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Subject: Latinos Who Think It's Better Now Should Reread Salazar
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Latinos Who Think It's Better Now Should Reread Salazar

URL:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-000069267aug26.story

   <p>By FRANK del OLMO
   <p>On Wednesday, it will be 31 years since my friend, mentor and former
   Times colleague
   Ruben Salazar was killed. Salazar was the first
   Mexican American
   journalist to write
   for this newspaper specifically
   about Latino issues, and he did it with such prescience that his work
   is still
   quoted.
   <p>Salazar died Aug. 29, 1970. His head was shattered by a bullet-like
   tear gas projectile fired by an L.A. County sheriff's deputy. The
   lawman was one of hundreds of officers who descended on East L.A. that
   hot, smoggy afternoon to control the city's worst riot since Watts had
   exploded five years earlier.
   <p>The deputy fired the projectile into a small bar on Whittier
   Boulevard, the Silver Dollar Cafe, after being told that a man with a
   rifle was inside. There was no gunman, we now know, only some
   frightened bar patrons, a news crew from Spanish-language TV station
   KMEX and Salazar, who was KMEX's news director as well as a regular
   Times contributor.
   <p>In the final weeks of his life, Salazar had been
   writing about--and having KMEX reporters cover--egregious cases of
   police brutality. He was so aggressive about it that his superiors at
   both KMEX and The Times were pressured by local law enforcement
   officials to rein him in. For him to die at the hands of a local cop,
   whatever the circumstances, was a coincidence too incredible to be
   easily accepted.
   <p>Although a coroner's jury concluded that Salazar died "at the hands of
   another," none of the deputies involved was charged with a crime. Once
   Salazar's family settled a lawsuit against the county, the matter was
   laid to rest. Or so local authorities hoped.
   <p>Instead, Salazar became a larger figure in death than he had been in
   life. Much to the chagrin of many cops--and more than a few reporters
   who preferred to remember Salazar as the hard-boiled newsman he
   was--Salazar became, to the activist Chicanos he had reported on, a
   martyr.
   <p>Today, the Eastside park where the 1970 rioting broke out after police
   broke up a Latino protest march bears Salazar's name. So do schools,
   community centers and scholarship funds.
   <p>Yet I sense among a new generation of Latino activists a tendency to
   assume that what happened in 1970--not just to Salazar, but to the
   community he covered--can't happen again. Some even seem to think it
   isn't relevant to their more prosperous and better-educated
   generation.
   <p>I can understand their confidence. With Latino population growing
   across the nation, Latinos are in powerful positions everywhere. The
   L.A. County sheriff is Latino, as is Los Angeles' city attorney and
   the president of the City Council. A Latino came very close to being
   elected mayor recently.
   <p>Little wonder that some people assume that the issues Salazar wrote
   about are ancient history--and that anyone who brings them up is a
   crotchety old Chicano who should get on with life.
   <p>They need to reread some of Salazar's columns about bad education,
   illegal immigration and, yes, police brutality. Many could have been
   written today.
   <p>Or doubters can drop by the place Salazar died, at 4945 E. Whittier
   Blvd. It's still called the Silver Dollar, but has been turned into a
   cultural center by Ricardo Lopez, one of those crotchety old Chicano
   activists. For the next month, Lopez is featuring an exhibit of photos
   taken the day Salazar died. He's also produced a fictional play
   telling the story, which will be performed there through Sept. 16.
   <p>If only it had been fiction. Because it wasn't, every police officer
   in the Southwest carries a special burden to this day. So do the
   Latino political leaders who are in positions to hold officers
   accountable when they treat Latino barrios as territory to be occupied
   rather than communities to be served.
   <p>As the saying goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned
   to repeat it.
   <p>Frank del
   Olmo is
   an
   associate editor of The
   Times