(NAME-MCE) Stamp Honors Journalist Ruben Salazar

[Anselmo Villanueva]

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Stamp Honors Journalist Ruben Salazar

La Prensa San Diego <http://www.laprensa-sandiego.org/>, Commentary, Dr.
Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, Posted: Mar 26, 2008
*Editor's Note: The issuance of a U.S. Postal stamp is a fitting tribute to
Ruben Salazar, yet, a stamp is not large enough to convey his life's work*.

For close to 40 years, my memories of journalist, Ruben Salazar, have been
of smoke, fire, riots, rampaging police, and his premature death in East L.A.
on August 29, 1970. Seared into my memory is running home every day to see
the Inquest held into his death. What is actually seared is not the fact
that he was killed by a nine-inch tear-gas projectile, fired into the Silver
Dollar Café by a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy, but rather, that no
one was ever brought to justice. Neither was anyone brought to justice for
the deaths of Angel Diaz or Lyn Ward, who also died on that day.
[image: ruben salazar]
After years of memories of injustice, I instead choose to remember him this
year on his birthday: Feliz cumpleaños – Happy Birthday, Ruben. On March
3rd, this pioneering journalist from Juarez-El Paso should have gotten 80
candles. Instead, on April 22, he will get a belated birthday present – his
own 42-cent U.S. postal stamp. Also being honored are four other journalists
Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, George Polk and Eric Sevareid.

Lost in the controversy over his death and the violent repression of the
National Chicano Moratorium rally (attended by 30,000 people) against the
Vietnam War – was the historic nature of his journalism. Clearly, he was a
journalist before his time and what he reported in the El Paso Herald Post
and the Los Angeles Times, from 1955 through 1970, still seems relevant to
this day. He covered an unpopular war; Vietnam. He also covered Cuba, the
Dominican Republic and the upheaval in Mexico in the 1960s. He also wrote
about the anti-war movement, black-brown relations, police repression, the
border, the inhumane treatment of migrants, the trouble in the lettuce
fields, and social and educational inequalities. In his last interview, he
even complained about a meddling vice president who was attempting to stifle
press freedom.

While not an activist, his journalism brought the emerging Chicano civil
rights movement to the nation's attention. He defined for the nation – in
language that mainstream society understood – what it meant to be Chicano.
On Feb 6, 1970, he wrote: "A Chicano is a Mexican American with a non-Anglo
image of himself." Activists to this day cringe at that description; for
activists, a Chicano/Chicana was more than an image, but an unapologetic
social and political rebel.

The issuance of a U.S. Postal stamp is a fitting tribute, yet, a stamp is
not large enough to convey his life's work, nor the impact that his death
has had upon an entire generation. The lack of prosecution of anyone over
his death (or Diaz or Ward) accelerated what anthropologist Victor Turner
refers to as a "primary process" or a massive volcanic political eruption.
In this case, Mexicans – through the organizing efforts of the national
moratorium – rebelled against years of living a dehumanized existence. It is
similar to the process that exploded during the 1910-1920 Mexican Revolution
and also during the Mexican Independence movement 100 years before against a
brutal Spain.

In California, this process can be traced to the East L.A. Walkouts of 1968
and to the even earlier strikes and boycotts of the United Farm Worker's
Movement throughout the country. And yet, it was his death that completely
unleashed this process or movement nationwide.

Those seeds of injustice created an instant martyr. Ironically, a primary
process can be both an explosive time and a time of intense creativity. Such
has been the case in regards to Salazar, though that political activity and
cultural explosion – which had actually brought him to the protest that day
– has been mischaracterized by historians as a nationalistic and separatist
impulse. My experience tells me quite the reverse; that it was a
rehumanization project in response to an ultranationalistic impulse in which
Mexicans were not always welcomed or treated as fully human.

Nearly 40 years after his death, I have begun to develop a journalism class
on his life's work. As I have been perusing over archives of the Media,
Democracy and Policy Initiative, the group responsible for promoting the
issuance of the Salazar stamp, I am in touch with a very special history.
Included in the archives are his early work, notes, photographs, letters,
FBI files, the coroner's report and most special, the actual typewriter he
used to write with. I get a feeling of frozen time. Yet truthfully, as I
speak with his family, friends and colleagues, what strikes me is that he
has not been forgotten and that his death is still an open wound. His memory
is living history.

While many of us will always seek answers and justice, after a generation,
it is also now time to remember him for the contributions he made, both to
the journalism profession and to the world we live in.

Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez*, who grew up on Whittier Blvd. in East L.A.,
is a long-time journalist-columnist and the author of "Justice: A Question
of Race"– a book that chronicles his own police brutality trials in East Los
Angeles. He is currently a faculty fellow at the Mexican American Studies
and Research Center at the University of Arizona. He can be reached at:
XColumn at gmail.com or go to the website for the Media, Democracy and Policy
Initiative at: http://mdpi.arizona.edu/index.php*

Source:
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=f04bd70dcddc6195f6200680ea8c5109