Border Correspondent: Selected Writings, 1955-1970 (Volume 6)

Latinos in American Society and Culture

by Ruben Salazar, Mario T. García (editor)

This first major collection of former Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist Ruben Salazar's writings, is a testament to his pioneering role in the Mexican American community, in journalism, and in the evolution of race relations in the U.S. Taken together, the articles serve as a documentary history of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and of the changing perspective of the nation as a whole.Since his tragic death while covering the massive Chicano antiwar moratorium in Los Angeles on August 29, 1970, Ruben Salazar has become a legend in the Chicano community. As a reporter and later as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Salazar was the first journalist of Mexican American background to cross over into the mainstream English-language press. He wrote extensively on the Mexican American community and served as a foreign correspondent in Latin America and Vietnam. This first major collection of Salazar's writing is a testament to his pioneering role in the Mexican American community, in journalism, and in the evolution of race relations in the United States. Taken together, the articles serve as a documentary history of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and of the changing perspective of the nation as a whole.Border Correspondent presents selections from each period of Salazar's career. The stories and columns document a growing frustration with the Kennedy administration, a young César Chávez beginning to organize farm workers, the Vietnam War, and conflict between police and community in East Los Angeles. One of the first to take investigative journalism into the streets and jails, Salazar's first-hand accounts of his experiences with drug users and police, ordinary people and criminals, make compelling reading.Mario García's introduction provides a biographical sketch of Salazar and situates him in the context of American journalism and Chicano history.

Genres: Nonfiction

322 pages, Hardcover

First published August 29, 1995

Reviews

[Kim Fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've spent the past 6 months researching the Chicano movement and moratorium marches in the early 1970s in LA. A key event at this time was the death of the Mexican-American journalist Ruben Salazar. The more I read about him, the more I knew that I must read his work: *his* words. While not comprehensive, this book is a significant introduction to not only Salazar, but the working conditions, living conditions and personal lives of Mexican-American communities in Southern California, and especially LA, during the mid-20th century. While the book does include some of his work in Texas and overseas, I focused my main attention on the pieces written about California and Los Angeles. It's unnerving to read these articles and think about the affects of overt racism on a singular group of people who were both indigenous and immigrants at the same time. People whose homeland did not lie far away across the Atlantic ocean, but in many cases just a few miles away, across the California-Mexico border. Some of Salazar's most challenging writing focuses on the definition of the term Mexican-American and the pull of cultures that caused so many people to feel that they were neither one nor the other. Salazar's columns for the LA Times, and his work with KMEX, were integral in helping shape an identity, and it's heartbreaking to realize the far-reaching damage done when he was shot by a sheriff's deputy at the Chicano Moratorium March in August 1970.