On August 29, 1970, journalist Rubén Salazar died instantly when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy Thomas Wilson fired an 8-inch bullet-shaped tear gas projectile into the back of his head. Salazar and his colleague Guillermo Restrepo had ducked into the Silver Dollar bar after fighting had broken out between marchers and police officers during the massive National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War that drew more than 20,000 people into the streets of East Los Angeles.
Restrepo later recalled that Salazar told him they were being followed, so they slipped into the bar to lose their trackers and use the restroom. The bar had a curtain over the door. An eyewitness recalled that when two sheriffs came to the door, one held back the curtain and the other—Wilson—shot the projectile. Restrepo recalled the gun was aimed directly at their heads.
When homicide detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department interviewed Wilson hours later, he said a bystander had thought he saw armed men enter the bar and had fired his weapon to get the men to come out. Witnesses told the detectives there had been no gunmen at the bar. A coroner’s inquest determined Salazar’s death was accidental. Wilson resigned from the Sheriff’s Department and left Los Angeles. The county admitted no wrongdoing but paid Salazar’s widow and three young children at least $700,000, worth close to $6 million today.
At the time of his death, Salazar was the most famous and influential Latino journalist in the United States. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1928, Salazar grew up in El Paso, Texas. After graduating from high school, he served in the U.S. Army and became a U.S. citizen after his service. He graduated from Texas Western College in 1954 with a degree in journalism and went to work at the El Paso Herald-Post, where his deep investigative work caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation almost immediately as Salazar exposed corruption and violence in the El Paso City Jail.
By 1959, Salazar was working at the Los Angeles Times where, among other assignments, he covered the Vietnam War. Back in the United States in 1968, he began to focus on the lives of Mexican-Americans, especially those in East Los Angeles. The media largely ignored the Latino community there except when it covered crimes.
In those years, the Mexican American community in the United States was building an exciting new intellectual and social movement: the Chicano Movement. In the introduction to his 2015 book The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement, historian Mario T. Garza explained that an earlier generation of Mexican Americans had focused on assimilating to Anglo culture, working to break down barriers to jobs, housing, education, the legal system, and voting, and fighting cultural stereotyping.
But in the 1960s, young Mexican Americans, most of whom had been born in the U.S., began to reimagine their community and its position in the United States. Calling themselves “Chicanos,” they called for a new identity based in the understanding that they were not outsiders at all, but rather natives of the northern region of old Mexico, a region that did not become part of the United States until long after the Chicano people—Indigenous Americans mixed with the descendents of Spanish invaders—had settled there.
Chicanos noted that they had not moved into the United States, but rather the United States border had moved over them. The U.S. had taken over the land on which they lived in 1848 after the U.S.-Mexico War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had established the new boundary between the two countries far to the south of where it had been before, was supposed to guarantee the land titles of those Mexican landowners over whom the border had moved. But U.S. courts had disregarded the terms of the treaty and refused to recognize the rights of Mexicans, most of whom lost their land.
The Chicanos saw parallels between their own history and that of colonized peoples around the world. And in the 1960s, as new nations rebelled against the colonial powers that had sought to erase their culture, Chicanos worked to address poverty and racism by recovering their cultural identity and determining their own future.
This cultural autonomy manifested itself in the public schools. Los Angeles County had the biggest Latino community in the United States and sent more than 130,000 students to the public schools. But officials expected the students to become manual laborers and made little effort to steer them toward college, while they denigrated Mexican American history and forbade the students to speak Spanish. Graduation rates were abysmal: at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, the dropout rate was 57.5%. Those who did make it to college despite their lack of college preparatory classes fared little better. Mexican American students had a college graduation rate of about 0.1%.
Social studies teacher Salvador Castro at Lincoln High School urged Mexican American students to see themselves as central to the development of the state and the nation. In 1963, he and other teachers organized the Chicano Youth Leadership Conference to inspire students to address the failures of the educational system for Mexican American students and to urge those students to graduate from high school and college, as well as to demand better from their local schools.
Filmmaker Moctesuma Esparza, who attended the Youth Leadership Conference in 1965, recalled how life was changing in the late 1960s. “This is 1967, while the Vietnam War is in full bore, and protests are growing, and the Civil Rights Movement is flourishing. And throughout the world, young people are looking to change the world. And this was not lost on the kids in East L.A. They were able to see what their own circumstances were and how they were being oppressed, how they were being denied an opportunity for an education, an opportunity to fulfill their lives. And so, it was not difficult to organize them. They wanted to be organized. They wanted to do something.”
The students decided to launch walkouts, or “blowouts,” from school in March 1968. In the first week of the month, an estimated 15,000 students walked out of Woodrow Wilson, Garfield, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Belmont, Venice, and Jefferson High Schools. Administrators barred the doors of the schools, and police officers beat the students with nightsticks, but still they walked out.
On March 28 they produced a list of demands, asking that teachers who showed bias toward Mexican American students be removed and that curriculum center Mexican American history and experience in schools where a majority of the students shared that heritage. They demanded that curriculum in the schools acknowledge Mexican American history as American history.
The Los Angeles Board of Education rejected their demands, and three days later the police arrested thirteen of the walkout organizers for “conspiracy to disturb the peace.” Esparza later recalled that the press portrayed the protesters as “un-American. That we were outside agitators in our own community. That we were ungrateful, and that ‘they’ were doing the best they could for a population that really didn't have (what it took) to succeed.”
Salazar covered the blowouts for the Los Angeles Times and, in February 1970, wrote a column titled “Who Is a Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?” “A Chicano is a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself,” Salazar began. “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 Italian explorer’s trip to the ‘New World.’” Salazar noted that “Mexican-Americans, though indigenous to the Southwest, are on the lowest rung scholastically, economically, socially and politically. Chicanos feel cheated. They want to effect change. Now.” “Chicanos,” he wrote, “are merely fighting to become ‘Americans’...but with a Chicano outlook.”
In April 1970, Salazar left the Times to become the news director for the Spanish-language television station in Los Angeles, KMEX. Salazar said in an interview that he “wanted to try my hand at communicating with the Mexican American community directly and in their language.”
But relations between Mexican American journalists and the police were deteriorating as police cracked down on the movement and on Chicano protesters increasingly frustrated by their exclusion from political power. Salazar collected information on police abuse, and in June he captured the paranoia and harassment of the Nixon administration toward protesters when he wrote that the “mood is not being helped by our political and law-and-order leaders who are trying to discredit militants in the barrios as subversive or criminal.”
Meanwhile, the escalation of the war in Vietnam dovetailed with the high school blowouts to push Chicano organizers toward anti-war protests. Because the public schools did not encourage them to go on to college, Mexican Americans did not qualify for the draft deferments that kept middle-class white Americans out of the war. This meant the government drafted them in disproportionately high numbers.
Chicano activists organized demonstrations against the war beginning in December 1969. They planned a large march for August 29, 1970, where they could illustrate that the Chicano Movement was not confined to students. As many as 20,000 Mexican Americans—entire families—turned out for the Chicano Moratorium in a festive spirit that celebrated their history and culture at the same time they spoke out against discrimination and the war.
But, as historian Garza records, county sheriffs and the Los Angeles Police Department refused to let Chicanos control the streets of East Los Angeles and attacked the participants at the end of the march. Police violence sparked a riot that led to injuries, more than 150 arrests, and the deaths of three people: two Chicano activists and journalist Rubén Salazar.
In the aftermath of Salazar’s death, organizers shifted from demonstrations to political mobilization, building the Raza Unida Party to achieve economic gains, social justice, and political self-determination for Mexican Americans.
When reporter Bob Navarro asked Salazar in May 1970 if he thought the Vietnam War had put the country in danger of a revolution, Salazar answered: “I think we are in a revolution. I think the United States is traditionally a revolutionary country.”
Navarro countered: “But I’m talking about it in the more sinister sense, an attempt to overthrow our more established institutions.” “I think that’s nonsense,” Salazar replied. “We are going to overthrow some of our institutions, but in the way that Americans have always done it: through the ballot, through public consensus. That’s a revolution. That is a real revolution.”
