“If you have to ask, you’ll never understand.”
Salazar wrote for the LA Times and the Santa Rosa Press, and for that America gave him awards and named streets and parks and university buildings for him–but America also killed him for it. Ruben wrote about poverty and corruption and violence, he told stories about people victimized by the police and by bureaucrats and landlords, and most of all he wrote that to be Chicano in America was always to be forced to live in two worlds. He wrote that immigrants and laborers and Latin peoples wanted change, recognition, and acknowledgment that their voices were real. LA County Sherrifs killed him with a tear gas canister in 1970; his last story was about students protesting the war.
(This image comes from the Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection at the UCLA Library.)
Recent Comments