About This Series

Part 1 Living in the Shadow of Ruben Salazar

Part 2 Alatorre: ‘I Am Not The Apostle’

Part 3 The Great De León: A Reckoning for Los Angeles

Part 4 Pete Aguilar & The Latino Presidency

Part 5 The Last Best Days of Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe

CHICANO POWER 50 Years Reflections is a series of stories critically re-examining the Latino civil rights history of the more than five decades since the advent of the Chicano Movement in Southern California and the LA County Sheriff’s deputy shooting death of famed Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar, which underscored the very social, economic and political inequities and discrimination against Latinos that he railed against in his writing.

In this five-part series, journalist and author Tony Castro offers a powerful interpretation the Chicano Movement from today’s perspective and writes movingly about Latinos continuing their faithful pursuit of the American Dream: their progress amid broken promises and ongoing challenges faced by Latinos in all aspects of life, but especially in politics and in following in Salazar’s footsteps.

In 1978 Castro, author of the civil rights history Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America (Dutton, 1974), succeeded Salazar as the leading Chicano voice in Los Angeles — a city of almost four million of which more than half are Latino — writing a three-times-a-week column for celebrated editor Jim Bellows‘ Los Angeles Herald Examiner and quickly becoming an influential community figure. (Publishers Weekly acclaimed Chicano Power as “brilliant… a valuable contribution to the understanding of our time.”) 

In these stories of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Castro invites readers into the world of Latinos — his world — chronicling the experiences about race, culture, identity, and belonging that have shaped those who led the Chicano movement campaign for human rights and social justice. As much as this story is about adversity, it is also about tremendous resilience. And Castro pulls back the curtain and opens up about his career and personal life — and his struggles balancing himself in a society discriminating against so many like him, and his journey toward open heartedness. 

Castro, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, was a Headliners Club–winning journalist for his reporting on the Latino civil rights movement in the Southwest for the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, and the Dallas PBS affiliate KERA’s Peabody Award winning show Newsroom created by the late Jim Lehrer. While a Nieman Fellow, Castro lectured on the Chicano Movement at Harvard’s JFK Institute of Politics and taught one of the first college courses in America on Chicano Studies,

Castro was among the first reporters in America to write extensively about race in presidential politics, as far back as his undergraduate days at Baylor when he reported on Bobby Kennedy’s quixotic 1968 campaign in the Mexican Americans barrios of California, which became a centerpiece of his book Chicano Power. 

Castro reported on the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in both English and Spanish for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and La Opinión de Los Angeles.

Living in the Shadow of Ruben Salazar

On Aug. 29, 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles protested the disproportionately high casualties among Latinos in Vietnam — but led to the tragic police shooting death of acclaimed Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar.

By TONY CASTRO

August 29, 2023

I HAD BEEN IN LOS ANGELES only a few days in 1978 when the unique pressures on Chicano journalists in this city first began weighing heavily on me, fittingly perhaps, in a bar at the Ambassador Hotel, where I was living at the time, not far from the kitchen pantry where Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Frank Del Olmo, by then the veteran Los Angeles Times reporter I had known since the early 1970s, was welcoming me to his town over drinks and conversation that inevitably turned to the man by whose standard both of us would ultimately be judged. Los Angeles still had two daily newspapers, though barely. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner had recently settled a labor strike whose impact would kill it a decade later.

The Herald Examiner had also hired the editor acclaimed as the greatest in America — Jim Bellows, the editor who in the 1960s had unleashed Tom Wolfe and the New Journalism. And Bellows now had brought me to L.A. to write about the Golden State’s rising political star governor, Jerry Brown, who wants to be president of the United States, and whose girlfriend is the hot darling of rock ‘n’ roll, Linda Ronstadt. And I’m to do this as a columnist at the near-bankrupt flagship newspaper of publishing legend William Randolph Hearst, whose granddaughter — kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst — is still in prison for a crazy bank robbery, all symbolic of the calamity of the wealth and power in California.

Del Olmo wanted to know what the “new” Herald Examiner was really like. Was it everything I thought it would be? It was a chicken-shit question, so I gave him an answer that was deservingly half-truthful and just to make conversation with someone I didn’t completely trust.

“Frank,” I said, “I’ve been working full-time as a reporter on daily newspapers since 1965, since I was eighteen, and I don’t mean as some lackey L.A. Times intern fetching coffee and carbon paper, and I authored a pretty damn good civil rights book — so I took this job because I thought they were hiring me, that they wanted me, the experienced reporter and feature writer, not because I happened to have been born Mexican American. 

“But when I got here, Editor Jim Bellows and the executive editor told me, without pulling any punches, that they wanted me to be Ruben Salazar. They wanted me to follow in his footsteps, which is kind of flattering but completely unrealistic, don’t you think? Worse, I seiously doubt they have idea what Ruben was writing in those last couple of years when he became so controversial. Plain and simple, they were hiring me because I’m Mexican American. I could just as well be a caddy from the Riviera Country Club, you know?”

Del Olmo smiled somewhat uncomfortably into his drink. “Too bad. But I guess there’s a lot of people who expect us to be Ruben Salazar. What did you say?”

“I told them, `I don’t want to be Ruben Salazar — Ruben Salazar got his ass shot off! Besides, I said, I’m not sure a Ruben Salazar is what Los Angeles needs any more. I told them that instead of a Ruben Salazar at the Herald Examiner, what the paper needs is about five more Mexican American reporters and a couple of Mexican American editors. Now that blew them away. Of course, they’re not going to do anything like that. And I’m fucking disappointed. I should have told them to fuck off and gone to work at the Texas Observer where no one pulls any punches with upper class niceties.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Somehow I got a damn Porsche out of this, and it’s keeping me out of the East where I almost froze to death a year ago.”

“You make yourself sound like a sell-out.” Del Olmo was loving all this.

“I am a sell-out, Frank. I’m just not naïve enough to think I’m the only sell-out sitting here. We’ve got a long way to go before either of us is in the class of Ruben Salazar. And we’ve got a longer way to go before there’s any meaning for his death.”

In a bar across town eight years earlier, Salazar had been killed — assassinated, some activists believe — at the height of his fame and notoriety as the most controversial Chicano journalist of all time. Salazar, in fact, became the martyr that the then-floundering Chicano movement needed to extend its life. In Del Olmo, of course, I was preaching to the choir. Our entire careers, it seemed at times, had been lived in the shadow of Ruben Salazar. Frank would live a lifetime with the expectations of being another Salazar, and, ultimately, I hope he made peace with both the expectations and the ghost that had thrust itself upon him, taking it all to his grave in 2004.

The day after having drinks with Del Olmo, my editor at the Herald Examiner and I had lunch with a group of the so-called movers and shakers of East Los Angeles. I would meet for the first time most of the city’s Mexican American political and economic power brokers. It was a meeting that Bellows and the publisher should have been taking for the purpose of some meaningful dialog. By having me there, though, it offered a distraction. But I was, after all, part of the revived Herald Examiner’s showpieces.

It also turned into a book signing event with Bellows taking great pride and joy that I had signed on to help in resurrecting the paper. Someone from the group we met with brought several dozen copies of Chicano Power for me to sign. The book had become the scholarly benchmark in Chicano Studies programs at colleges and universities in California and throughout the country, while for others it was a page-turning political manifesto that helped fuel the Chicano movement in America. I had been graced with the validation of a coveted journalism fellowship at Harvard. And I was credited with having exposed Richard Nixon’s campaign dirty tricks against Hispanics, which had been a footnote in the sordid Watergate scandal. After the meeting, a couple of those Eastside movers and shakers took me aside and began detailing the agenda they had in store for me. When I asked them what they were talking about, one of them looked me eye to eye.

“You,” he said, “have to carry on the work that Ruben Salazar began.”

I cringed and began looking for ways to get out of L.A.

Several months later, now checked into the Chateau Marmont Hotel, I was approached by a young screenwriter named Stephanie Liss who was developing a screenplay for the actor Henry Darrow, a New York-born Puerto Rican actor who had risen to fame playing Manolito Montoya on the 1967-71 NBC television western series The High Chaparral. It didn’t take long, however, to figure out that the screenwriter was writing a fictitious account of the Ruben Salazar story and apparently wasn’t getting much assistance from Salazar’s family or friends in “fleshing out” the main character.

“I need your help,” she said, “because Frank Casado says you’re the closest thing I’ll find to what Ruben Salazar was like.”

“I don’t think Frank really knows who I am,” I said.

“He says you’re a loose cannon seething full of anger and frustration and that your writing drips with emotion. He says you are Ruben Salazar whether you want to accept it or not and that you can help me with my screenplay.”

I laughed. “I think Frank is just worried I’ll write a negative column about his restaurant,” I said. “Or that I’ll run off with his daughter.”

That night I confronted Casado, the Hollywood restaurateur who had been one of Ruben Salazar’s best friends and whom I had become close to in my short time in Los Angeles.

“Don’t be mad at me, kid,” said Casado. “Ruben didn’t want to be who he was either. But he didn’t have any choice.”

In the following years, hardly a week went by when Salazar wasn’t thrown up to me, sometimes as a compliment but more often as a knock, the way some wayward son might have the reputation of a dead father rubbed in his face. I hadn’t set out to become a Chicano columnist, a term that I never applied to myself but which both Chicanos and non-Chicanos seemed determined to place on me. I hadn’t ever thought of myself as being very Chicano. And I wasn’t too comfortable with the title columnist either. I saw myself as a reporter who had fallen into the role of a columnist and, to some degree, I suppose, into the role of a Chicano as well. From time to time, I found myself having long conversations with people who had known Salazar, especially Casado, whose Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe in Hollywood had been only a short walk for Ruben from the Spanish-language station KMEX-TV where he worked the last year of his life. I dared not tell anyone that I had, in fact, spoken with Ruben in 1970, just weeks before his death. At the time I was a young reporter at the Dallas Times Herald. There, an assistant city editor who had reported from Vietnam with Salazar thought I should meet him and put us together on the telephone.

“You need to be in L.A.,” Ruben said to me. “Come to L.A. I’ll get you on at the Times, and you can help me kick butt here.”

I was flattered, but I was barely out of Baylor University, and I had goals of going to the East Coast, not the West Coast. A week or so later, Ruben even stopped in at the Dallas Times Herald newsroom to visit with his war correspondent buddy. Ruben and I then conversed almost entirely in Spanish in the middle of the newsroom, an unusual sight indeed. At the time I was the only Latino reporter working on any major Texas daily. Suddenly to see the two of us in the same newsroom conversing in a language no one else understood must have seemed threatening, especially given the rise of the Chicano movement throughout Texas and the Southwest. In the weeks and months that followed, colleagues and editors began to raise questions about my close personal relationship with leaders of both the Chicano movement and the New Left. 

By then, too, it had become common knowledge among my colleagues that I had skirted the U.S. embargo of Cuba to tour Fidel Castro’s communist citadel with two of the most notorious 1960s New Left groups in America, the national Students for a Democratic Society and the South Texas-based Mexican American Youth Organization, better known by its acronym MAYO.

So, among some of my colleagues and editors in conservative Dallas, I had unwittingly gained the reputation of being a New Left activist, if not a communist. It didn’t help, I suppose, that I was often having lunch with United Workers Auto labor boss Pancho Medrano. Before my senior year in high school, I had worked all summer in my uncle’s Dallas construction business and had gotten to know Medrano who was a partner. Four years later, I’d accompanied Pancho to Los Angeles where he spent the California Presidential Primary trolling the East Los Angeles precincts for Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. I wrote about the experience for my hometown weekly, the Waco Citizen, and then included the reporting in writing Chicano Power. I was in Los Angeles on the night that Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel, but I was at a United Farm Workers’ party watching the tragedy unfold on local television.

I was twenty-one, exhilarated one minute, shocked and exhausted the next. Politics and violence, worlds we’d come to know in national tragedies — President Kennedy in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. two months earlier in 1968, and now Bobby Kennedy — had become uncomfortably interwoven into the American fabric. You had come to expect it. Or at least I did. Perhaps that is why I wasn’t shocked by what unfolded three weeks after Ruben Salazar had visited in Dallas. It didn’t seem out of character for a country still moving on fumes from the 1960s. 

On Aug. 29, 1970, some 25,000 activists gathered in East Los Angeles to take part in what was billed as the National Chicano Moratorium march and protest against the Vietnam War. They were protesting the disproportionately large number of Latino soldiers who were being killed in Vietnam. It never occurred to any of them that one of three people who would be killed that day as a result of the march would be perhaps the most important Latino who would die in the age of civil rights protests. Ruben Salazar, a controversial crusader for Latino rights — especially against law enforcement — was slain when Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies fired a tear gas projectile inside an East L.A. bar that struck him in the head, killing him instantly. Salazar was also news director at KMEX, L.A.’s pioneering Spanish-language television station. No one was ever arrested — then or since — in connection with Salazar’s violent death. Although no action was taken against those involved in his death, Los Angeles County did pay $700,000 to Salazar’s family to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit.

Was I bothered about what had happened to Ruben? Damn right I was. Could I do anything about it now eight years later? Not likely. Protests and demonstrations in the 1970s and into the new millennium produced new inquests, but nothing came of it. No one was prosecuted or even charged. To me, the real question was what had Salazar’s longtime powerful, influential employer — the Los Angeles Times with all its gloried history and clout — done behind-the-scenes, not just in preening with empty editorial copy, to secure justice for him? That failure right there showed the true power of the press in California against an entrenched political power structure of which it was an integral part.

I often argued with Del Olmo over this very point. I would emphasize what Frank himself had often said, that even his mother who lived in the San Fernando Valley refused to subscribe to the Times. Yet he couldn’t find his way to seeing how it was as much his oppressor as his employer. Finally, in 1994, Frank publicly threatened to resign when the Times endorsed conservative Republican Governor Pete Wilson for a second term in office, despite his support for the anti-immigrant ballot measure, Proposition 187. Del Olmo, though, couldn’t do it. Then Editor Shelby Coffey III talked him into taking a two-week vacation to “think about it.” Tantrum over, Del Olmo wrote a dissenting opinion piece lambasting Wilson and Proposition 187. It was like putting lipstick on a pig. The Times got to keep its Latino figurehead and Del Olmo retained his title and position in the city. His impact was negligible. Wilson was re-elected to a second term, and voters overwhelmingly passed the ballot initiative establishing a new citizenship screening system that stopped undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services in the state.

“I hope you think I put up a good fight,” Del Olmo said the next time we met.

“Frank,” I said, “when it comes to symbolism, you’re the champ.”

Back in 1972 I had called Frank just a few months before La Raza Unida’s national convention in El Paso to introduce myself and to arrange to meet there. We were both the same age, from the same socio-economic backgrounds, and virtually alone in covering the same stories. Over dinner and drinks, we also learned we had one other important thing in common: We were each married to lovely blonde, blue-eyed women. However, as we drank and talked more freely, I came to understand that Frank was troubled beyond belief that he had married a non-Latina. He spoke about the disapproving looks he would get, especially from Latinas his own age, making him feel that he was responsible for badly depleting the bank of eligible Mexican American men with good futures ahead of them. Didn’t I get those same looks, too, he wondered. Maybe I did, I said, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. My personal life was none of their business, I told Frank. Neither should his be, but I sensed that Frank’s issues were more deeply rooted than what people thought of him. I also joked about how I was more concerned about the possible lynch mobs of white men angry that I’d married a beautiful Anglo woman, which he didn’t think was funny. Frank, I came to understand, particularly as I got to know him in the years ahead, had no sense of humor on this subject. When he learned that my wife was blonde and blue-eyed, he asked if I felt guilty not having married a Latina. I would have felt insulted except that he quickly informed me that he too was married to an Anglo woman and sometimes was guilt-ridden and uncertain if the marriage would last.

“You really don’t feel guilty?” he wanted to know.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why should there be any guilt. You married the woman you fell in love with and a woman you love, didn’t you?”

Frank, though, feared there had been some kind of heritage betrayal on our part. By marrying non-Hispanics, he wondered whether we might be engendering an entirely new race of people and diluting the existing Mexican American bloodlines that had been created from the original mestizo process — the mixing of Spaniard and Mexican. We strongly disagreed, and we had words, not kind ones either. It was also obvious that we saw ourselves and our roles as journalists differently. Frank was in the process of organizing a group of Hispanic journalists in California as a kind of informal Chicano journalists union and wondered if I was interested in trying to do the same in Texas. Absolutely not, I said.

“Frank, I don’t see myself as a Hispanic or Mexican American journalist,” I said. “I see myself as a journalist, period.”

“Well, you’re being naïve,” he said. “Others see you as that.”

“That’s their problem,” I said. “I can’t control that, but I’ll be damned if I allow how they look upon me or treat me to affect the way I see myself or the way I behave professionally. You start branding yourself a Chicano journalist, and you’ve lost. You’ve allowed those people whose hearts and minds you want to change to get into your own head. This isn’t like joining a guild or a union. You do this and you start advocating for something as a Chicano, and guess what? You’re not much more than another activist, just one with a byline.”

Nevertheless, at the time I actually wanted to share a byline with Frank. Chicano Power was becoming an overwhelming undertaking. As La Raza Unida’s convention in El Paso showed, the movement was rife with fractionalization and rivalries, not only along state lines but also as to priorities. To do justice, it would require extensive reporting in California, New Mexico, and Colorado as well as Texas. Despite our personal differences, I proposed to Frank that he handle the two westernmost states and I would cover Texas and New Mexico, as well as do the writing. But Frank resisted. He didn’t like the idea of a book written about the movement from a dispassionate perspective. The issues, he said, were too important not to take sides and get involved. I agreed and, if we were activists, we should jump in without hesitation. But we weren’t. I wasn’t, at least. I would do the book on my own, getting a tremendous assist from Roy Aarons, the West Coast bureau chief of the Washington Post,who to that time had done perhaps the best reporting on Cesar Chavez and the farm workers as well as the Chicano movement in California. Aarons helped open doors with Chavez at his compound in La Paz especially and guided me through the occasionally hazardous trail of interviewing other movement leaders in the Southwest.

I also came to find Del Olmo almost Pollyannaish in believing that dramatic change in California and in the country was, if not imminent, then certainly almost at hand, and he had an unfounded confidence that the Los Angeles Times would be instrumental in achieving that new society. On the other hand, I believed that our children would be fortunate to see that transformation, which I didn’t see occurring for at least a generation, maybe two. Our previous generation would have to die and ours perhaps, too, before we would see significant social change. Frank’s optimism, I felt, came from being a native Californian and influenced from living so close to the source of where so much change had begun in the past. But it was often a change that, while reported nationally, would never be widely implemented or accepted outside of California and parts of the East Coast. My pessimism, if it were that, stemmed from being a Tejano who had witnessed widespread resistance to social change and had grown up in a largely white environment where racism and discrimination weren’t as politely dished out as I found to be the case in California. Neither the Herald Examiner nor the Times were exemplars of champions or activists for civil rights. All we had to do was look at the newspapers’ mastheads and the list of their newsroom and editorial management from which Latinos, African Americans, and Asians were largely excluded. 

“How can you be so negative about the future?” Frank demanded to know.

“I’m not negative,” I said. “I’m realistic. Pero no les pinto los labios a esos cochinos — I just don’t put lipstick on those pigs. They know what I am, and I know what they are.”

I was a pain in the butt. I admit it. From the time I was young, I’d been called all kinds of names based on my ethnicity or the color of my skin or my heritage or native language. Usually, there was nothing I could do about it. That changed when I began working in newspapers. I had punched out two fellow reporters at papers where I was a reporter, and I came close to slugging an editor at the Herald Examiner.  Yeah, I could be a violent son-of-a-bitch. Not especially proud of it, but prouder than being the chicken shit racists I leveled. Hell, it was Texas. I knew reporters who carried handguns into the newsroom. I was capable of terrible things, but I chose to fight the hatred into which I was born. So my frame of reference on our world was different than that of the gentile, civilized Del Olmo.

As a young intern at the Times in 1970, Del Olmo’s fate was molded by Ruben’s violent death. He hardly knew Salazar, a veteran reporter whose controversial columns in the Times exposing inequities and injustices against Latinos had exalted him to hero status in the city’s Mexican American communities. But Del Olmo would be traumatized as if Salazar had been his next of kin. In a journalistic sense, he was. Soon Del Olmo was made a full-time reporter on a newspaper that had virtually no Latino presence on its staff. A cub newspaperman, he was thrown into a situation reluctantly following in Salazar’s footsteps, without either the experience or the swashbuckling style that had marked Salazar’s tenure.

At the time I was a reporter covering civil rights at the Dallas Times Herald, which in the summer of 1970 was bought by the Los Angeles Times. On the day the deal was announced, Otis Chandler, the publisher of the Times between 1960 and 1980, attended the news conference in Dallas. Physically, he may have been the most impressive and imposing newspaper publisher to ever appear in public. At forty-three, he looked like an Olympian god: blond, golden tanned skin, 6-foot, 3 inches and 220 pounds, a former record-breaking shot putter at Stanford who was kept out of representing the U.S. in the 1952 Olympics by a wrist injury.  The afternoon after buying the Times Herald, Chandler made a dramatic appearance in our newsroom. Dressed in a cream-colored suit, he personally introduced himself to each editorial staff member. Heck, our own publisher had never done that.

A month later, Ruben Salazar was dead, and Del Olmo and I began commiserating about the loss in phone conversations and in that long El Paso weekend binge of tequila and regret. The regret that we both had was having been thrown into the coverage of Latino issues by virtue not of any special skills other than being the only Spanish-speaking Latino reporters on our respective staffs.

“I don’t think of myself as a token — and I don’t think I am a token,” I recall him lamenting. “But why do I feel that that’s how I’m looked at by many of my fellow reporters and editors?”

I sensed a tortured soul residing within Del Olmo, far more consumed with race, ethnicity, and inferiority than anything I had felt, and I had often brooded on all of that too much for my own good. A part of Frank made me feel shallow. A part made me feel sorry. A part made me curious as to what ghosts of American ethnic uncertainty haunted him. Several years passed before I spent any more significant time with Frank. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1978 to go to work as a columnist for the afternoon rival of the Times, Frank was not only among the first to welcome me but also tried to help me understand the ethnic-cultural landmines confronting any Latino journalist in the city. Several years later, we spent several weeks together in El Salvador reporting on that country’s civil war and again commiserating on the personal war within each of us.

I soon came to realize that Del Olmo had a love-hate relationship with the Times. At various times, he and the growing legion of Latino reporters he had helped recruit to the paper were on the outs with the editors. Once he and another Latino reporter came to me almost in tears upset that a city editor had become so infuriated with their surprise confrontation of an executive editor at the paper, that he had called Frank on his phone extension and demanded that he “round up your Mexicans and get in here!”

It may have been Del Olmo’s ultimate payback that he was able to successfully lobby for a special reporting and editing team for a comprehensive series on Latinos that in 1984 won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize gold medal for meritorious public service for the Times. When I congratulated him, I jokingly said, “Man, Frank, you sure rounded up your Mexicans, didn’t you?”

From time to time, we would put differences aside and tilt margarita glasses at Lucy’s El Adobe. Once we sat at a booth with Edward James Olmos alternately pleading and berating us over our reporting. Frank, being much more serious and conscientious about such matters, patiently heard out Eddie. I got up and left. I couldn’t take the life that we had both chosen as seriously as Del Olmo did, at least not seriously enough to be lectured to by an actor. At Lucy’s one day, I pointed to a poster of what I presumed to be Manolete, the famous Spanish matador known for his gaunt, severe demeanor.

“Frank,” I said. “That guy was a great matador, but he didn’t look like he was having very much fun living.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll take Manolete.” Frank said it like it was a curse.

I was having an early dinner with Lucy Casado, the owner of Lucy’s El Adobe, on the afternoon of February 19, 2004, when a friend called her restaurant to tell her that Del Olmo had collapsed at his office at the Times and died of an apparent heart attack. He was fifty-five.

We were both shocked and didn’t know what to say for a moment. 

“I promised Frank that I would dance on his grave if he died before I did,” I said after a while.

“What did he say?” Lucy asked.

“Don’t do me any favors.”

I did, and from time to time I would take flowers to his grave and continue our conversation. Sometimes I would simply toast him with a margarita at Lucy’s El Adobe, just because he disliked the place so much. He never would tell me why, but I suspect it was because Frank Casado was so often on his case.

“What the fuck’s the matter with that guy?” Casado would often begin, bitching at me as if I knew. “He’s the senior Mexican American at the goddamn Los Angeles Times, and he’s afraid to raise a little hell. What does he think they’re going to do to the Mexican American who succeeded Ruben Salazar? Fire him? Get rid of him? Look the other way when something happens to him like what happened to Ruben. It can’t happen again. These aren’t puppies.”

The shadow of Ruben Salazar was indeed long.

Once, after unloading my soul to him over margaritas about the frustrations of being a columnist who happened to be Mexican American — especially trying to do that in Ruben Salazar’s old stomping ground — Casado began crying.

“Kid,” he said, “this is deja vu. Ruben used to sit in the same chair you’re sitting in, and he used to say the same things you’re telling me now. He felt like a man trapped in the middle. The Chicanos were pulling on him from one side, and the Anglo editors he worked for were pulling on him from the other side. He used to say he felt like a man who was being ripped apart.”

Then one day, out of the clear blue, I received an unexpected call from Sally Salazar, Ruben’s widow, to whom I had written a long letter several weeks earlier.

“There were times,” she said, “when I wanted Ruben to simply walk away — to just walk away from everything that was pressing in on him. I used to tell him, `Ruben, walk away from it before it kills you.’

“And if he had lived, I think he would have.”

Not long after talking to Sally Salazar, I took the advice she had given her husband.

I walked away, thanking Ruben Salazar for each step I took.

Tony Castro, the former award winning Los Angeles columnist and author of CHICANO POWER (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a writer-at-large with LAMonthly.org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.

Alatorre: ‘I Am Not The Apostle’

The Richard Alatorre I knew, the Richard Alatorre who said he had to change the world — and to a great degree, he did just that… that Richard Alatorre dramatically altered the political landscape for Latinos in California and ultimately became The Godfather of Latino Politics.

By TONY CASTRO

IT IS MEXICAN INDEPENDENCE DAY IN a couple of days. El dieciséis de septiembre, or the Sixteenth of September, marking the beginning of Mexican independence from Spain, its ruler since 1521. The 16th is the day that New Spain — which would become Mexico on Sept. 27, 1821, after 11 years of constant battle — declared independence from Old Spain in 1810.

Celebrations abound every year, and this one is no different. The Mexican American group behind the annual East Los Angeles Mexican, Independence Day parade is honoring the late great Latina political trailblazer, Gloria Molina, who passed away earlier this year. And well it should.

But with all due respect, I am honoring a different Latino political power figure on this Mexican Independence anniversary. Raise a toast, my friends, to one Richard Alatorre.

It has been almost seven weeks ago that I received a message from an acquaintance informing me that Richard was near death, hospitalized in an intensive care unit after suffering more than one cardiac arrest, and unlikely to make it through the weekend.

In my life, I have had any number of disturbing telephone calls, letters and emails. But this may have been the most disturbing of all. I was no more ready for Richard Alatorre to leave the world that I am about my own life ending. And I fretted about what I would read about my friend over the coming days if this were true. I could already imagine the obituary in the Los Angeles Times, which never gave a damn about Alatorre when he was at the height of his career, and seems to still delight in his troubles, towards the end of his public life.

There is no denying that Alatorre, the former State Assemblyman and Los Angeles City Councilman who represented the 14^th District of the city’s Eastside and Northeast made almost as big a mess of his political career as the numerous enemies he collected during his life. And there indeed undeniably was a celebration among his foes when his mistakes brought the powers of local prosecutors and then the federal government down upon him.

He gave up his council seat and did what he had to, to avoid any kind of prison sentence, eventually just retiring to his family’s home in his old City Council district.

But that was not the Richard Alatorre I knew, the Richard Alatorre who said he had to change the world, and to a great degree, he did just that. The Latino power celebrated today in recognizing Gloria Molina or any of the other California Latino politicians now in office possibly might not have happened — or happened as quickly as they did — if it had not been for Richard Alatorre. 

The Godfather of Latino Politics. That’s what he came to be known. And for good reason.

The Richard Alatorre who survived this midsummer health scare and continues his recovery would never agree with that description of himself, though it’s true. Quite simply, Alatorre changed how the non-Latino world in California viewed Latino politicians. He is the politico who altered Latino politics from the image of an overly humble, sleepy Eastside hat-in-hand public servant to an almost swashbuckling, churlish, no holds barred powerbroker too bold, too brash, and too unmindful of old-style civilities. Put in Hollywood terms, he turned the image of Latino politicians from the embarrassingly silly José Jimenez to Johnny Depp’s iconic Captain Jack Sparrow.

“I am not the apostle,” he said to me once, trying to beg off the power broker label I had pinned on him in a 1981 column in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “You give me too much credit.”

Did I? Alatorre had just redrawn California’s congressional and legislative redistricting maps carving out a historic new number of largely Latino districts in the Los Angeles Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, that at the time almost quadrupled the number of Latino elected officials in the Golden State.

During that time, Alatorre had arguably become the third most influential politician in the state, behind only Governor Jerry Brown and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. It had been Willie Brown, who upon ousting his predecessor from his longtime Assembly leadership position, gave his pal and legislative partner Alatorre the choicest plum of all legislative committee chairmanships — as head of the redistricting committee redrawing the Golden State’s congressional and legislative maps after the 1980 census.

Latino politicians in California were suddenly in awe of what he had done. There was incredible respect shown to him anytime he was around, short of kissing a symbolic ring on his finger. Even the aging Edward Roybal, who in 1949 had become the first Latino elected to the City Council and then in 1962 the first Latino elected to Congress from California, begrudgingly told me: “Richard was born under a lucky star. How he has been able to do some of the things he’s done, well, yeah, I have to take my hat off. Only a riverboat gambler could pull off some of these things. Who knew he had this kind of pluck or luck?”

Four decades later, the impact Richard Alatorre made on California has been forgotten by many and not known to even more. But his contributions remain as part of a legacy that will likely take biographers and historians decades longer to unravel and explain. It is a legacy shrouded by time and by his own undoing and misbehavior in his later public life. Alatorre was a complex man, and his career and public life were equally convoluted and entangled.

What was the controversial Alatorre’s role in shaping the history of Latinos in the 20th century: Was Richard Alatorre — for so long considered an iconic realist by friends and defenders — a misunderstood idealist who went about trying to right society’s wrongs with an unnecessary penchant at times for tough, profane talk and a weakness for booze, cocaine, and doing stupid favors for influential friends who used him to make themselves richer? Or is Alatorre, idealist or not, worthy of the continued praise that gets heaped on him in certain political and social circles? Is he best characterized as the godfather of Latino politics, capable of making smart sacrifices for the greater good? Or was he a careless and callous leader, responsible for perpetuating political corruption to the detriment of the image of Latinos everywhere? Was Alatorre simply a vastly overrated politician — no more original in his ideas than any other post-World War II political figure? And, ultimately, was he a force for good — or for bad? Well, what was it he said about himself in his ponderous 456-page 2016 autobiography, Change From the Inside, a book that one well-regarded critic described as “nearly worthless as scholarship? 

“I’m always the bad Mexican.”

The Bad Mexican. Yeah, Richard. What a great subtitle to a better book about you or an epitaph on your  gravestone. I know, but you know that, in almost half a century of talking to, interviewing him, and dealing with Richard Alatorre, I can’t recall of a single instance in which he ever referred to himself as a Mexican or a Mexican American, or a Chicano. He did use those words, of course, in talking about issues and society. But not once did I hear him call himself by any ethnic term. And we had dozens if not hundreds of conversations about numerous things, political and personal. 

Or do you want to ask me what so many of his critics do: should Richard Alatorre have any legacy beyond being the guy who was caught using cocaine by a family court judge? Yet that told me more about Alatorre than any good he ever accomplished as a legislator or a politician. He was humbled and guilt-torn beyond anyone’s imagination about the legal battle that had won him custody of his third wife’s niece after her mother’s death and which ultimately had been at the heart of how his political career unraveled into disgrace. 

It also showed me that, at his best, Alatorre was not driven by ego alone. His generation assumed that political activism had the power to make a difference. This was at the heart of Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign, after all, revised and updated by Barack Obama in 2008. But what lasting change did either of those two quixotic, egalitarian campaigns accomplish? We fell in love with the romance of change and the way revolutions always tantalize our dreams of a perfect world. We were going to change the world. To his detriment, Richard Alatorre may have abused the privilege, but his career is a valuable reminder of that now anachronistic belief.

But the Bad Mexican self-rap was a chip on his shoulder that he carried through life and politics, not unlike the motivations that so many others have used in sports, business, and in the political world. It served him well, especially in fending off criticism from reporters, who generally didn’t care for Alatorre, the way he carried himself, the way he behaved, and especially the way he treated most of them. Has anyone in California public life ever, for so long, attracted so much adulation from his defenders while earning so much censure for his personal gestures and attitudes? 

Why was it that seemingly for much of his time, Alatorre’s personal life was a mess. Though he quietly committed countless acts of kindness and generosity, he also railed at many newsmen, the very people with the power on how he would be portrayed to the public. He made no secret that he was not a family man, though he portrayed an entirely different image in his third marriage, with the adoption of his niece and while his political and professional life were falling apart as his criminal troubles took him to the brink of going to prison. 

But in 1985, as he was preparing to transition from being a powerful figure in the legislature to a new freshman city councilman in Los Angeles, domesticity wasn’t even in Alatorre’s language. That summer, I remember rushing to a lunch with Richard at his favorite Chinatown restaurant, and Alatorre pointing out that I looked like a fashion plate with exception of some paint along my right temple. I had been repainting the nursery we were preparing for the baby my wife and I were expecting in September.

“What? You’re starting a family already?” He had been a guest at our wedding the previous summer. “I hope you’re ready for that. I couldn’t handle it. The diaper changes and all that shit. I told (his first wife), ‘You wanted kids. You handle it.”

“You never changed any of your kids’ diapers?” I couldn’t believe it.

“Nah, not one,” he said. “That’s not what I do.”

Somewhere in those seven years since I had relocated to  Los Angeles, I had also lost track of the second marriage. She was a blonde beauty, who looked like she belonged in Hollywood on the silver screen, and not in Sacramento as a legislator’s wife. And it was only at this lunch that I learned that this marriage had ended.

“This surprises you?” He asked.

“Yeah, I guess it does,” I said. “She seemed like a keeper.”

And then we got into a talk I wasn’t prepared for, having come to this lunch to talk to Richard about his dreams as a city councilman. Was he about to lay the groundwork to run for mayor? 

But Richard wanted to talk about marriage, and in particular being married as a Latino man to an Anglo woman, as Richard’s second wife had been, as well as my wife.

“I don’t know, man,” he said. “Are we doing the right thing? I mean, the women you date, you get on with someone, you fall in love, but you’re Hispanic, and she’s white. I mean, man, do you ever feel like you cross the line you shouldn’t have? I mean, there’s a whole sociological discussion going on over this.”

“I know, I took part in a study that the University of Texas did on Latino-non-Latino marriages,” I said. “Look there is always going to be pros and cons on this as there is on everything else. What’s that great John Lennon line? Let them think what they want to think. They will, anyway, won’t they?”

“Yeah, but man, this is us,” he said. “This is real life we’re talking about.”

“Well, Richard, maybe you’re having lunch with the wrong journalist,” I said. “Maybe you should be having lunch with your good pal, Frank Del Olmo, who, for as long as I’ve known him, has been uptight about this whole question through at least two marriages.”

That lightened the mood significantly. Alatorre and Del Olmo, an editorial writer and occasional columnist at the Los Angeles Times, had never been on the best of terms. In fact, they couldn’t stomach one another.

As for me, I’d met Richard Alatorre on one of the worst days of our young lives. June 4, 1968. He was 25. I was 21. He was a graduate student at the University of Southern California, helping direct an organized labor get-out-the-vote drive for Senator Robert F Kennedy in the California presidential primary. I was an undergraduate at Baylor University in Texas, working on another part of that same get-out-the-vote drive for my old man’s compadre and World War II army buddy, Pancho Medrano. 

Pancho was a national organizer for the United Auto Workers and had been with the Kennedy campaign since March, just days after Bobby had entered the race. I had joined Pancho in Texas, which didn’t have a presidential primary but instead presidential caucuses at the precinct level. So there our job wasn’t getting out the vote but getting people out to attend their precinct caucuses, which were held minutes after the polls in the local and state primaries had closed. It was only at those caucuses that voters could participate in the selection of the presidential nominee. But it was Texas. 

How can I say this? And I am a Texan. But I am also a Tejano. And the game seemed rigged. But in California, it was a different story. And there’s no drama today about what happened in the 1968 California presidential primary. You know how it ended. Badly. Working on the campaign is much like gambling at a casino in Vegas. There are no clocks. You don’t know what time it is. You’re not even sure what day it happens to be, except when it’s election day. 

And that day had been long and then, after the shooting, it was as if, that long day and night would never end. About 12 hours before Kennedy was shot in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, I had been at some hole in the wall in Boyle Heights, passing out lunches and sodas to volunteers on lunch breaks. It was there that Richard later insisted we met. He knew Pancho by name and labor affiliation because of Medrano’s long association assisting the United Farm Workers in their organizing and strikes. 

In 1971, when we met again while Alatorre was running for the California State Assembly in a special election, I couldn’t place the face, but I remembered the name, though it may have been the late California labor activist Soledad Alatorre I confused him with. A part of me suspected he made up our past having crossed in the Kennedy campaign, because no one I knew from that time remembered him. It may have also been the garrulous side of Alatorre, simply wanting to make a useful connection. 

By then, I was a young reporter at the Dallas Morning News. I was reporting on politics and civil rights, and I had written a long 4,000-word feature about Pancho and his work with Cesar Chavez and the UFW, as well as his political work with Kennedy and other campaigns. He had suggested I join him on this latest trip to Los Angeles not because of Alatorre who was running as a Democrat, but because of a third-party candidate from the Chicano movement’s Raza Unida Party.

La Raza Unida party, which had formed in several southwestern states, became the champion political organization of the activists and students — and would have one major moment of glory in Los Angeles. 

In 1971, a California Assembly seat opened in a special election in northeast Los Angeles and caught the eye of Alatorre, by then a political aide to Assemblyman Walter Karabian, who had the claim of having been the youngest legislator in state history and the party’s majority leader in the State Assembly.

“When you talk about who truly got the Chicano political movement on its way, you have to say it was Wally Karabian,” said Louis F. Moret, who later became one of the most influential behind-the-scenes movers and shakers among Hispanic politicians. “You have to be on the inside to know and understand how real politics works. How you organize. How you get out the vote. How you get elected. How you network and collect IOUs and how and when you cash them in. 

“Well, we, Latinos didn’t really have anyone learning the ropes of the inside until Wally hired Richard.”

But Alatorre’s first run at public office became a disaster. The third-party Raza Unida candidate jumped into the race, taking away enough Democratic Latino votes from Alatorre that it allowed a Republican candidate to slip through and win the Assembly seat.

“I learned a costly lesson,” Alatorre later recalled. “I was out-Hispanicked in my own backyard. It wouldn’t happen again.”

Alatorre won the Assembly seat in the regular election year in 1972. He became the first Hispanic since Roybal elected to any kind of office from a political district entirely within the city of Los Angeles.

“When I first ran for public office, Tom Bradley ran for mayor, trying to become the city’s first African American mayor,” said Alatorre. “He lost in what was an ugly, racist campaign directed at him. Four years later, he ran and won, and I remember thinking that Los Angeles was changing.”

But not changing quickly enough. In the next decade, though, Alatorre sped up the clock, to the point that I began calling the political machine he had built on the Los Angeles Eastside The Golden Palominos. That was how I christened them in a column in the Herald Examiner. I didn’t think much of it until a few days later when I called Alatorre’s Sacramento office. It was around noon, and a receptionist said she would check to see if Richard was available to take my call. A few minutes later she returned to the line, and I thought I could hear her holding back a laugh as she said: “The assemblyman asked if he could return your call in half an hour. He said to tell you that the palomino is grazing.”

At first I thought I’d misheard her. 

“Miss,” I said. “Did you say, ‘the palomino is grazing’?”

“Yes.” She was barely able to contain some giggles. “He said to tell you that word-for-word exactly.”

Aha! Soon, though, The Golden Palominos became a term in common use by those very Latino politicians themselves. Many of them called my newspaper asking for extra copies of my Golden Palominos column issue. One of them, I understand, even had special T-shirts made. Mind you, at the time this clique was a boys’ only club. There were no women in the group, and no Mexican American women held elective office in Los Angeles or in the California state government. It would prove to be an exclusionary mistake. The Chicano movement itself, after all, had been a civil rights activism borne out of machismo, with mostly men in leadership roles. For good or bad, machismo was in the culture. 

Remember. The heroes of the Mexican Revolution in the history and stories down through the years had been Porfirio Díaz, Pancho Villa, Francisco Madero, Álvaro Obregón, Victoriano Huerta, Venustiano Carranza. It didn’t make it right. It was what it was. Even in modern times the most notable Latino hero was Che Guevara, the Argentine rebel who had aided Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution and became a pop culture icon. Was it any wonder that in the largely Latino Los Angeles Eastside, the hypnotic eyes of a revolutionary with flowing long hair and a Che Guevara look beamed like headlights through a morning fog from the wall of a housing project along East Olympic Boulevard with a simple message of the changing times:

“We Are Not a Minority.”

Neither were Chicanas, and no one likely knew that better than Gloria Molina.

I still remember the afternoon I first met her. I had just finished interviewing Willie Brown. But throughout the interview with the new Speaker of the State Assembly, I couldn’t help but sense that I was being critically studied by a young Latina in a women’s power business suit standing nearby. We were on the Cal State Los Angeles campus, and I assumed she was a professor as she was holding a briefcase and seemed to be waiting to speak to Brown. It turned out she wanted to introduce herself to me. She was an aide to the Speaker, and she reminded me that Assemblyman Art Torres and his wife had wanted us to meet.

“Art says you may be the most influential Latina in California,” I said.

“I think he says that because I round up the women to get him elected,” she said. Her confidence was unmistakable.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” I said, “though I wonder if maybe you shouldn’t round them up to get yourself elected.” 

After all, there were no Latinas in elected offices in the Assembly, the State Senate, the Los Angeles City Council, or almost anywhere else in California.

Gloria looked at me as if not sure whether to believe me. 

“You really think so?” I couldn’t tell if her question was just rhetorical. “But no one outside our group of women knows who I am.”

A few weeks later, Gloria Molina, a Latina she said no one knew her beyond her family and friends, was on the front page of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the news peg for a series of stories on Chicana power called “Machisma.” The stories were picked up by the Associated Press and translated and republished in Los Angeles Spanish daily La Opinión. Local television and radio reporters followed up. In a matter of days, Molina was the second most famous Latina in the state, behind only Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers union.

The only ones who didn’t seem impressed were the Golden Palominos who were about to commit political suicide. Molina seemed hellbent on of running for the Assembly seat being vacated by Art Torres who was hoping to move up to the State Senate. She had Torres’ blessing But the endorsement she needed was that of the head of the Eastside political machine, Assemblyman Richard Alatorre. 

Alatorre’s Sacramento office was in a state of disarray. He was in the midst of moving to larger quarters in the east wing of the Capitol, and so his office was littered with packing boxes filled with a decade’s worth of business as an Assemblyman. But now he was arguably the second most powerful person in the Assembly. And so the disarray in Office 2188 on this cold, overcast day in late 1981 was not only physical but also political. For going on inside Alatorre’s quarters was the secret power-brokering of the political spoils in the Mexican American Eastside of Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, Molina didn’t get Alatorre’s endorsement in the 56th Assembly District race she was eyeing, but neither did anyone else. She was disappointed, though she took consolation in knowing that she would not be running against a candidate openly supported by the Alatorre machine.

“I had worked with him for years, so I trusted him,” Molina recalled in an interview. “I had an awful lot of confidence in him and felt that he was somebody I could talk to. It started out that, ‘I’m thinking of running for the seat. What do you think?’

“And it was the way he responded that was the most disappointing, and I’ll never forget that. All that self-doubt? He threw it all back at me. ’You can’t run. You can’t win. What are you talking about? You can’t raise money. You can’t get endorsements.’ I mean, all the ‘You can’ts’ that I said to myself, he just laid it all out there for me. And I said, ‘But, of course, I could try. I think I can raise… I think I can do it.’ All this doubt. It was a very, very hard meeting, but I had already settled these things for myself. And then he had turned around and just threw it all back at me and said, ‘You can’t.’”

Years later, when I reminded Richard about this meeting with Gloria Molina, he smiled and shook his head. He knew he had screwed it up. But I thought I would reinforce the memory by telling him about the then new film Once Upon a Time in Mexico and a powerful scene in which the actor Johnny Depp delivers a prophetic line that perhaps should be asked of every Mexican and Mexican American:

“Are you a MexiCAN or are you a MexiCAN’T?”

Alatorre laughed, nodded, then lifted his bottle of Tecáte and offered a toast fitting for Mexican Independence Day as well.

“To all MexiCANS!” 

Tony Castro, the former award winning Los Angeles columnist and author of CHICANO POWER (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a writer-at-large with LAMonthly.org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.

The Great de León: A Reckoning for L.A.

How Los Angeles deals with Kevin de León and therefore with itself will show it to be either the Tinseltown viewed by its detractors — selfish and exclusive — or the city seen by its defenders: painfully troubled, but still holding on to the country’s original moral purpose and promise.

By TONY CASTRO

KEVIN DE LEÓN, WHO A YEAR AGO BECAME persona non grata from Southern California to the White House, is betting that his constituents are forgiving enough to help him re-launch his once promising political career — so damn the torpedoes. He’s running for reelection to the Los Angeles City Council where until recently he might have been mistaken for a character from The Walking Dead.

More significantly, de León is gambling that voters in his predominantly low and middle-income Latino district in their own personal way might privately agree or empathize with him on the delicate but volatile issue behind the controversial racist comments that got him and two other Latino politicians into trouble in the first place — and that maybe, on a larger scale, this secret and illegally taped recording was only the tip of the iceberg.

Amazingly, it was only a year ago that even President Joe Biden called on fellow Democrat de León to resign his council seat after a leaked tape of a political backroom full of disparaging racist comments about other minority groups embarrassingly exposed the divisive racial ethnic fissures that often still simmer in Los Angeles, the most Third World major city in America.

“When a lot of people that I called my friends and allies turned away from me, my constituents had my back,” de León said in an interview. “I understood in a deeper way the relationship that I had with my community and how that motivates and drives me. That’s why I’m still here. And that’s why I’m running.”

Call him Latino Lazarus, if he pulls this off, The Walking Dead of biblical proportions. And, if he does, don’t let the Los Angeles Times forget that earlier this year it called him a fart in print: “KDL has turned into the political version of a fart — most officials stay as far away as possible, while his fellow council members hold their nose every time they take a vote alongside him.”

Sinvergüenza would have been more like it. Someone without shame. Kevin de León might have argeed. He is, after all, the self-made poster boy for the American Dream in California or as he put it, “I am not just a defender of the California Dream. I am a product of it.” It is fitting. Kevin de León is also a product of Los Angeles’ most famous business. He believes in fantasies. Some critics say he is a fantasy of his own making, another politician tinkering with his narrative.

But he knows he blew what he had going for himself by being part of that racist-filled political conversation with two other colleagues and a labor big shot that ultimately exploded into the biggest political scandal in recent Los Angeles history.

For sure, the last year has been hell for de León, becoming a punchline and being chased out of the City Council chamber to which he had been elected in 2020 to replace the real Sinvergüenza who had bribed and scammed and collected hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally and is now about to become perhaps the only Princeton-educated Latino ever to do time in federal prison. Someone may have to remind that guy that the sign at the entrance reads “Jail,” not “Yale.”

But Kevin de León is not that guy. He’s broken no law. He is a 56-year-old Guatemalan American who was raised by a single mom in San Diego and Tijuana and strongly identifies with the Mexican culture. In his youth, he also did something quite status-climbing, Jay Gatsby-like. While attending the University of California at Santa Barbara, he began going by Kevin de León and has continued using it, though apparently never legally changing his name from Kevin Alexander Leon. 

“I didn’t want to be viewed as a bastard child,” he said, not knowing his father and describing his name-change as a search for structure and roots. “De León gave me that sense that I belonged to something, to somebody — even though at the end of the day I didn’t.”

Clearly, it was a sign of upwardly mobile ambition. By adding the “de” to his surname, he was trying to give it a classier ambiance. Like Gatsby, Kevin de León “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.” Call him The Great de León.

He was intent on being somebody. His own Daisy Buchanan? Political power.

After graduating from Pitzer College, de León was first elected to office in 2006, winning a Hollywood-Northeast LA seat in the California Assembly by defeating César Chávez’s granddaughter, of all people. He then won election to the State Senate in 2010, becoming Senate President Pro Tem and earning a reputation as an ambitious rising star in Latino politics.

But he would be dogged by controversy and scandal from almost the very start. 

As an Assemblyman, he was found to have made illegal ghost votes for another Assemblymember but opposite of how that Assemblymember planned to vote. A scandal erupted, but de León avoided punishment through the forgiveness of then-Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, the future Congresswoman and mayor of Los Angeles. Some believe it cost him his chance to become the next Speaker of the Assembly. Then he foolishly ridiculed in public much of the state of California as being nothing more than “tumbleweeds.”

De León encountered more controversy during his eight years in the State Senate. He voted against a water bill when the company benefitting from his vote had previously contributed to his political campaign. Then there was persistent criticism in Sacramento over the manner in which he managed to get several bills passed.

De León carried his personal magnetism for negative publicity and scandal to the Los Angeles City Council. He raised questions over just how close he was financially to an AIDS nonprofit organization. Another time he drew condemnation attempting to stall a rapid transit project. But possibly his most embarrassing faux pas was forgetting the pledge of allegiance when asked to lead his colleagues in its recitation at the opening of a City Council meeting.

The zoom video of the incident quickly went viral, viewed with disbelief and pity hundreds of thousands of times or more throughout the country, if not the world: the ambitious and Latino upstart wanting to make a name for himself in politics who can’t remember the words of national pride that American kids learn in grade school. Play it again, please. De León starts off strong and then suddenly loses the words, stopping at the phrase “United States of America.” He pauses, mumbles “undervisible,” then quickly starts over. On the second try, de León reaches the word “America” and pauses again. He noticeably skips over part of the pledge before making his way to the finish. As soon as it was over, someone at the meeting can be heard uttering “Oof.”

When he ran for U.S. Senator and mayor of Los Angeles, he didn’t lose because of that gaffe. But it didn’t help him in inspiring non-Latino voters to vote for him or in convincing them that he was the Latino Barack Obama, someone deserving of trust and transcending the unfortunate stereotype some white voters might have of black and Latino politicians.

If he was your kid, or you knew him personally, you would have to feel for him. Remember that line about him not wanting “to be viewed as a bastard child”? Growing up, de León was torn not knowing who his father was, as well as being acutely aware that he was an out of wedlock child, the son of a mother and father who had their own separate families. He wanted a father, but he came to understand that “I am who I am today because of my mother.”

“I don’t go though my life any longer wishing I had a father,” he said in an interview. “I believe I have surpassed that moment in realizing that I am a product of my mother.”

But he felt a resentment that drove him — “a chip on my shoulder… I wasn’t good enough, maybe.” 

The veteran political journalist Dan Walters, who has witnessed it all in California and in America, saw in de León “an archetypal up-from-poverty political striver” with an unquenched need for validation and an obvious cry for attention such as when he threw a lavish “inauguration” ceremony in Sacramento after winning the Senate President Pro Tem position. Some are still laughing about it at the state capitol.

“California is the greatest beacon of opportunity the world has ever known,” de León has said in his defense. “But we didn’t get here through years of political seniority — we built it through acts of audacity.”

So Is there enough audacity in that uber-ambition to get reelected to the city Council in 2024 when his name and reputation have been further tarnished and poisoned by enemies and former friends alike over the past year?

In next spring’s primary, de León will face at least two other similarly ambitious former colleagues from the State Legislature, who are using the audio taped racist-scandal to maintain that Los Angeles needs new blood in order to heal the wounds that the Eastside councilman and two other fellow Latino City Council members created by their language in the leaked audio tape.

One of those other two council members heard on the tape, the then City Council President Nury Martinez, resigned. The third councilmember, Gil Cedillo, had already lost his reelection bid in the primary earlier in the year. 

But are Angelenos — be they Black, white, Latino, Asian, Jewish, Muslim or any other group — so naïve as to believe that Latinos and African-Americans in particular live in perfect racial ethnic harmony in this modern world and culture? If they do, in what fairy tale Hallmark card have they been living in?

Since the scandal erupted, the charismatic de León has focused his attention almost exclusively on his Eastside district, doubling down on his constituents’ needs and neighborhood issues — and reestablishing his community political organizational ties — which were the backbone of his initial success into the world of California’s often misunderstood and maligned Latino politics. His own politics became even more liberal than that of most Latino politicians, though it did endear him to progressives in the state whose backing helped him make a respectable showing when he challenged Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2018.

A special note in that campaign was one of De León’s political ads titled “Our Time” that clearly underscored the vision that drives him politically. The ad attacked Feinstein and then President Donald Trump for bashing immigrants and had a scene of a single mother, a housekeeper like De León’s late mom Carmen, being hauled away by immigration agents. “This is our story,” de León says in the ad. “It’s time to stand up and fight back.”

Then and today in his every day political life today, de León speaks about and to Latinos with an urgency that understandably inspires and moves both Latino Americans and immigrants, especially those in single mother families. And make no mistake, it is a message not intended for all, but certainly for the people who are the heart and soul of his district’s constituency, which is likely where de León will win or lose his upcoming reelection. That district takes in all or portions of downtown, Boyle Heights and El Sereno on the Eastside and Eagle Rock in the Northeast.

“He really helped the Latino community in and around his district, and they will never forget that ” said Maria Costa, a Los Angeles pollster who focuses on Latino communities. “Honestly, he still has a lot of support there, and he has spent the summer going out and about trying to repair his reputation. And his staff has being using the usual playbook for political rehabilitation, right down to ‘getting your picture taken eating food at a local restaurant.’”

Is de León counting on the phenomenon that too often voters have surprisingly short memories and that politicians’ followers and political supporters don’t care what kind of scandal their leaders get themselves into, so long as they deliver on what’s important to their political base?

Early proof of that may have been that a campaign to recall de León earlier this year failed miserably when its leaders couldn’t muster enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot — this in California, the state that’s the easiest to get a respectable ballot measure before the voters, and at a time when professional signature-gathering organizations can virtually guarantee doing just that.

Even a Los Angeles Times poll of voters in his district also indicated that de León may not be as vulnerable as some had believed. Only 51% of the voters in his district thought he should resign, and an even lower 43% of Latinos felt the same way. And that was a poll taken last January when the racist comments scandal was still fresh and in the news and the anti-de León protests in the council chambers so intense that he was staying away.

Who would’ve thought at that time that the embattled Kevin de León had a comeback path? And could that snarky Los Angeles Times rhetorical remark after the botched recall attempt prove to be prophetic?

“Did those predicting the death of de León’s political career miss something?”

Give him credit. De León is a born campaigner. He had plans to go places, and he had goals. But he was termed out of office in the legislature, which is why he ran for the City Council where long futures are often bleak in politics, unless you have designs on running for mayor. But still, no Los Angeles mayor has ever successfully moved on to any higher office in modern times. De León insists his goal in L.A. was just to serve and help improve the lives of his constituents.

So when de León and those other two former council members met with the head of the politically influential County Federation of Labor, their intention was far from committing political suicide. Their goal had been to strategize as Los Angeles’ presumed Latino leadership on how to take on the City Council’s once-a-decade redistricting process — and to prevent it from again short-changing Latino representation by carving out districts more favorable to the city’s old-guard politicians as well as to other non-Latino constituencies.

From experience, de León and those other two former councilmembers were intimately aware of how redistricting battles in Los Angeles underscore the way big city leaders — often Democrats — have historically used gerrymandering for their political advantage, much the way Republican lawmakers have redrawn legislative lines to secure or expand their control over some statehouses. 

There is no denying the disproportionate and gross City Council underrepresentation of Latinos who comprise almost half of Los Angeles’ 3.8 million people but hold only a third of the 15 City Council seats. At the time of that controversial meeting, there were only four Latinos on the City Council. In comparison, Blacks represent 8% of the population but hold three seats — 20% of the City Council. Today, there are five Latino members of the City Council, still only a third of the lawmaking body.

This may explain why In the leaked audio tape of that meeting, de León can be heard comparing African-American representation on the City Council to the “The Wizard of Oz” — projecting a presence that is much larger than their actual numbers.

It is noteworthy that de León has expressed remorse for not rebuking former City Council President Nury Martinez and others, including the former head of the county’s Federation of Labor, for their racist statements secretly recorded at the labor organization’s headquarters and then apparently leaked by someone from that office.

The Los Angeles Police Department is currently investigating the leaked recording, which was illegal under California law, with suspicion focused on a disgruntled employee of the Federation of Labor, according to Los Angeles Magazine.

Additionally, de León has apologized for agreeing with Martinez in calling the Black adopted son of a fellow Council member a prop, adding the child’s presence at a political event was “just like when Nury brings her yard bag or the Louis Vuitton bag.” He later called his comment “a flippant remark.”

But he stands firmly behind his “Wizard of Oz” comment.

“The context of our conversation was about redistricting and ensuring equal representation,” de León has said. “You have to look no further than the maps that were drawn. Are they fully reflective of the demographics of the city? Not really.”

And today, the redistricting of the City Council districts remains unsettled. An effort to create a fair and equitable redistricting map by representatives of each councilmember dragged on for the better part of two years. Ultimately, it was rejected for a substitute redistricting map that was virtually the same one created a decade earlier with all its built-in biases and flaws that have failed to curb the political corruption that has led to a handful of councilmembers going to prison, or in route to prison at the moment.

Now it would appear that city officials are preparing to put the question to voters next year as to how to proceed, possibly with an option to enlarge the City Council by as many as 10 members.

But don’t hold your breath. For as Sara Sadhwani — an assistant politics professor at Pomona College who was part of the academic panel that suggested some of the City Council redistricting reforms about power, who holds it, and are they really interested in sharing it — has said:

“It’s a rare thing to see a councilmember or any legislator that has such a power have a willingness to relinquish it.” 

That, too, could be said of Kevin de León who in 2020 succeeded City Councilmember Jose Huizar, who was enmeshed in a massive corruption scandal that led to his indictment and conviction. He is now awaiting sentencing on federal racketeering and tax evasion charges. 

In 2020 de León won election outright in the primary with 52% of the vote. If no one receives a majority of the vote in the primary next March, the top two vote-getters will face off in November.

Is there any doubt that the reelection campaign will be messy, dirty and a bizarre spectacle at times? This is post-Trumpean America, after all, where politics has become a free-for-all entertainment sport. 

But that election will also be more than a referendum on Kevin de León. It will be a referendum on Los Angeles. The way Angelenos, particularly in his district, react to de León and his plea for forgiveness and a second chance will define for years what kind of community it really is. How Los Angeles deals with de León, and therefore with itself will show it to be either the Tinseltown seen by its detractors — selfish and exclusive — or the city seen by its defenders: painfully troubled, but still holding on to the country’s original moral purpose and promise. It may be Kevin de Leon’s role not only to struggle for his rightful share of his American Dream, but also to recall the rest of Los Angeles to its own sense of conscience and destiny.

Tony Castro, the former award winning Los Angeles columnist and author of CHICANO POWER (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a writer-at-large with LAMonthly.org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.

Pete Aguilar & The Latino Presidency

The election of Barack Obama, the country’s first African-American president, in 2008 immediately raised the question among Latinos, who comprise the largest minority group in the United States: when will America elect its first Latino president?

By TONY CASTRO

November 28, 2023

ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 20, 2009, I am about 75 yards away from where Barack Obama would soon place his hand on the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his 1861 inauguration and recited the presidential oath administered by Chief Justice John Roberts. Several friends and I are sipping tea warmed with Chivas Regal, when one of us poses the question that the historic Obama presidency stirs up in old Texas Chicano activists who never thought we would see the day of the first Black president in America: how long before the first Latino president of the United States?

In the intervening decade and a half, speaking about Latino politics at colleges and universities, it is a question I am most often asked. And my answer is almost always a collection of intelligent sounding soundbites mixed with humor but offering certainly no definitive answer. At best, the answer is complicated.

The names of a handful of Latino senators, governors, congressmen, and maybe even a Supreme Court Justice are often the usual candidates. Notably, though, not a single Latino appears among the candidates for 2024 who could succeed President Joe Biden or replace Donald Trump as the leading challenger. But I can offer a name for perhaps 2028 that may sound as puzzling as that of Barack Hussein Obama did to many back in the year 2000.

Peter Rey Aguilar.

Better known as Pete Aguilar, who since 2015 has been the U.S. representative for California’s 33rd congressional district — renumbered from the 31st after the 2020 redistricting cycle. It is the district that once seemed to be the personal property of the late Jerry Lewis, the longest-serving Republican congressman in California history who stepped down in 2013 after serving 17 terms and who was well liked by both his Republican and Democratic colleagues. 

But in California, Pete Aguilar was never expected to be where he is today. This was the road mini thought would be cast with a Latino politician from Los Angeles, the home of California Latino political power since the 1970s. Richard Alatorre, Art Torres, Gloria Molina, Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa. Those were the names most often associated with the future of Latino political leadership.

None more dominant than Antonio Villaraigosa, one of the most powerful leaders in the California legislature in the 1990s when Aguilar was still an undergraduate at the University of Redlands. Then, in the new century, Villaraigosa’s career had skyrocketed. He had barely been elected to the Los Angeles City Council when he ran for mayor in 2001, losing but winning overwhelmingly four years later.

As the first Latino in modern time to be elected mayor of Los Angeles, Villaraigosa instantly became a star in the Democratic Party and a sought-after endorsement. His inaguration was attended by Vice President Al Gore, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, national and state leaders, and several foreign heads of state, with Cardinal Roger Mahony presiding over interfaith services at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Afterward, Villaraigosa along with Cardinal Mahoney led and arm and arm march of thousands from the cathedral to City Hall, where he delivered his inaugural address. In the coming years,Villaraigosa was even mentioned as a possible vice presidential contender, add he was the share of the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

But repeated questions concerning Villaraigosa’s marital infidelity appear to have damaged his reputation locally and nationally. His fall from grace was almost as deep as his climb had been. At the same time, Pete Aguilar was beginning his own political climb, serving on the Redlands City Council from 2006 until his election to Congress.

Aguilar was mayor of Redlands from 2010 to 2014 during which time he became closely acquainted with Lewis. Aguilar even spoke glowingly of Lewis at his funeral in 2021 as a man who rose to be the powerful House Appropriations Committee’s chair and head the House Republican Caucus.

“He talked about their long-standing friendship going back to when he was mayor of Redlands,” recalled Claremont McKenna political science professor Jack Pitney, who had worked for Lewis.

“It’s no coincidence they got along so well, because Jerry was pretty much like that too. He was not a cultural warrior. He had a conservative voting record, but he made a point of befriending people on the Democratic side.”

So perhaps it is only to those outside California’s Inland Empire that Aguilar has so surprisingly emerged as the political darling and rising star of the Democratic party. Today he chairs the House Democratic Caucus, he’s the highest-ranking Latino in Congress and now also heads up the Democrats’ campaign to recapture control of the House of Representatives — with a Herculean promise to flip five GOP-held congressional seats in his home state alone.

“He’s also the highest-ranking Californian in Congress today,” says Rep. Lou Correa, D-Orange County, of his fellow Golden State congressman. “And he’s got a big responsibility of representing the interests of the biggest state in the union. I think Petey has really grown into the position of leadership.

“He doesn’t hesitate to tell it the way it is, and that’s what I like about the guy. He’s many times unfiltered, he’ll tell you what he thinks, but that’s good, you want some transparency when you’re negotiating with somebody. You want them to tell you exactly where they’re coming from, so you can better get to the point where you want to get faster.

“He’s got a good head on his shoulders, and I think Petey’s not done. Petey’s going places.”

He is not alone. Petey is 44 now, but solidly of California Inland Empire roots. Born in Fontana, Aguilar grew up of Mexican descent in a working-class family in San Bernardino. He graduated from the University of Redlands, where he studied government and business administration. 

He and his wife Alisha, a Student Financial Services director at the University of Redlands have two sons, Palmer and Evan, they are raising in San Bernardino, even as Aguilar spends 34 weeks a year serving in Congress in Washington, D.C.

“The Inland Empire is always home — and it will always be home,” Aguilar says. “My parents, my grandparents, were born and raised here. I’m raising my kids in public schools here. This place is always going to be home. And I’m always going to want to come back home.”

Kevin Dyerly, who roomed with Aguilar in college, remembers his friend “getting up at the crack of dawn on Saturdays to coordinate a student project for Habitat for Humanity.

“He has always cared deeply for his community,” says Dyerly, “and the quality of life for people within it.”

In 2015, when he was a freshman congressman, Pete and Alisha completed a week-long SNAP challenge, where they could not spend more than $4.73 per person, per day on food — the average benefit for California’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients. They did the challenge to raise awareness for nutrition and hunger throughout the Inland Empire and “to better understand what thousands of families on SNAP throughout San Bernardino County go through every day.” 

At the age of 21, Aguilar served as deputy director for Gov. Gray Davis’ Inland Empire office — four years before he was appointed to the Redlands City Council. Then in 2014, Aguilar was elected to the House of Representatives, easily winning reelection four times since then.

“He’s not afraid to take a different side than yours” says Carole Beswick, CEO of the Inland Action think tank, who has known Aguilar for more than a decade. “But he’ll listen. He’ll be respectful, and he’ll consider what you’re saying. You may not have persuaded him, but you know he’s heard you.”

Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Manhattan Beach, who was part of the same Congressional freshman class that year, said Aguilar puts on no airs or pretense.

“He’s the same guy as he is back home,” he said. “He doesn’t change when he’s in Congress.”

“Mr. Aguilar,” The New York Times wrote, sizing him up, “is known for his affable demeanor and his ability to bring together the various flanks of the party and cut deals with Republicans.”

Politico.com has gone so far as to say, “This California Democrat Might Be the Future of the Party.” The Future of the Party. What could that mean? His hometown newspaper, the San Bernardino Sun wrote a long piece on Aguilar and, ultimately, could only speculate “Future Speaker?” But that was hardly a revelation. A year ago, the Washington Post reported that “close friends view Aguilar as the man who could become the first Hispanic speaker of the House.”

But then, Aguilar was practically unheard of, except maybe in his district and in the Latino Caucus, until last year when then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tapped him to serve on the House January 6th Committee.

The day of the rioting insurrection at the U.S. Capitol would alter Pete Aguilar’s life. One moment he is preparing with other congressmen to confirm Joe Biden as the nation’s next president. The next he is fleeing the chamber floor for his life from the attack on the Capitol. As he scrambled to leave, Aguilar scribbled in a little red notebook he carried.

“I’m a little scared.”

As it turns out, that day, and what came afterward, catapulted him into the forefront of the nation’s leadership and a position of prominence and power he had never actively sought.

What role that might ultimately be is up to Aguilar and the turn of events ahead of him, which essentially have dictated his political opportunities. For his part, he says he has no ambition beyond where he is in the House. It’s the one thing Nancy Pelosi says she loved most about him as he was coming up: “He was a House guy.”

But Aguilar is not a loyally blind “House guy” or congressional leader, as two recent positions have made that evident.

In September, he called for Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) to resign for allegedly pocketing bribes in a wide-ranging corruption case, adding that discrimination against Latinos should not be conflated with Menendez’s indictment.

Then in early November, Aguilar slammed Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the only Palestinian American member of the House, after she accused President Biden of supporting Palestinian “genocide.”

He is, after all, a fierce supporter of President Biden, who while vice president in 2014 had stumped in California for Aguilar who was running for Jerry Lewis’s old House seat after having lost his first congressional campaign two years earlier to the incumbent that he was now trying to oust.

Biden said Aguilar “understands that every single solitary child out there deserves the same chance he (Aguilar) had,” and that the “American people are tired of standing still.”

“Do not let this man lose. We need him,” Biden told the Colton High School gymnasium standing-room-only crowd. “Get out the vote!”

Aguilar won and Pelosi was soon so impressed with the young congressman that she fast-tracked him to a seat on the Appropriations Committee.

“He has all the talent,” she says “He’s articulate and eloquent. He is values-based. He knows the subject matter.”

Pelosi has also done more than just mentor him. She has connected him with top California donors and introduced him to her California inner circle to ensure that he is well positioned both in Washington and in their home Golden State.

But she had to convince him to accept serving on the high profile Jan. 6 committee position that raised his visibility and made him the rising star he’s become.

Aguilar feared how the job of investigating Donald Trump’s violent extremists might put his wife and two sons at risk. 

“I didn’t need the death threats,” he recalled thinking.

But it may be that the role of investigating and helping prosecute a disgraced president’s criminal thugs will yield the biggest payback of his life.

As such, Aguilar has now assumed a new role: mentor and guide while hoping he might follow in the footsteps of Pelosi and eventually the leader for the next generation of California Democrats in Washington.

“I benefited from learning from her,” Aguilar says of his mentorship under Pelosi, “spending time with her, watching her build relationships. Nobody is going to recreate that in four months.” And it may be that Aguilar fits the bill that most perfectly matches what the Democrats need today because of his heritage. What is the future of Latinos within the Democratic Party, and can the party hold on to the increasingly massive Latino vote in future national elections?

Those are questions of growing concern to Democrats as polls show that President Biden is losing support among Latino voters, who are potentially the swing vote in a presidential campaign not only in the traditionally large Latino population states like California and Texas but also in the southwest, parts of the Midwest and south as well as in some northeastern states.

Aguilar isn’t giving up, but he understands that the issue is more complex than many Democrats and Democratic party leaders make it out to be.

According to the Washington Post, “Aguilar has grown frustrated with how Democrats treated all Hispanics with a broad brush, leading to a troubling decline in political support from that voting bloc. The anti-police rhetoric cost Democrats votes in South Texas, he said, where a huge portion of Hispanic families work for the Border Patrol or local law enforcement.”

“They’re very different,” he said, referring to the different nationalities of Latino voters. “How you talk to a Mexican American in Southern California versus a Cuban American in South Florida, we have to acknowledge that we can’t have boilerplate campaign literature.”

Not lost in translation, however, is the idea that Latino voters aspire to the same thing most Americans have wanted.

“I think the Latino Dream is the American Dream,” says Aguilar, “and it’s a better quality of life for our kids. It’s clean air and clean water, safe communities, safe streets, good schools — those are things that the Latino community wants — and those are things that thankfully, the Biden-Harris administration wants to invest in.

“I do think that there’s always an opportunity to get in front of our voters to get in front of our constituents, and the Latino community and to share exactly what we’ve done. So rather than treating people as just ‘of course, they’re going to be with us,’ we need to convince them, and we need to talk with them. And we need to engage with them about what we’ve done… 

“The role that the Democratic Caucus put me in to do, that is important. It’s historic, it’s significant. And it shows how far we’ve come as a country.”

Tony Castro, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author of CHICANO POWER (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a writer-at-large with LAMonthly.org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.

The Last Best Days of Lucy’s El Adobe

The famous but now shuttered Lucy’s El Adobe Café in Hollywood holds a special place in California pop culture where the author met his adoptive and extended LA family that included Governor Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt.

By TONY CASTRO

December 28, 2023

AS THE YEAR 2023 CLOSED OUT, feeling a bit nostalgic about my early days in Los Angeles, I visited the once famous but now shuttered Lucy’s Adobe Café on Melrose Avenue across the street from Paramount Studios. I’m not sure what I was looking for, and what I found maybe belonged on some unused Hollywood backlot, forlorn and forgotten.

In the El Adobe’s glorious day I always entered Lucy’s through the rear. Maybe for that reason, I climbed the wrought iron fence guarding the driveway and made it to the back entrance, just as the skies unleashed another rainstorm. Everything was safely locked, looking as deserted as my friend Patty Casado — the late owners’ only living heir — warned me it would be. 

But I hadn’t gone for the margaritas, nor the vegetarian tostadas. I had gone to visit the memories, most of which had to do with my late friend best Alex Jacinto whom I met there in the most extraordinary of ways. The fact that it was extraordinary had nothing to do with either of us. Nor even with the business that brought us together one autumn afternoon at a table in the darkened, near empty side room of the famed Hollywood Mexican restaurant.

The owner Frank Casado, a behind-the-scenes politico and close friend of then Governor Jerry Brown, wanted us to meet. Jacinto, his longtime pal and lawyer, was about to file a landmark civil rights lawsuit against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department that was bound to ruffle feathers in the city. 

And me? Well, Casado had taken to calling me the “New Kid in Town,” the title of a hit song in the Eagles’ great “Hotel California” album. This was 1978, and the Eagles, the hottest name in music, were regarded as extended family by Casado and his wife Lucy who had fed and sheltered the group’s members during their days as struggling artists.

I was the new kid because I had only recently arrived in Tinseltown to write a three-times-a-week column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, a strike-crippled afternoon newspaper attempting to resurrect itself from near ruin through splashy New Journalism: hiring a big name editor, Jim Bellows, who was among those who had given birth to the New Journalism back East, and show-boating aggressive advocacy reporting and columns by journalists like Denis Hamill, the legendary writer Pete Hamill’s younger brother, and myself, the author of a recent bestselling Latino civil rights manifesto titled Chicano Power.

I’m pinching myself at the assignment. The greatest editor in America has just hired me to come to L.A. to write about the Golden State’s rising political star governor whose girlfriend is the hot darling of rock ‘n’ roll and who wants to be president of the United States. I’m to do this as a columnist at the near-bankrupt flagship newspaper of publishing legend William Randolph Hearst, whose granddaughter — kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst — is still in prison for a crazy bank robbery, all symbolic of the calamity of the wealth and power in California. But lucky me, I’ve just stumbled onto the very people who can help make all of this happen.

Alex Jacinto reminded me of a larger-than-life Orson Welles stepping out of a scene from the film Citizen Kane. He was as loud as he was big and commanding. As I jogged my memory for where I’d seen Jacinto before, Casado broke the ice with a pitcher of margaritas and a large, inviting plate of a dish called Taquitos Jacinto that he said he had named in honor of Alex: sliced beef steak wrapped inside corn tortillas with rice, beans and guacamole.

“This isn’t Mexican food,” said Casado, whispering so that the only other customers on this side of the restaurant wouldn’t hear. “It’s Tejano food.”

“Is he from Texas?” asked Jacinto, pointing at me, almost accusatory.

“Sure is,” said Casado. “Just like Lucy.”

Jacinto let out a loud laugh as he hung a large napkin from his shirt collar. “Now you’ll have your hands full! If you thought having one Tejana was bad ass enough. Imagine having two around.”

That’s when it got extraordinary.

Our conversation was halted by the thunderous sound of roller skates indoors, echoing loudly –– CUR! CUR! CUR! CUR! Had the Roller Derby come to town? We could hear someone careening through the narrow hallway leading into this side of the restaurant, with the sound growing louder, almost violent. CUR! CUR! CUR! CUR! And what a showstopper. CUR! CUR! A gorgeous, smiling roller-skater caromed into the side room of Lucy’s El Adobe, skate-screeching to a sudden stop and booty blocking our table.

Linda Ronstadt, no less in roller skates and wearing shorts and a Dodgers jacket, gave Casado a big hug and kiss. She looked superstar radiant, just like the night a year earlier when she made a splash singing the national anthem at a World Series game against the New York Yankees at Dodger Stadium. That was such a hit that Ronstadt wore a similar satin jacket –– along with short shorts, kneepads and roller skates –– on the cover of her 1978 album, “Living in the USA.”

Yes, with the exception of the Dodgers jacket, that was what she now wore.

I immediately stood up. Casado noticed and gave me an inconspicuous down-boy wave with his hand.

“You can take the kid out of Texas, but you can’t take manners out of the kid,” said Casado, who, being an unruffled former sailor, acted as if this –– Linda Ronstadt, the reigning queen of rock pecking his cheek –– was an everyday occurrence, and continued puffing on an unfiltered cigarette. Jacinto also kept a nonchalant look that I tried to imitate, though I think my mouth was agape as I sat back down.

“Whacha doin’?” Casado spoke to the rock star as if she were his daughter, Patty, who was, in fact, a close friend of the singer.

“Rehearsing,” said Ronstadt, removing a helmet and shaking a head of beautiful hair. “Back on the road in Texas in December.”

“On the road at Christmas?” asked Casado.

“Just a few dates,” said Ronstadt. “But at The Forum on Christmas Eve. You and Lucy have to come.”

Casado then introduced us to Linda. I had met her briefly several months earlier, but there was no reason she would remember. She held on to Frank’s arm as he got up to take her to the restaurant office, likely for a more private conversation. 

They had a backstory that would become an important footnote in political history. Among some in the news media, Casado and his wife were known as Jerry Brown’s surrogate parents, for it was no secret that Brown had a complicated relationship with his father, former Governor Pat Brown. Jerry had never hidden his ambivalence about his back-slapping politician father, and their differences had created mixed feelings. Like his father, the son had been attracted to political office –– but, unlike his father, he was repelled by the gritty work of winning it. 

With the Casados, Jerry had filled the holes he had at home. Frank and Lucy had known him since his early entry into politics when he ran for a community college district trusteeship.

Brown often visited the restaurant late at night, staying into the wee hours of the morning talking politics with Casado and spiritualism with Lucy. Then when he was elected governor in 1974, Brown appointed each of them to state boards and commissions. 

Two years later, he made a quixotic but late entry into the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination race. He couldn’t stop Jimmy Carter from the nomination, but Jerry Brown’s political ceiling seemed endless. So did his personal capital. 

As Brown was finishing his first term as governor, the Casados tried their hand at matchmaking. In an unlikely pop cultural pairing that could only have been scripted in Hollywood, Jerry and Linda became a couple who surprisingly were able to keep their romance secret until early 1978. Their love affair came into full bloom when they celebrated Brown’s 40th birthday at Lucy’s El Adobe while hordes of photographers and television crews waited outside.  

I was present at that small birthday party the first week of April, thanks to Casado. I had met Frank and Lucy about a month earlier, just days after arriving in town. They had paid a visit to the publisher of the Herald Examiner, Francis Dale, formerly the publisher of the Cincinnati Enquirer as well as president of the Cincinnati Reds who had helped build the world champion Big Red Machine teams. 

The publisher had insisted that I sit in on the meeting with the Casados. After all, I was the Herald Examiner’s new columnist and, more importantly for this meeting, the only Hispanic on the newspaper’s staff. Dale had asked me to come to his office early that day to get acquainted. We both had a lifelong interest in baseball and were memorabilia collectors as well. Among the Reds mementos adorning his office was future Hall of Famer Johnny Bench’s game-used catcher’s mitt, which he allowed me to handle and try on. 

“Do a good job for me here at the paper,” he said, “and I’ll leave it to you in my will.” I told him he had a deal.

Moments later, Dale and the Casados were in mildly spirited conversation about politics. Dale was a staunch Republican who served on Richard M. Nixon’s Citizens Committee to Re-Elect the President and became Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. 

The Casados were polar opposite politically. They were not only closely allied with Jerry Brown and Democratic Party but also supporters of numerous Chicano Power civil rights groups and causes. Soon, though, Casado managed to impress upon the conservative publisher that, despite their political differences, they were intimately bonded.

“We’re tocayos, Frank,” said Casado, taking up Dale on his request that he call him that. “I’m Frank, too. And in our culture, two men sharing the same name are called tocayos.”

Frank Dale was letting that swill in his mind and swiveling, as was his habit, in his big executive chair when the most unexpected thing suddenly happened. Dale leaned so far back in his chair that he fell backwards, flipping in geriatric acrobatic fashion and crashing behind his desk with his legs landing on a credenza against a wall. 

The Casados and I were stunned and motionless. For a moment I thought my publisher had suffered a heart attack and died. I have to confess. My first fleeting thought was a selfish one: that he hadn’t yet put me in his will giving me his Johnny Bench catcher’s mitt. So I wasted no time in rushing to my publisher’s aid along with Casado. 

There was a shocked look in Frank Dale’s eyes. His face was flushed. He was breathing heavily. And he smelled of something strong. Casado and I tried to help him to his feet. I didn’t know Casado yet, but we exchanged a look of recognition, not of each other but of the smell of booze, as Dale apologized profusely..

“Don’t worry about it, Frank,” cracked Casado. “This happens with the margaritas in my place all the time.”

That stormy night I ate at Lucy’s El Adobe for the first time, and the Casados and I got drunk on margaritas laughing about our bizarre afternoon and how their political pow-wow had almost killed the publisher. It was also the rainiest April in the history of Los Angeles, and a few days later Casado helped me move from the Ambassador Hotel, where rain had flooded my bungalow, to the Chateau Marmont, the celebrity hotel packed with Old Hollywood glamour on the Sunset Strip. There, for a few days, my next-door neighbor was Audrey Hepburn. It wasn’t like working at the poor Herald Examiner didn’t have its perks. It was picking up all the bills, and Casado had insisted that I ask to be put up at the Chateau Marmont.

“Heck, if they won’t do it, I’ll call my tocayo Frank Dale myself,” said Casado. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want pictures of him upside down in his office making the rounds.”

“You don’t have photos of that, do you?” I asked, finding it inconceivable that Lucy had the quick presence of mind to surreptitiously snap a picture with a disposable camera of the new Herald Examiner publisher unceremoniously upended in a chair with his legs dangling in the air.

Casado’s sly smile was one for the ages. “No, kid,” he said. “But Frank Dale doesn’t know we don’t.”

“Besides, the Chateau Marmont is where you want to be right now,” he said. “It’s the place not just for big stars but writers, too. A lot of good movies were written there. The Day of the Locust. That was written there. Billy Wilder. He wasn’t too bad, was he? He began his career writing there. It’s also a great place to hide your sins. That guy Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures. Warren Beatty once told me that Harry Cohn used to tell all those bad boys he had under contract, ‘If you have to get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.’ So, yeah, kid, it’s the perfect place for someone running away from trouble.

“Kid, don’t get me wrong. It’s great having you here. You’re infamous but for all the wrong reasons.”

What Casado meant was my troublesome mound of lawsuits and bills and the stories that had followed me to California. My auto insurance company was suing me for deliberately setting my Porsche on fire in the middle of Harvard Square. Not true. My former Houston landlord was suing me for the damage that my two former roommates, strippers to whom I’d sub-let my apartment, did in almost destroying the place. The lease had expired. A guy in New Orleans was suing me for punching him and breaking his jaw. Self-defense. My ex who left me for a used catheter salesman wanted my royalties for Chicano Power. Good luck with that. A lawyer in Dallas was claiming I’d sold him a defective Snipe sailboat now at the bottom of White Rock Lake. The guy would have sunk Noah’s ark. The line was long. 

Casado’s way of helping was feeding me for free, like he and Lucy had done for Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles, Jackson Brown and a litany of music artists. 

“They were all young, and they’d all wound up in Los Angeles and many of them were homesick,” said Casado’s daughter, Patty. “They came here when they were stuck or lonely or had writer’s block or just wanted company.” I felt humbled and honored to be included.

And in Alex Jacinto, I had a good friend and a lawyer who broke the stereotype. He was more Don Quixote than I ever imagined, a modern-day knight errant never shy about jousting with windmills he found offensive to his sense of justice. In 1982, he ran for Los Angeles County Sheriff, challenging the same powerful but corrupt longtime incumbent he had successfully sued in that 1978 civil rights case. In that race Alex became a cause celeb often campaigning with no less than boxing legend Muhammad Ali alongside him. 

“I’m supporting Alex Jacinto because I see him as the conscience of Los Angeles,” Ali said in his endorsement. “He is a good, honest, moral man, and I don’t say that lightly.”

Jacinto lost that race, but I sensed that the experience changed him. In the coming years, he became a crusader against abortion, stem cell research and other causes that were dear to his progressive Democratic pals, much to their chagrin. In Mexico City he was so moved by the Virgen de Guadalupe tilma enshrined in the cathedral that he bought an expensive life-size replica that he then carried in the back of his car for religious pilgrimages around southern California.

But the change didn’t spoil his sense of humor, which was uncanny. He once attended a Mardi Gras costume party at my home dressed from head to toe like a Roman Catholic pontiff, replete with the papal mitre, cape, garments and even the red shoes. That night Pope Alex beat out the trapeze-swinging male stripper with a 12-foot python, the boogying John Travolta Saturday Night Fever impersonator, and a sexy bikinied pole dancer for best costume. 

All the while, Alex was watching my back. 

On one occasion, he kept me from pulling the plug on a Latino hack in the Nixon administration with whom I had often quarreled. My reporting in Houston had exposed that official and others of misusing tens of millions of dollars in federal grants and programs to woo Latino voters in the Southwest for the Nixon re-election campaign. 

It was just one of the many Nixon scandals related to Watergate. In the aftermath, a number of Latino officials lost their jobs, some faced criminal prosecution and others like the hack who showed up at Lucy’s El Adobe one night was ruined in politics. Casado knew him in passing and, unaware of our history, brought him to the side room where Alex and I were having dinner. 

The hack immediately greeted me with a profanity-laced invective and proceeded to insult the English woman I was with, calling her a “British hussy.” My good manners be damned. I responded by hurling my plate still laden with most of a vegetarian tostada at the former Nixon official. 

The plate hit him in the face and then smeared guacamole and salsa over his shirt and suit. Stunned, the guy retreated from the table and called police, demanding that I be arrested for assault.

“Assault! What with? A deadly tostada?” demanded Jacinto when police arrived. “That’s an insult to my client’s restaurant!”

Casado interceded, explained what had happened, and treated the officers to a complimentary dinner. Then he asked the former Nixon official to leave.

“That Castro kid just ordered another margarita,” Casado, who also possessed a wicked sense of humor, told the pol. “Another margarita and who knows what he’ll wind up throwing at you.”

But this was Lucy’s El Adobe, remember, a place that might have been imagined for a Hollywood lot, especially for its margaritas which could be as sedative as the climate. My screenwriter friend Teo Davis called it one of the consummate California destinations for a certain set to go after the sun, the Colombian gold, the Cuervo tequila, and the California blondes had kept you up at the Pacific until dawn with thoughts surfing on a suicidal, if you’ve indulged in enough of a cocaine jag to need three Tuinals to reduce agitation. Then, Teo used to say, Lucy’s was better than the Betty Ford Center in the desert, and much closer.

One night Lucy took me by the hand and introduced me to a handful of her friends who were there: Joni Mitchell, Don Henley, Dolly Parton, Daryl Hannah, Barbra Streisand. On another evening songwriter Jimmy Webb played his famous “MacArthur Park” on the baby grand piano he had given the restaurant, while nearby Secret Service agents checked the surroundings to clear the cafe for a visit by a presidential candidate. Bobby Kennedy had dropped by in 1968 on the afternoon of his last day alive, and many others followed.

But the restaurant had only one favorite son. On the night of the governor’s 40th birthday, April 7, 1978, I was seated with Frank and Lucy at a table adjoining the one where Jerry and Linda dined with Jerry’s mother, father and sister. Jerry was in rare spirits, playful and loving with Linda, gracious to anyone who came to wish him well, cheerful as toasts were offered and as he was serenaded with “Happy Birthday” and “Las Mañanitas,” the traditional Mexican birthday song. And what did the governor have for his birthday dinner at Lucy’s? Well, it wasn’t the arroz con pollo dish that Casado had named the Jerry Brown Special.

“He’s having Taquitos Jacinto,” said Casado. “Steak strips wrapped in corn tortillas with beans and rice. The guy I named it after is sitting over there.”

He pointed to the table against the wall next to where the governor was celebrating. There I recognized the governor’s chief of staff, a bodyguard, a couple of aides, a special adviser and guru, and a guy who was dominating the conversation and seemed to be enjoying every moment.

It was Alex Jacinto.

I spent many New Year’s Eves with Alex and friends at Lucy’s El Adobe, closing out another year singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

Here’s a cup of kindness, my friend.

Tony Castro, the former award winning Los Angeles columnist and author of CHICANO POWER (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a writer-at-large with LAMonthly.org. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.

About This Series

Part 1 Living in the Shadow of Ruben Salazar

Part 2 Alatorre: ‘I Am Not The Apostle’

Part 3 The Great De León: A Reckoning for Los Angeles

Part 4 Pete Aguilar & The Latino Presidency

Part 5 The Last Best Days of Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe

CHICANO POWER 50 Years Reflections is a series of stories examining the Latino civil rights history of the more than five decades since the advent of the Chicano Movement in Southern California and the LA County Sheriff’s deputy shooting death of Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar, which underscored the very social, economic and political inequities and discrimination against Latinos that he railed against.

In this five-part series, journalist and author Tony Castro — who in 1978 succeeded Salazar as the leading Chicano voice in a city of almost four million of which more than half are Latino — reexamines the Chicano Movement from today’s perspective and writes movingly about Latinos continuing their faithful pursuit of the American Dream: their progress amid broken promises and ongoing challenges faced by Latinos in all aspects of life, but especially in politics and in following in Salazar’s footsteps.

In these stories of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Castro invites readers into the world of Latinos — his world — chronicling the experiences about race, culture, identity, and belonging that have shaped those who led the Chicano movement, as well as himself. As much as this story is about adversity, it is also about tremendous resilience. And Castro pulls back the curtain and opens up about his career and personal life — and his struggles balancing himself in a society discriminating against so many like him, and his journey toward open heartedness. 

Castro, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, was an award–winning columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, reporting on the Latino civil rights movement in the Southwest, and in civil war-torn Central America in the late 1970s and 1980s. He later covered politics and for the Los Angeles Daily News.

Castro is a Harvard and Baylor University-educated historian, Hemingway and Napoleonic scholar and the author of eight books, including the landmark civil rights history Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America, (Dutton, 1974) which Publishers Weekly acclaimed as “brilliant… a valuable contribution to the understanding of our time.”  

Tony was among the first reporters in America to write extensively about race in presidential politics, as far back as his undergraduate days at Baylor when he reported on Bobby Kennedy’s quixotic 1968 campaign in the Mexican Americans barrios of California, which became a centerpiece of his book Chicano Power. 

As a journalist, Tony has reported on politics, race relations, wealth and power, pop culture, Latin America, and sports for numerous news organizations, among them the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Texas Observer, and Sports Illustrated. He reported on the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in both English and Spanish for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and La Opinión de Los Angeles.