por Charlie Ericksen
Hispanic Link News Service
Rubén Salazar
Mexican-American journalist Rubén Salazar held no aspirations to be recognized as a natIonal Latino leader, Yet that’s how a mix of old-timers and college kids who majored in Chicano Studies extol him every Aug. 29, the date in 1970 when he was killed by a cop.
Rubén, ever the joker, would have laughed in your face if you told him that one day his own face would adorn a commemorative U.S. postage stamp. Elaborate dual dedication ceremonies by the U.S. Postal Service in Los Angeles and at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., introduced such a stamp on April 22, 2008. It was a 42-cent one, by coincidence representing the number of years Rubén lived before a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff triggered the missile into Rubén’s head that killed him instantly, Rubén’s blonde late wife Sally used to say that RUben — not ruBEN (she stressed the first syllable of his name, not the last, as it would be pronounced in Spanish) — was a steakand-Scotch person, not a taco-and-tequila connoisseur, like those who toast him annually with ice-cold Coronas, con limón.
As schools and streets were being named in his memory, Sally would quote her children, all of whom were under 10 at the time he was killed, as inquiring if he really was that person being lionized as a brown crusader from the rostrum. They knew him as the dad they splashed with in their backyard swimming pool in Orange County.
Associates who knew him best recognized Rubén as culturally both Mexican and American. He revelled in his hyphenated environment. Just don’t mislabel him as a “Mexican-American journalist.” He was a journalist — period. With his depth of understanding of people in our polyglot world, he excelled with lengthy assignments as a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Asia in a profession overstaffed with Ivy Leaguers who parachute into Mexico or the simmering Middle East wearing trench coats and blinkers while posing as global experts. Rubén was the real thing. War-ravaged Vietnam was major beat on his résumé.
He integrated the nearlily- white Los Angeles Times news staff in 1959 after already having honed his multiple reporting talents and proven his perceptive and objective depth at the El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post, Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat and San Francisco News. Arriving in Southern California, he accepted no activists’ claims that the police were habitually discriminatory and brutal in their treatment of Latinos until he himself witnessed the pattern.
That’s when he started reporting on the realities of living and dying in L.A.’s barrios — a journalistic journey that ultimately led to his untimely death.
(With his Oaxacan wife, Sebastiana Mendoza, and their eldest son, Héctor, Charlie Ericksen founded Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C., in 1979 as the nation’s only news syndicate that featured Latino and Latina writers to report and comment on the emerging ethnic community’s status and its contributions.)
