Mexican American Hall of Fame Honors Unsung Cultural Heroes : Commemoration: Montebello facility is named after the late Ruben Salazar, a journalist. Backers say more focus is needed on the community’s achievers.

Bert Corona, Pancho Gonzalez, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta--the names of these Mexican American heroes and others will soon line the walls of the Ruben Salazar Mexican American Hall of Fame at a leading social services agency in Montebello.

“It’s time to put the light on the unsung heroes of Mexican origin, instead of stressing the gangs and the killings and the border,” said Dionicio Morales, 75, who founded the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation 33 years ago.

A black-and-white portrait of Salazar, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist, stood outside the beige-brick hall Thursday during its dedication. Morales and other Latino leaders said such a commemoration is necessary because the achievements of Mexican Americans go unheralded by mainstream society.

Mexican American leaders “have been placed in a position that the only way you can study them is in a special (Chicano studies) class,” said Frank Villalobos, a Eastside businessman and community activist.

Morales envisions a hall filled with the portraits and biographies of the chosen “unsung heroes.” Those heroes will include Corona, director of a Latino immigrant rights group; Richard (Pancho) Gonzalez, an international tennis champion in the 1950s; Chavez, the late founder of the United Farm Workers union, and Huerta, another key UFW leader.

Fernando Oaxaca, a foundation board member, blamed Hollywood and the news media for creating a negative perception of those of Mexican descent.

“The focus is on our pathology,” Oaxaca said. “Our gangs, our knifings, our accidents, our domestic problems, and nothing much gets written about the success and gradual increases” in education and affluence.

The hall dedicated to Mexican American achievers sits at the beginning of a row of classrooms that the foundation uses to provide vocational training and child-care services to a mostly Mexican American clientele.

The agency, which has a $20-million annual budget, reported that it served 98,064 people in 1994. It moved into the 2.4-acre site, the former Sacred Heart Catholic School for girls, in December. Before buying the building for $2.3 million, the foundation rented facilities in City of Commerce.

Morales said Salazar was an obvious first choice for the hall, where meetings and training classes are held.

It was Salazar who focused attention on the plight of the Mexican American community in Los Angeles, said Oaxaca, a friend of Salazar. Into the 1960s and ‘70s, many equated the word minority only with African Americans, a community that was already being served by social service agencies, Oaxaca said.

Salazar gave extensive coverage to Mexican Americans, writing about the community’s high dropout rate, poor schools and lack of political power.

“He understood what was happening before most people got around to it,” Oaxaca said, “in terms of the reality of the Latinos and the rest of Los Angeles. He saw the discrimination in ways that perhaps even those that were experiencing it didn’t understand it.”

Salazar worked for The Times for 11 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent. He left the newspaper in 1970 to become news director of KMEX-TV, but continued to write a weekly commentary for The Times. He was killed at age 42 by a sheriff’s tear-gas projectile in a East Los Angeles bar, where he had stopped after covering an anti-war demonstration and rioting that erupted along Whittier Boulevard.

Salazar’s death was ruled accidental, but Los Angeles County paid $700,000 to his widow and three children.

Morales said the idea of a Mexican American Hall of Fame came after a recent visit to a cultural center in San Antonio. Morales, the son of Mexican immigrants, said he found the contributions of Polish, German and African Americans commemorated, but nowhere could he find a portrait of a Mexican American.

“I saw a little corner reserved for Mexico and Mexicans,” Morales said. “I said, ‘What about the Mexican Americans?’ ”