Voting Station

Ruben Salazar

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Martyr

The Resume

    (March 3, 1928-August 29, 1970)
    Born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
    Birth name was Ruben Hernan Salazar
    Mexican-American journalist/columnist for the Los Angeles Times
    News director for the Spanish language television station KMEX in Los Angeles (1970)
    Killed at the Silver Dollar Café by a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy during the National Chicano Moratorium March against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles, California (Aug. 29, 1970)
    Subject of the PBS documentary by Phillip Rodriguez, 'Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle' (Apr. 2014)
    Subject of the famous article, 'Strange Rumblings in Aztlan' (Apr. 29, 1971)
    Widely believed to be the first Mexican-American journalist to cover the Chicano community from the mainstream media

Why he might be annoying:

    He became the National Council for La Raza's answer to Medgar Evers.
    He frequently butted heads with the East LAPD, reinforcing the belief that his death was a police-devised conspiracy.
    His death served as a National Chicano Moratorium rallying cry for antagonism against the 'gringo police' ('carry on in the spirit of Ruben Salazar!')
    This despite the fact that, while he was always sensitive to the needs of the Hispanic community, he never identified as a 'militant activist' and was largely indifferent to the Chicano movement.
    He offered a narrow definition of what it meant to be Chicano, saying that a Chicano was 'a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself'
    His 2008 US postage stamp features an unfinished newspaper quote reading 'during Chicano protest rally in East Los Angeles,' leading activists to accuse the Postal Service of 'whitewashing' the Chicano movement by leaving out the rest of the quote: 'assassinated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.'
    In 2011, the Office of Independent Review conducted an in-depth investigation into his death and concluded that there was no evidence that the LA sheriff's deputies intentionally targeted Salazar.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He served in the US Army.
    He was a nationally-acclaimed journalist who had served as a foreign news correspondent in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
    He reported on the police brutality cases involving the East LAPD even when they made efforts to shut him up.
    He won the Greater Los Angeles Press Club Award twice.
    He was posthumously awarded a special Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award (1971).
    Laguna Park, the site of the riot which led to his death, was renamed Salazar Park.
    He was a rising star in the world of journalism and it is believed that he would have become the Chicano Movement's leading voice if he had lived (he was becoming more vocally supportive of the movement before his death).
    The LAPD tried to brush his death under the rug, but a Hunter S. Thompson article in Rolling Stone brought it to the forefront and drew national attention to police attacks on the Hispanic community.
    His wife was unhappy about Chicano activists making him into a martyr, insisting that her late husband would have been skeptical and amused by the whole thing.
    His last words, in response to a warning that cops outside the café were about to shoot, were 'that's impossible, we're not doing anything' (before getting a tear gas bomb in the left temple).

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 9 Votes: 77.78% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 4 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 5 Votes: 80.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 12 Votes: 41.67% Annoying