Rubén Salazar

Mexican-born journalist and writer

• Born: March 3, 1928
• Birthplace: Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico
• Died: August 29, 1970
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

An investigative reporter, Salazar was highly respected for his fearlessness in tackling tough subjects, the quality of his writing, and his advocacy of the rights of Mexican Americans. Simultaneously a broadcast newsman and a newspaper columnist, he was killed on the job, and his death remains shrouded in controversy.

Early Life

Rubén Salazar (rew-BEHN SAL-ah-zar) was born in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, the son of timepiece repairman Salvador Salazar and Luz Chavez Salazar. While still in infancy, he moved with his parents across the Rio Grande to El Paso, Texas. He attended Lamar Elementary School before graduating from El Paso High School. After graduation, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served two years between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Korean War. After leaving the military, Salazar became a naturalized American citizen. He enrolled at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) on the G.I. Bill and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1954.

During his time in college, Salazar wrote for the student newspaper, The Prospector. In his junior and senior years, he worked as an investigative reporter at the El Paso Herald-Post, and he went undercover to explore stories that particularly affected the Chicano community. Seeking the truth about reports of prison brutality directed at minorities, he dressed in rags and was arrested as a vagrant. He crossed the border into Juárez and went undercover again to file some of the earliest articles about drug trafficking.

After graduation, Salazar was hired as a reporter at the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, California. In 1957, he moved south to become a reporter for the San Francisco News. Two years later, he joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times.

Life’s Work

In Los Angeles, Salazar married Sally, a non-Hispanic woman, by whom he would father three children. Salazar wrote a regular column for the Los Angeles Times, which focused on the Latino community, then centered in East Los Angeles, and he exposed injustices in education, employment, and civil rights. For his objective, thorough writing, Salazar twice won the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Award, and in 1965 he received an award from the Equal Opportunity Foundation for serving as a minority spokesperson.

In 1965, the Los Angeles Times sent Salazar as a foreign correspondent to Vietnam to document the growing American presence in the war. He was one of the first to report on the disproportionately large number of minorities—especially Latinos—serving in the U.S. military and on the alarming percentage of Latinos among combat casualties. Two years later, Salazar was named the Los Angeles Times’ bureau chief in Mexico City, the first Chicano at a major American newspaper to rise to such a responsible position. Salazar traveled to the Dominican Republic to report on the American invasion. In Mexico City, he covered the massacre of students at Tlatelolco before the start of the 1968 Olympics. While Salazar was reporting from Panama, revolutionaries captured and held him for a time as a suspected Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) undercover spy before releasing him unharmed.

Late in 1968, Salazar returned to the Los Angeles Times as a special assignment reporter, covering the increasingly active Mexican American community in Los Angeles. He filed reports on migrant farmworkers’ fight for equal pay, walkouts, and the rise of the Brown Berets, and he renewed his coverage of the injustices inherent in the high percentage of minorities serving—and dying—in Vietnam. In 1969, he was offered and accepted a position as news director at a Los Angeles Spanish-language television station, KMEX-TV. The Times asked him to continue writing his Chicano-oriented weekly column, and Salazar used both print and broadcast media to campaign against stereotyping, racism, prejudice, segregation, underrepresentation, and inequality.

In his dual capacities, Salazar ultimately fell afoul of law enforcement. In investigating allegations of beatings, the planting of evidence on Latino felony suspects, and other abuses, he accused the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department of treating Chicanos unfairly. The authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), began to investigate him. His movements were closely monitored, and he was followed wherever he went.

Salazar did not retreat in the face of intimidation. In 1970, he and his camera crew were a highly visible presence at the third, and to that date the largest, National Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War, which brought out a sizable crowd of protestors, with estimates ranging from seven thousand to thirty thousand. Though the march in East Los Angeles along Whittier Avenue from Belvedere Park to Laguna Park was peaceful, confrontations between the marchers and law officers broke out, and a full-scale riot ensued. In the melee, dozens of protestors and police officers were injured, stores were burned and looted, scores of people were arrested, and three people—including Salazar— were killed.

Salazar and his camera crew were relaxing over beers in the Silver Dollar Café, more than twenty blocks from the heart of the riot. Suddenly, a deputy sheriff, acting on an alleged report of a gunman on the premises, fired a tear gas canister into the café. The projectile struck Salazar in the temple. He died instantly, at the age of forty-two.

Significance

In death, as in life, Rubén Salazar served as an inspiration. One of only a handful of Hispanics in the era to be elevated to foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and columnist for a major mainstream publication, he became an icon, particularly for a new wave of Latino journalists that emerged during the 1970’s and who made significant contributions to the craft of reporting.

Salazar received many posthumous honors for his courage as an investigative journalist and his excellence as a writer. In 1971, he was the recipient of a special Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Laguna Park, site of the 1970 riot, was renamed Salazar Park. Buildings at Sonoma State University and California State University were named in his honor. A public housing complex in his former hometown of El Paso was also named in his memory, and the city commissioned several murals depicting the reporter. The first inductee into the Hispanic Journalists Hall of Fame, Salazar was the subject of a singular Mexican American tribute—a corrido, or ballad, about his life. In 2008, he received worldwide recognition as part of a United States Postal Service series commemorating outstanding journalists, taking his place alongside John Hersey, Martha Gellhorn, George Polk, and Eric Sevareid.

Bibliography

Chavez, Ernesto. Mi Raza Primero! (My People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. A study of the period during Salazar’s heyday, when Mexican Americans in Southern California began to be empowered.

Mariscal, George. Aztlan and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. An anthology of stories, articles, and recollections that reflect the high rate of participation, injury, and death among Mexican Americans during the Vietnam War.

Salazar, Rubén. Rubén Salazar, Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955-1970. Edited by Mario T. Garcia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. A representative collection of Salazar’s articles and columns.