by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” for the evening was Ruben Salazar: Man in
the Middle, a fascinating vest-pocket
(53-minute) documentary on the life and death of one of the most enigmatic
figures in Mexican-American history, whose bizarre and tragic exit (he was
struck and killed by a tear-gas projectile in a seedy bar called the Silver
Dollar Café where he’d ducked into during the police riot at the Chicano
Moratorium anti-war demonstration in Los Angeles August 29, 1970) turned him
into an instant martyr for the Chicano liberation movement — of which Salazar
had often been fiercely critical during his lifetime. Salazar was a “man in the
middle” both literally and figuratively; he was born in the town of Ciudad
Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border, just across la linea from El Paso, to which his family moved while he was
still a child. He recalled the feeling he had every time he crossed the bridge
that linked the two cities that he was at home in neither country. Salazar
began his career as a journalist for an El Paso paper in the mid-1950’s, and
his first big story was an exposé for which he got himself arrested for public
drunkenness, was in jail for two days, and described the “circle of hell” he
found in the local jail, especially among guards and staff who regarded him as
just another drunken Mexican. That story got him noticed by the Los
Angeles Times, which hired him in 1959; it
also got him noticed by the FBI, which started a file on him. For the next
several years he worked at the Times
as a general-assignment reporter, interviewing Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon and writing all kinds of stories rather than being specifically assigned
to cover the Latino community in L.A. In 1965 he was made a foreign
correspondent and sent first to the Dominican Republic to cover the U.S.
invasion, then to Viet Nam, and in 1968 he was assigned to Mexico City to cover
the Olympics and the international fallout from them — though he missed the
biggest story that happened in Mexico City when he was there, the police
massacre of rioting students at the Zócalo plaza in front of the Mexican government buildings. Salazar was called
back to L.A. and assigned to cover the rising Chicano movement — an assignment
he regarded as a demotion — and amazingly, a man who had been a virtual model
of assimilation (he married a white woman and lived with her and their family
in Orange County) and who had regarded (with some justification) the original
Chicano leaders as hucksters more in it for money and power than to serve the
people came to share a lot of the ideals of the movement and in particular its
determination to expose the way the police were used to repress Chicanos and minority
communities in general.
Salazar was warned several times, especially after he
quit his gig as a Los Angeles Times
reporter to take a job as newscaster at a small Spanish-language TV station in
L.A. called KMEX —though he continued with the Times as a columnist, which gave him the freedom to write
opinion pieces unhindered by the constraints of “objectivity” within which he’d
had to work as a print reporter. At one point Salazar bitterly commented that
in any clash between L.A. police and Mexican residents, the mainstream media’s
view of “objectivity” was you interviewed the police and that was what “really”
happened. His current bosses at KMEX and his former ones at the Times both told him they’d got calls from the police
department and the L.A. county sheriff’s department telling him he was
overstepping the bounds of responsible reporting and there would be
consequences for such actions, and at one point Salazar himself was summoned to
the headquarters of the LAPD and given such warnings in person. Like any good
journalist, he responded by writing an account of the meeting and publishing it
in his column. Without access to Salazar’s actual articles (it seems likely
that someone has published a book
compiling his columns — and if that hasn’t been done, it should), it’s hard to
trace his apparent evolution from “objective” reporter to print activist or
have much of an idea of what his
politics were when he died. Director Phillip Rodriguez was able to land
interviews with former sheriff’s deputy Tom Wilson — who fired the fatal
tear-gas projectile that struck Salazar and killed him — as well as the “man in
red” who supposedly told sheriff’s deputies during the Chicano Moratorium
demonstration that men with guns had gone into the Silver Dollar, were hiding there
and needed to be flushed out, and he seems to have concluded that Salazar’s
killing was what the coroner’s inquest at the time and a secret investigation
by the federal Department of Justice said it was: a horrible accident during
which the police were guilty of misconduct but not murder.
Of course, in the
highly charged politics of 1970 — when radicals had disrupted the police
inquest and one of Salazar’s closest friends, who’d been with him on the day,
was told he’d be called to testify and wasn’t — it’s not surprising the
underground paper L.A. Free Press
ran with a headline, “Was Salazar Murdered?” and Salazar became a martyr to the
Chicano movement that hadn’t before had one. Of course, it’s also not
surprising that Salazar’s image after death took some bizarre twists and turns
that made the real man’s life almost incomprehensible. One of the most
interesting points Rodriguez makes in his film is that the issues Salazar wrote
about are still dominating the
politics of U.S.-Mexican relations and the way Mexican-Americans are treated by
the U.S. government: immigration, drugs, gangs. Some awfully unlikely people
have claimed Salazar’s mantle since (including Mexican-American Right-wingers), which is just an indication of what happens to
your reputation when you’re dead and therefore no longer around to protect it.
One curious fact I hadn’t known before was that the Silver Dollar’s awning on
the day Salazar was killed had a sign hanging from it saying the bar sold wigs
— or at least that’s what it looked
like it said — which suggests that it might have been a Gay bar, or at least a
drag bar, and though there’s no indication that Salazar knew about the bar
before that day, or went in there for anything more than a beer and a chance to
get away from out-of-control police, it does hint that it may have been a place already under
more intense-than-usual police scrutiny and therefore a lousy place for a man who’d already pissed off the cops to
hide.
