On Aug. 29, 1970, the National Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles protested the disproportionately high number of Latino casualties in Vietnam — and ended with the police killing of Ruben Salazar, the most influential Latino journalist of his generation.
I HAD BEEN IN LOS ANGELES only a few days when the pressures placed on Chicano journalists in this city first began to settle on me. Fittingly, it happened in a bar at the Ambassador Hotel, where I was living at the time, not far from the pantry where Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Frank del Olmo, then a veteran reporter at the Los Angeles Times whom I had known since the early 1970s, was welcoming me to town over drinks. The conversation quickly turned to the man by whose standard both of us would inevitably be judged.
Los Angeles still had two daily newspapers then, though barely. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner had recently survived a labor strike whose aftershocks would help kill it a decade later. It had also just hired the most celebrated editor in American journalism, Jim Bellows, the man who in the 1960s had unleashed Tom Wolfe and the New Journalism.
Bellows had brought me west to write about California’s rising political star, Governor Jerry Brown, who wanted to be president and whose girlfriend happened to be rock ’n’ roll royalty, Linda Ronstadt. I was to do this as a columnist at the near-bankrupt flagship of William Randolph Hearst, whose kidnapped heiress granddaughter, Patty Hearst, was still in prison for a surreal bank robbery. California, even then, felt like a place where wealth, power, and dreams regularly went wrong.
Del Olmo wanted to know what the “new” Herald Examiner was really like. It was a timid question, so I gave him a half-truth.
“Frank,” I said, “I’ve been working full time on daily newspapers since 1965, since I was eighteen. Not as some intern fetching coffee and carbon paper, but as a reporter. I’d already written a civil rights book I’m damn proud of. I took this job because I thought they wanted me — not because I happened to be Mexican American.”
I told him that when I arrived, Bellows and the executive editor made it clear they wanted me to be Ruben Salazar. To follow in his footsteps. Flattering, maybe, but unrealistic. Worse, I wasn’t convinced they understood what Ruben had actually been writing in those years when he was raising hell.
“They hired me because I’m Mexican American,” I said. “I could just as well be a caddy from Riviera Country Club.”
Del Olmo smiled uneasily into his drink.
“What did you tell them?” he asked.
“I told them I didn’t want to be Ruben Salazar. Ruben Salazar got his ass shot off. I told them Los Angeles didn’t need another Ruben Salazar. What it needed was five more Mexican American reporters and a couple of Mexican American editors.”
That stopped the conversation cold.
I told him I should have told them to go to hell and gone to work at the Texas Observer. Instead, I somehow walked away with a Porsche and a job that kept me from freezing to death back East.
“You make yourself sound like a sellout,” Frank said, enjoying it.
“I am,” I said. “I’m just not naïve enough to think I’m the only one sitting here.”
Eight years earlier, in a bar across town, Ruben Salazar had been killed at the height of his fame and notoriety as the most controversial Chicano journalist of his time. In death, he became the martyr the Chicano movement needed to survive its own fractures. For those of us who followed, his shadow was long.
The next day, my editor and I had lunch with a group of East Los Angeles power brokers — the kind of meeting Bellows himself should have been attending. Instead, I was there as a kind of distraction, one of the Herald Examiner’s showpieces. Someone brought stacks of Chicano Power for me to sign. Afterward, a couple of men pulled me aside.
“You have to carry on the work Ruben Salazar began,” one of them said.
I began looking for ways to get out of Los Angeles.
Months later, staying at the Chateau Marmont, I was approached by a young screenwriter developing a film for Henry Darrow, the Puerto Rican actor who had played Manolito Montoya on The High Chaparral. She was writing a fictionalized Salazar story and needed help.
“Frank Casado says you’re the closest thing to Ruben Salazar,” she told me.
I laughed it off. Later that night, I confronted Casado, one of Salazar’s closest friends.
“Don’t be mad,” he said. “Ruben didn’t want to be who he was either. He didn’t have a choice.”
For years, Salazar was thrown at me — sometimes as praise, more often as accusation. I never thought of myself as a Chicano columnist, a label others insisted on applying. I saw myself as a reporter who had fallen into column writing and, eventually, into the politics of identity.
I rarely told anyone that I had spoken with Ruben in 1970, just weeks before his death. I was a young reporter at the Dallas Times Herald. An editor who had reported with Ruben in Vietnam put us on the phone.
“You need to be in L.A.,” Ruben told me. “Come out here. I’ll get you on at the Times. We’ll kick butt.”
I was flattered, but I had my sights set on the East Coast. A week later, Ruben walked into the Times Herald newsroom to visit his old war buddy. We spoke in Spanish in the middle of the newsroom — the only two Latino reporters in sight. It felt dangerous. Soon afterward, editors began questioning my associations, my politics, my loyalties.
By then, I’d already skirted the U.S. embargo to Cuba with Nedw Leftist and Chicano activists. In Dallas, that was enough to earn you a reputation as a communist. I was twenty-one. I’d watched the Kennedy assassination unfold on television at a United Farm Workers party. Violence had become part of the political weather.
So when Ruben Salazar was killed three weeks after our meeting, I wasn’t shocked. It fit the country we were living in.
On Aug. 29, 1970, 25,000 people gathered in East Los Angeles to protest the Vietnam War. Three people died. One of them was Ruben Salazar, struck in the head by a sheriff’s tear gas projectile fired into a bar. No one was arrested. Los Angeles County paid his family $700,000 and moved on.
What haunted me wasn’t just the killing. It was the response of the Los Angeles Times. The paper preened in editorials, but behind the scenes did nothing to force accountability. It revealed the limits of press power when it was embedded in the same political structure it claimed to challenge.
I argued about this with Del Olmo for years. He loved the Times and mistrusted it. In 1994, when the paper endorsed Pete Wilson despite Proposition 187, Frank threatened to resign. He didn’t. He wrote a dissent instead. Wilson won. Proposition 187 passed.
“When it comes to symbolism,” I told him later, “you’re the champ.”
Frank wrestled with identity in ways I never did. He worried about marrying a non-Latina. He organized Hispanic journalists. He believed change was imminent. I didn’t. I believed our children might see it — if we were lucky.
Frank died of a heart attack in 2004. He was fifty-five.
The last time I spoke with Sally Salazar, Ruben’s widow, she told me she had begged him to walk away.
“If he had lived,” she said, “I think he would have.”
Not long after that conversation, I took her advice.
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, 1976), is a writer-at-large with LAMonthly.org. CHICANO POWER will be published in a 50th anniversary edition in 2026. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com.
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 ongoing 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, 1976), 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.
The impact of the Chicano Power Fifty Years Reflections perhaps can best be explained by a telephone conversation that series writer Tony Castro had with Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. Mr. Arellano and Mr. Castro were acquainted with one another’s careers but had never spoken to each other until this call from Mr. Arellano. Numerous people had brought this series to his attention, Mr. Arellano said, and he had just finished reading the most recent two parts. “It’s absolutely fascinating — and I don’t say that lightly ,” said Mr. Arellano, who was graciously complimentary.
What especially impressed him, Mr. Arellano said, was the depth of Mr. Castro’s behind-the-scenes knowledge of the Chicano Movement, and particularly the Los Angeles political aspects of that civil rights history. Chicano Power Fifty Years Reflections, he said, has created an ongoing dialogue and debate among Latinos in the city reflecting a newly heightened frustration among two generations of Angeleno Latinos with their leadership, both past and present. Mr. Arellano’s own background and extensive experience was in Orange County, having only begun writing about Los Angeles for the Times in recent years. So he had found the series especially enlightening and helpful.
It was also Mr. Arellano’s opinion that the biggest impact of Mr. Castro’s series was in showing how Los Angeles Latino political corruption and scandals of the past two generations had failed the city’s increasingly growing Latino community — and how the Latino politicos’ own failures legislatively and politically may have been largely responsible for how Black political power in Los Angeles has continued to exceed that of Latinos, even as Latinos today far outnumber the declining African American population in the city.
Mr. Arellano believed there was incredible irony in that. In late 2021 three Latino members of the Los Angeles City Council along with the Latino leader of the county’s most influential organized labor group held a clandestine meeting to strategize on how to increase the disappointingly poor level of Latino political power in the city. Unfortunately, that meeting degenerated into a shocking racist diatribe with hateful views about black political leaders, their families and even their children. Unbeknown to those in the meeting, their session had been secretly tape-recorded. Almost a year later, an audio tape recording of the meeting was made public in an anonymous social media post in the fall of 2022, causing what has been described as the biggest racial-ethnic political scandal in Los Angeles history.
The fallout was unprecedented. The president of the Los Angeles City Council, a Latina who had been the most vocal in the racist comments, resigned almost immediately. The Latino director of the county Federation of Labor was forced to step down. A second Latino City Council member involved in the meeting soon left office, as he had earlier lost his reelection campaign. A third Latino councilmemberweathered a recall attempt as well as a yearlong campaign by critics urging him to resign, only to be eventually defeated when he sought reelection.
Castro, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, is also the author of the landmark Latino civil rights history Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America (E.P. Dutton, 1976) that Publishers Weekly acclaimed as “brilliant… a valuable contribution to the understanding of our time.” The book will be published in a commemorative 50th anniversary edition this fall.
