Ruben Salazar

Ruben Salazar (March 3, 1928 – August 29, 1970) was a civil rights activist and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, the first Mexican journalist from mainstream media to cover the Chicano community, in the US.

Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, March 3, 1928, Salazar was brought to the United States with his family in 1929.

Salazar began his U.S. naturalization process on October 15, 1947, when he submitted his application for a certificate of arrival and preliminary form for a declaration of intention of citizenship.

After high school, he served in the U.S. Army for two years.

Salazar attended Texas Western College, graduating in 1954 with a degree in journalism.

He obtained a job as an investigative journalist at the now-defunct El Paso Herald-Post; at one point he posed as a vagrant to get arrested while he investigated the poor treatment of prisoners in the El Paso jail.

After his tenure at the Herald-Post, Salazar worked at several California newspapers, including the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

Salazar was a news reporter and columnist for the Los Angeles Times from 1959 to 1970.

During his career, Salazar became one of the most prominent figures within the Chicano movement.

During Salazar's time as the news director for KMEX, which is a Spanish-language station since 1962, he became more outspoken on Chicano issues and gave priority to cases that were important to the Chicano Movement.

This included the killing of the Sánchez cousins by police which brought forth a community-wide protest as well as covering the Chicano Moratorium which ultimately led to his death.

Salazar's strong support for the Chicano movement as a Mexican-American distinguished him early on from other journalists in mainstream media.

With a strong disparity of racial minorities in news organizations nationwide, Salazar felt it was his personal and professional responsibility to give necessary attention to the actions led by his fellow Chicanos in East Los Angeles.

He was a foreign correspondent in his early years at the Times, covering the 1965 United States occupation of the Dominican Republic, the Vietnam War, and the Tlatelolco massacre (the latter while serving as the Times' bureau chief in Mexico City).

When Salazar returned to the US in 1968, he focused on the Mexican-American community and the Chicano movement, writing about East Los Angeles, an area largely ignored by the media except for coverage of crimes.

He became the first Chicano journalist to cover the ethnic group while working in a large general circulation publication.

Many of his pieces were critical of the Los Angeles government's treatment of Chicanos, particularly after he came into conflict with police during the East L.A. walkouts.

While reporting for the Times, Salazar forged relationships with members of the Chicano movement, including draft protester Rosalio Muñoz.

Salazar was killed during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War on August 29, 1970, in East Los Angeles, California.

During the march, Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy Thomas Wilson struck and immediately killed Salazar with a tear-gas projectile.

No criminal charge was filed, but Salazar's family reached an out-of-court financial settlement with the county.

In January 1970, Salazar left the Times to become news director for the Spanish language television station KMEX in Los Angeles.

At KMEX, he investigated allegations of police officers' planting evidence to implicate Chicanos and the July 1970 police shooting of two unarmed Mexican nationals.

According to Salazar, he was visited by undercover LAPD detectives who warned him that his investigations were "dangerous in the minds of barrio people."

In February 1970, just six months prior to his death, Salazar made his support for the Chicano movement particularly clear when he authored an article in the Los Angeles Times, titled, "Who Is A Chicano? And What Is It the Chicanos Want?"

In this piece, Salazar not only describes the evolving identity of Chicanos and the historic importance of the movement, but he details his frustration with the lack of Mexican-American representation among the elected representatives in the Los Angeles city council.

Salazar writes, "Mexican-Americans, though large in numbers, are so politically impotent that in Los Angeles, where the country's largest single concentration of Spanish-speaking live, they have no one of their own on the City Council. This in a city politically sophisticated enough to have three Negro council-men."

Due to his support of the Chicano movement, Salazar became an FBI target and was the subject of an FBI internal file.

He was noted as being cooperative during his interactions with the FBI during the investigation of Stokely Carmichael, but he had drawn the FBI's attention during the Korean War when he began corresponding with a white female pacifist regarding the loss of his application for US citizenship by the army.

During his Carmichael interview, he is noted as saying that he could not be a witness to the speech that FBI was referencing as he was not present to which he was then asked to obtain a video of the speech to present to the FBI.

While Salazar accepted, he did so under the notion that he would publicize the fact that the FBI was looking for the tape.

As they feared the civil unrest this could cause if publicized, the FBI rescinded their request.

Due to the fact that the FBI and the LAPD correlated civil unrest with communism, and Salazar reported at many events where civil unrest occurred, he was viewed in his files as a communist.

LAPD also held files on Salazar specifically due to an article that Salazar wrote about the Chief of Police, Chief Davis, wherein he reported the fact that Davis referred to Mexican "tyranny and dictatorship".

While local and national law enforcement were displeased with Salazar's reporting, he continued to write articles advocating the rights of the Chicano community.

On August 29, 1970, Salazar was covering the National Chicano Moratorium March, organized to protest the Vietnam War, in which some believed that a disproportionate number of Latinos served and were killed.

The march ended with a rally that was broken up by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department using tear gas.

Panic and rioting ensued.

Salazar had taken a break from covering the march and was resting in a nearby bar when a tear gas round fired by police through a curtained doorway struck him in the head, killing him.

A coroner's inquest ruled the shooting of the tear gas projectile to be "death at the hands of another," but Tom Wilson, the sheriff's deputy who fired the shot that killed Salazar, was never prosecuted.