A Memory, a Legacy

This seems to be the year for observing major anniversaries of key events in our past. For Latinos, Aug. 29, 1970, is such a day--the humid Saturday afternoon when rioting engulfed the East L.A. barrio. But I hadn’t planned to write about that today.

Surely, I thought, Latinos don’t need to be reminded of how the largest Chicano demonstration in history, more than 20,000 people protesting the Vietnam War, was suddenly broken up by police, and how that set off an afternoon of rioting that left dozens of stores looted and burned, hundreds of people injured and three dead. The most prominent victim was Ruben Salazar, news director for the Spanish-language television station KMEX, who had also been The Times’ columnist on Latino affairs.

It is still difficult for me to write about Ruben’s death. His head was shattered by a tear-gas projectile fired into a tavern where he and dozens of others had sought safety from the rampage in the streets. While some Chicanos believe to this day that he was targeted--murdered--because of the tough columns that he had written on police mistreatment of Latinos, I long ago concluded that he was just the unlucky victim of a dumb mistake made by a frightened, badly trained cop.

And it still troubles me that Latinos who had never even met Ruben made him into a martyr for la causa. There is no role more inappropriate for a man who was as skeptical a reporter as I ever knew.

So I expected to write today’s column on some timely issue that deserves the attention of Latinos and non-Latinos alike. Something hopeful, like the planned expansion of an innovative bilingual-education program in the Los Angeles city schools this fall. Or a controversial topic, like the possibility that President Reagan’s aggressive stance toward Nicaragua is drawing us into a new Vietnam-style war.

After all, things have changed for the better since that day 15 years ago when Chicanos in Los Angeles jolted the nation into noticing the social problems that festered in poor barrios. There is still poverty in places like East Los Angeles. But more Latinos are graduating from high schools there than 15 years ago. The immigration service still harasses Latinos, but other law-enforcement agencies are more sensitive in dealing with them.

And many of the ardent young activists who demonstrated on Aug. 29, 1970--perhaps even joined in the riot afterward--today are professionals holding responsible and important positions. One even works in the Reagan Administration. Some of these young, upwardly mobile Latinos still like to reminisce about past events from the Chicano movement, like the 1970 riot. An aura of lost innocence pervades these recollections, as if what they are doing now is not as meaningful as their days of protest. I remember those days, too, but I have no appetite for a Chicano “Big Chill”--a barrio version of the popular movie about former college radicals who spend a reunion bemoaning the fact they have become prosperous Yuppies.

That is why I decided that 1985 was a good year to let the 1970 riots fade into memory. I left Los Angeles at the start of August to teach for three weeks in the Summer Program for Minority Journalists at UC Berkeley. By ignoring the anniversary when I resumed my column today, I hoped to remind Chicanos who dwell on the past that there are many important issues facing them in the present.

Then I met Antonio Zavala. A 36-year-old Chicano from Chicago, he was one of five Latinos in this year’s 15-person summer class at Berkeley’s journalism school. Zavala had some rough edges, but he also had a burning desire to be a journalist. Like other Latinos who have been admitted to the intense training program at Berkeley, Zavala wrote well, but he needed training in how to pursue facts and to learn the discipline of a professional journalist.

It was not easy for Zavala, but eventually he learned. Soon he will begin work as a reporter for a daily in El Paso, Tex., where Salazar began his career.

Just before the training program ended, Zavala told me his professional goal: “I want to be like Ruben Salazar,” he said with genuine emotion. “I told my editor (at a Chicano community newspaper), ‘I am going to Berkeley to learn, and I’ll become as great as Ruben Salazar.’ ”

That is when I realized that I should write about the 1970 riot, and Ruben Salazar, one more time. While I might not approve of what some Chicanos had made of Ruben’s memory, Zavala had shown me that it could be used constructively, by reminding people of what Ruben had accomplished in life rather than death.

I have written before--and I still believe--that nobody really knew the man who died that bloody August afternoon in East L.A. But I do know that Ruben Salazar would have appreciated being remembered as a newsman, and that his memory has brought more than one Chicano into this great business of ours.