My phone call with Ruben Salazar
I had never heard of Ruben Salazar, nor had much of America outside Southern California, until Time magazine in 1970 published a story about him…
A VOXXI reporter tells the story about his encounter with Ruben Salazar (Photo: Twitter/@ViveLoHoy)
I had never heard of Ruben Salazar, nor had much of America outside Southern California, until Time magazine in 1970 published a story about him in its Media section.
Salazar, who had moved from the Los Angeles Times to the citys Spanish TV station, had become the rage of the people, as Jean Paul Marat had said of himself during the French Revolution, in reporting abuses and injustices suffered by Mexican Americans, particularly at the hands of law enforcement agencies.
SEE ALSO: Ruben Salazar was a journalist living in two cultures
Cops and authorities were beside themselves and had complained to the station and to the Times, which was publishing his columns about the discrimination and inequality of life experienced by the citys Hispanics.
Several of my fellow reporters at the Dallas Times Herald, my first reporting job after college, brought the article to my attention, but it was a veteran former war correspondent who took a more active interest in me meeting Salazar.
Warren Bosworth, one of the papers assistant city editors, knew Salazar personally. They had been reporters together covering the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, and one day Bosworth called me over to his desk and handed me his telephone.
Ruben Salazar was on the other end.
You need to be in L.A., Ruben said after dispensing of the niceties. Come to L.A. Ill get you on at the Times, and you can help me kick butt here.
I was flattered, but I was barely out of college, and I had goals of going to the East Coast, not the West Coast.
Journalist Ruben Salazar (Photo: Twitter/@Emottaman)
Still, moved by Rubens encouragement, I made tentative plans to visit him in Los Angeles.
That visit, though, never materialized. A few weeks later, Salazars time as a cause celeb was cut short.
On August 29, 1970, Salazar was killed assassinated, some activists believed at the height of his fame as the most controversial Chicano journalist of all time.
Ruben and his TV crew had been covering an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in East Los Angeles where an estimated 25,000 Mexican-Americans from across the Southwest were protesting the disproportionately high number of U.S. Hispanic troops killed in Southeast Asia.
Taking a break, Ruben and his crew went into a bar called the Silver Dollar Café where deputies were soon responding to a report of an armed man inside.
Those deputies later maintained they were trying to empty the bar when one of them fired a ten-inch tear gas canister into the darkened premises that struck Ruben in the head, killing him instantly.
Salazars friends and others insisted he was targeted by law enforcement because his aggressive coverage of Mexican-American issues had created a growing voice for Latinos caught up in the turbulence of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
At the time of his death, Salazar was also investigating allegations of misconduct by sheriffs deputies and Los Angeles police.
He had told friends that he thought he was being followed by authorities and feared they might do something to discredit his reporting.
Investigations found mistakes committed by the deputies, but no arrests were made in a controversy that would continue for decades.
They killed Ruben, but they havent silenced correcting the injustices, a teary-eyed Bosworth said to me on the Saturday night that Salazar was killed.
We were both working Saturday night shifts, and I was surprised by Bosworths emotional reaction.
He was a no-nonsense former Marine who had covered the Kennedy Assassination and rarely gave any hint of what he was thinking about stories he assigned.
Even when discussing Salazar, he told me that he personally had not liked the man.
We didnt see eye to eye in Vietnam, and I didnt like the son-of-a-bitch, he said, without elaborating. But that doesnt mean I didnt respect him. And I thought you should meet him.
