Bringing Back an L.A. Hero : Ruben Salazar gave a passionate voice to city’s Chicanos : BORDER CORRESPONDENT: Selected Writings, 1955-1970, <i> By Ruben Salazar</i> . <i> Edited and with an introduction by Mario T. Garcia (University of California Press: $28; 283 pp.)</i>

On the 25th anniversary of Ruben Salazar’s death, UC Santa Barbara history and Chicano studies Professor Mario T. Garcia has completed a task that should have been undertaken long ago: exhuming from the ashes of a not-too-distant history the memory of the man who became the martyr of the Chicano Moratorium anti-war protest of Aug. 29, 1970, when he was killed by an L.A. County sheriff’s tear-gas canister in the midst of the pandemonium in East Los Angeles.

Despite the fact that he was the best-known Mexican American journalist to write for a major metropolitan newspaper in the ‘60s, Salazar today is an unknown to most Angelenos, including many Latinos who were either too young or not yet in the country at the time of the tumultuous events that led to the moratorium. This fascinating collection of Salazar’s journalism, along with Garcia’s lucid introduction, will, I hope, help resurrect this unjustly forgotten figure.

Born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and raised across the Rio Grande in El Paso, Tex., Salazar lived and died in the midst of what Garcia calls a “border experience.” He was the first Mexican American reporter to be hired by the Los Angeles Times and as such was a crucial link between Chicano East L.A. and the rest of the city, which was then--as it is now--astonishingly ignorant of the whys and hows of Chicano Los Angeles. At the time of his death, he was news director of local Spanish-language TV station KMEX.

Like many other Latino writers and journalists, he worked in perpetual ambivalence: He loathed being called a Chicano writer, believing that the moniker unfairly typecast him, but at the same time he clearly sympathized with--and, in the months before his death, passionately advocated--the community and culture he was very much a part of. As such, he struggled to prove himself a writer in the fullest sense, eschewing both the harder rhetorical line that Chicano militants demanded and the more dispassionate mainstream tone that his editors surely expected.

And a writer in the fullest sense is what Salazar was: a talented and consummate professional. Aside from his comprehensive coverage of Mexican Americans in the Southwest from the mid-1950s to the time of his death, he also worked as a foreign correspondent for The Times, sending dispatches from Vietnam, the Dominican Republic and Mexico City. By Aug. 29, 1970, at the age of 42, he’d matured into a writer who had found his voice and found a way to be fair and objective in his reporting and a persuasive advocate in his news analysis. Salazar’s reportage and editorial writing, in the words of H.L. Mencken, comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.

Reading through Salazar’s writings 30 years and more after the events he covered is both fascinating and depressing. These, after all, were the first accounts of Mexican Americans to appear in The Times that were free of the prejudice and anti-Mexican sentiment that tinged earlier journalistic attempts. His reports were carefully crafted and, in many ways, startlingly prescient. If one changed the dates and the names, they could easily pass for stories written today:

Stories about how the drop-out rates for Mexican American students were nearly twice as high as those for Anglos. About the constant specter of police abuse in the barrios. About the tensions between organized labor and agribusiness in the picking fields and the tragic enmity between Mexican American migrant farm laborers and their immigrant counterparts. About the decades-old dream coalition between blacks and Latinos that never materialized because of bickering and cultural misunderstanding. About the fight over bilingual education in the public schools.

Again and again, Salazar drives home the point that Mexican Americans are unique in their cultural experience, different from European immigrants both for their proximity to their home country and for the fact that their home country once governed what is now the American Southwest.

I have written for both mainstream and alternative newspapers and magazines for a decade, covering these very same stories. What is depressing is that the story hasn’t changed. In this sense the book reads like a tragic eternal return: 1994’s Proposition 187, aimed at restricting the rights of illegal immigrants, is the Operation Wetback of the ‘50s is the Repatriation of the ‘30s is the Greaser Laws of the late 19th Century. A depressing history, to be sure, but one that, if studied, can help us build a fairer society.

In bylines dating to the mid-1950s, Salazar gives us all the characters of the the modern drama in Southwestern America, from the militant Chicano nationalists espousing cultural separatism to the more centrist Mexican Americans doing their best to redress historic wrongs through the system; from do-gooder white liberals who patronize minorities to racist hotheads and their sometimes murderous designs.

In his early works, Salazar explores the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of El Paso with the wide-eyed wonder of a cub reporter discovering for the first time the joys and tragedies of the Mexican barrio. One of his first journalistic coups entailed having himself arrested on a made-up drunk and disorderly charge to write an expose of the harrowing conditions of El Paso’s jail system, an article entitled “25 Hours in Jail--I lived in a Chamber of Horrors.”

One can only imagine the pressure Salazar must have felt when he arrived at The Times. He was absolutely alone at the Gray Lady (a more apt name would have been White Lady), the first Mexican American at a paper whose record covering L.A.’s biggest minority had been neglectful at best and at worst outrightly racist. (During the so-called Zoot Suit Riots of 1942, yellow headlines fomented tensions between servicemen and the Zoot Suiters, who were invariably referred to in the paper as hoodlums.)

Salazar must have been aware of the historic nature of his appointment and he wasted no time in trying to make up for the mistakes of the past. In 1963, he published a groundbreaking six-part series, “Spanish-Speaking Angelenos: A Culture in Search of a Name.” It is a stunning piece of journalism. Single-handedly, Salazar did for The Times and L.A. journalism what perhaps only historian Carey McWilliams (author of the seminal study of Mexican Americans, “North from Mexico”) had been able to achieve before: painstakingly describe Mexican Americans in all their social, economic and cultural complexity.

Demythologizing whites’ notions of dirty Mexicans as well as the equally prejudiced romantic image of Spanish dons and senoritas, the series revealed Chicano culture in all its magnificent contradictoriness: a people who are more American than the Americans (earning more Medals of Honor proportionate to their numbers in the armed services than any other group) and more Mexican than the Mexicans (Chicanos harking back to Old World traditions given up long ago by the Mexicans across the border). A people desperately in search of the American Dream, a people denied that dream over and over again.

Still, Salazar was uncomfortable with the voice-of-the-voiceless mantle that was thrust upon him, so when The Times editors offered him the job of foreign correspondent, he leaped at the chance. A tour of the Dominican Republic during the American intervention of 1965 was followed by a short stint in Vietnam and, finally, a tour of Mexico during the student uprisings of 1968, just before the Olympics.

Back home, The Times, in its pre-multicultural awkwardness, still had not found another Mexican American reporter--and this at a time when things were heating up on the streets of East Los Angeles. According to a Times editor interviewed by Garcia for his introductory essay, Times Publisher Otis Chandler recognized that the paper was in trouble and specifically requested that Salazar be called back to report on the burgeoning Chicano movement.

Up to this point, the best of Salazar’s writings had been thoughtful, nuanced distillations of Mexican American culture for the white reader of The Times. But with the advent of Chicano militancy, Salazar’s selection of topics, and even the tone of his writing, shifted. In his final series of columns for The Times (written after he became news director at KMEX), Salazar assumed the role of advocacy journalist.

The more objective reporting he’d done up to this point was, in a sense, the homework for this series of impassioned pleas for cross-cultural and cross-generational understanding. Make no mistake, Salazar was no revolutionary. But by early 1970, he was calling on both conservative Mexican Americans and non-Latino Angelenos to listen to the Chicano students walking out of classes across East Los Angeles, protesting the Vietnam War and the lack of educational opportunity for minorities.

Mexicans, though indigenous to the Southwest, are on the lowest rung scholastically, economically, socially and politically, he wrote. Chicanos feel cheated. They want change now. He gently criticized the more radical elements of Chicano cultural nationalism but embraced the general goals of the movement. By Aug. 29, 1970, Salazar’s column was arguably the most powerful Chicano media voice in California, given the political potency of The Times.

That his writing ruffled the feathers of the powers that be is underscored by the FBI’s opening a file on Salazar in his final years, a document cited by Garcia. Our men in blue kept a file on him too, writing up Salazar as a left-wing reporter. All of which lends some credence to what Salazar had been writing all along: that Chicanos had never been considered full-fledged Americans. If Mexicanos crossed the border looking for work, they were considered outlaws. If Chicanos complained about social conditions, they were accused of looking for handouts. And if writers such as Salazar denounced injustice, they were denounced as communists or, in today’s nativist lingo, agents of Mexico.

The last two years of Salazar’s life bear an eerie resemblance to last year in Southern California. In 1968, he covered the blowouts in which tens of thousands of Chicano students walked out of classes. Last October, tens of thousands of students walked out protesting Proposition 187. Salazar begged his readers to listen to the students in his day: Grass-roots movements like the school walkouts bring out important overall issues. And that is what democracy is about, he wrote a few weeks before the moratorium.

Today, there are more than a handful of Latino reporters at The Times and even one high-ranking editor. And yet, above these writers’ objections, the paper endorsed Gov. Pete Wilson in his reelection bid last year--an endorsement, said some Latino staffers at the Times, that appeared to tacitly approve Wilson’s unqualified advocacy of Proposition 187 (even though the paper came out against the proposition in a separate editorial).

Were Salazar alive today, his voice would certainly have been among those of dissenters in the Wilson affair. The larger point to be made is that the term Mexican American obscures the gulf that still separates the two cultures. It is a gulf that Salazar tried to narrow with his words. We would all honor his memory by continuing to close that gap. I suspect that many, many more articles will have to be written--in The Times and elsewhere--before we can cross the border that killed Ruben Salazar.