By Joe Olvera

When Ruben Salazar was a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post in the early 1950s, he pretended drunkenness and got himself thrown into the El Paso County Jail so that he could view first-hand the deplorable conditions and abuses being perpetrated against the incarcerated men and women of Chicano descent. Thanks to his hard-hitting expose, conditions at the jail improved, although the practice of incarcerating Chicanos for even the slightest infraction continued long after his ground-breaking story.

For another investigative piece, he pretended to be a heroin addict so that he could penetrate the infamous “shooting galleries� that belonged to one of the most corrupt destroyer of men’s souls, La Nacha. The shooting galleries in Juarez were testament to man’s inhumanity to man – albeit, they represented a place where a chemically ill person could go for his soothing fix. Salazar knew he was taking his life in his hands because La Nacha was a dangerous woman. His stories had a negative impact on her trade, as Juarez cops began to hound her illegal abodes.

That’s the sort of man, and the sort of reporter, that Salazar was. He wanted to be where the action was. He didn’t care for his personal safety, but he only cared that he was able to present the truth as it presented itself to him – without embellishment, without rancor, without taking sides on an issue. He was a reporter par excellence. Unfortunately, though, that’s the very thing that killed him.

Salazar was born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and attended UT El Paso. While still a student, he began his newspaper career. His intrepid ways took him to one of the highest planes in Journalism – The Los Angeles Times. It was while he was covering one of the singularly most important dates in Chicano history that Salazar lost his life. His courage and dedication in the line of fire caught up to him, finally, in East Los Angeles – when his life was snuffed out by one Tom Wilson, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy.

On August 29, 1970, during the Chicano Moratorium to protest the Vietnam War, Wilsonfired a tear-gas projectile into the Silver Dollar Cafe, where Salazar had gone for a respite from the turmoil and violence that was threatening to tear L.A. apart. Wilson, some people believe, may have fired directly at Salazar. The projectile penetrated Salazar’s skull, killing him instantly.

This man who was a seeker of truth – his life had been destroyed because he was too honest, too truthful. Ironically, he was killed in the prime of his life, age 42, as he covered what became one of the most violent periods in U.S. history. The protest against the Vietnam War was not so much against the war itself, as it was against the disproportionate number of Chicanos who were fighting and dying in that far-flung shore. Chicanos represented only 5 percent of the U.S. population at that time, but they were 20 percent of the casualties.

Salazar’s death was ruled a homicide, but there was never any legal action taken against Wilson, or against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. There still is the belief that the investigation and inquest were deliberately flawed. The reality is, however, that Salazar was becoming an irritant to Los Angeles officials because of his insistence on making Chicanos a visible minority.

Salazar’s columns spoke about the hardships and the discrimination that Chicanos were suffering in that City of Angels. Especially alarming to the anti-Chicano racists were columns in which he verbally punished cops because of their abusive ways, and because of the system’s inadequacies in alleviating the concerns of the Chicano population. Some of my favorite Salazar columns of that era, include:



* Who is a Chicano? And what is it the Chicanos want? – in this column, Salazar writes: “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself. He resents being told Columbus‘discovered’ America when the Chicano’s ancestors, the Mayans and the Aztecs, founded highly sophisticated civilizations centuries before Spain financed the Spanish explorer’s trip to the ‘New World.’ Chicanos resent Anglo pronouncements that Chicanos are ‘culturally deprived’ or that the fact that they speak Spanish is a ‘problem.’ Chicanos will tell you that their culture predates that of the Pilgrims and that Spanish was spoken in America before English and so the ‘problem’ is not theirs but the Anglos’ who don’t speak Spanish.�



Maligned Word: Mexican – “Mexican. That good name has been vilified for so long that even in the Southwest, where Mexicans are as plentiful as Yankees in New England, the word is used cautiously….The reason is that the word Mexican has been dragged through the mud of racism since the Anglos arrived in the Southwest. History tells us that when King Fisher, the famous Texas gunman was asked how many notches he had on his gun, he answered: ‘Thirty-seven, not counting Mexicans.’ Remember the Alamo is still used as an anti-Mexican insult where Remember Pearl Harbor has been forgotten.�



“Don’t make the bato loco go the way of the zoot suiter� – Salazar makes the distinction between the zoot suiters of the past and the batos locos of today. “A bato loco is a zoot suiter with a social conscience. He may be an ex-con, a marijuana smoker and dangerously defiant. But the difference between the zoot suiter or pachuco of the early 40s and a present bato loco, literally a crazy guy, is that the bato loco is experiencing a social revolution and so is learning and liking political power. Recently, a front-page story appeared in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, which warns of possible violence in the Southwest’s Chicano barrios. According to the newspaper, Jose Angel Gutierrez, a Texas Chicano activist who holds a master’s degree in political science, said that ‘It’s too late for the gringo to make amends. Violence has got to come.’ This may sound scandalously alarming, but the mood in the barrios seems to back it up.�



See what I mean? These bits and pieces that I culled from columns Salazar wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 1970, gives you an idea of why he was hated so much by the establishment, and why he was revered so much by those who benefited from his hard-hitting words – mainly, Chicanos. If you think about it, however, things haven’t changed that much, have they? Salazar is being honored again this year, as he has been honored since the day he was murdered. Please remember him. Lest we forget.

Sin Fin

Joe Olvera ©, 2002