County
Sheriff's deputy, but rather, that no one was ever brought to justice.
Neither was anyone brought to justice for the deaths of Angel Diaz or
Lyn Ward, who also died on that day.
After years of memories of injustice, I instead choose to remember him
this year on his birthday: Feliz cumpleaños – Happy Birthday, Ruben.
On March 3rd, this pioneering journalist from Juarez-El Paso should
have gotten 80 candles. Instead, on April 22, he will get a belated
birthday present – his own 42-cent U.S. postal stamp. Also being
honored are four other journalists Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey,
George Polk and Eric Sevareid.
Lost in the controversy over his death and the violent repression of
the National Chicano Moratorium rally against the Vietnam war – was
the historic nature of his journalism. Clearly, he was a journalist
before his time and what he reported in the El Paso Herald Post and
the Los Angeles Times, from 1955 through 1970, still seems relevant to
this day. He covered an unpopular war; Vietnam. He also covered Cuba,
the Dominican Republic and the upheaval in Mexico in the 1960s. He
also wrote about the anti-war movement, black-brown relations, police
repression, the border, the inhumane treatment of migrants, the
trouble in the lettuce fields, and social and educational
inequalities. In his last interview, he even complained about a
meddling vice president who was attempting to stifle press freedom.
While not an activist, his journalism brought the emerging Chicano
civil rights movement to the nation's attention. He defined for the
nation – in language that mainstream society understood – what it
meant to be Chicano. On Feb 6, 1970, he wrote: "A Chicano is a Mexican
American with a non-Anglo image of himself." Activists to this day
cringe at that description; for activists, a Chicano/Chicana was more
than an image, but an unapologetic social and political rebel.
The issuance of a U.S. Postal stamp is a fitting tribute, yet, a stamp
is not large enough to convey his life's work, nor the impact that his
death has had upon an entire generation. His death accelerated what
anthropologist Victor Turner refers to as a "primary process" or a
massive volcanic political eruption. In this case, Mexicans rebelled
against years of living a dehumanized existence. It is similar to the
process that exploded during the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution and also
during the Mexican Independence movement 100 years before against a
brutal Spain.
In California, this process can be traced to the East L.A. Walkouts of
1968 and to the even earlier strikes and boycotts of the United Farm
Worker's Movement throughout the country. And yet, it was his death
that completely unleashed this process or movement nationwide.
Those seeds of injustice created an instant martyr. Ironically, a
primary process can be both an explosive time and a time of intense
creativity. Such has been the case in regards to Salazar, though that
political activity and cultural explosion has been mischaracterized by
historians as a nationalistic and separatist impulse. My experience
tells me quite the reverse; that it was a rehumanization project in
response to an ultranationalistic impulse in which Mexicans were not
always welcomed or treated as fully human.
Nearly 40 years after his death, I have begun to develop a journalism
class on his life's work. As I have been perusing over archives of the
Media, Democracy and Policy Initiative, the group responsible for
promoting the issuance of the Salazar stamp, I am in touch with a very
special history. Included in the archives are his early work, notes,
photographs, letters, FBI files, the coroner's report and most
special, the actual typewriter he used to write with. I get a feeling
of frozen time. Yet truthfully, as I speak with his family, friends
and colleagues, what strikes me is that he has not been forgotten and
that his death is still an open wound. His memory is living history.
While many of us will always seek answers and justice, after a
generation, it is also now time to remember him for the contributions
he made, both to the journalism profession and to the world we live
in. ROBERTO DR. CINTLI RODRIGUEZ
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