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Thursday, May 01, 2008
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RUBEN SALAZAR honored with Postal stamp! "Viva"
Just sharing an interesting story on Ruben Salazar who was just honored with a USA 42 cents stamp!
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First-class honor for brave Latino journalist
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, April 21, 2008
.. --> types/ads/pages/oas/oas_rich.tmpl -->Ruben Salazar, a pioneering Latino journalist who was killed in 1970 by a tear gas canister fired by a sheriff's deputy after an anti-war demonstration in Southern California, will be honored Tuesday with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp.
The stamp is to be unveiled in Washington, D.C., along with four other stamps recognizing courageous American journalists. In Los Angeles, where Salazar became the first Mexican American foreign correspondent and columnist at the Los Angeles Times, his life will be remembered on a day the City Council has declared Ruben Salazar Day.
Journalists and scholars remembered Salazar, who was 42 when he died, as a brave and intrepid reporter who opened doors for future generations of Latinos to enter U.S. newsrooms.
"After his death, he was elevated into a martyr of the Chicano movement ... but first and foremost, Ruben Salazar was a damn good journalist," said UC Santa Barbara history Professor Mario Garcia, who edited a 1995 book of Salazar's writings. "He translated the issues of the Chicano community to the larger community ... because he had access through the L.A. Times. He was the only voice who could connect" the two.
The oldest of Salazar's three children, Lisa Salazar Johnson, said she was thrilled that the U.S. Postal Service has seen fit to recognize her father with a stamp, almost 38 years after his death.
"Stamps are for presidents and scientists and movie stars," said Johnson, who was 9 years old when her father was killed. "We're always grieving for him; you never do stop. But now it seems we're not alone in missing him, that other people are remembering him too."
Born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Salazar grew up in El Paso, Texas. He served in the Army in World War II, studied at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) on the GI Bill, and took his first newspaper job at the El Paso Herald Post in 1955. There, Garcia said, Salazar began muckraking, investigating conditions in the local jail and reporting on drug trafficking along the border.
First wanted to be cartoonist
Olga Briseño, a journalism instructor at the University of Arizona who is compiling an archive of Salazar's papers and spearheaded the campaign for the stamp, said Salazar initially wanted to be an editorial cartoonist but found that words had more power after he wrote an editorial for his school paper.
Salazar moved to California and was hired by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, then by the San Francisco News and, in 1959, by the Los Angeles Times. As the only Latino on the local news staff, he covered stories about farmworkers, the border and issues affecting the Mexican American community, Garcia said.
Salazar's first assignment as a foreign correspondent was to cover the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. Next, the Times sent him to Vietnam, where he reported on the widening U.S. involvement in the war. His favorite foreign post was in Mexico City, where he served as bureau chief for almost two years.
In 1969, Salazar's editors brought him back to California and assigned him to cover the emerging Chicano movement. The next year, he made a leap to television, becoming news director for KMEX, the only Spanish-language station in Los Angeles at the time.
There Salazar devoted himself to covering issues of concern to his Spanish-speaking audience, such as inadequate schools and police brutality. At the same time, he continued to write a weekly opinion column for the Times, explaining Latino issues to a largely non-Latino audience.
"Nobody has had the ability to speak to both communities before or since," said Rosalio Muñoz, a Chicano student organizer at UCLA who knew Salazar. "There was divisiveness, but Ruben began closing that gap."
On Aug. 29, 1970, Salazar was covering a major anti-war demonstration in East Los Angeles, the Chicano National Moratorium. As police tried to break up the demonstration, protesters fought back and the scene descended into a riot. Late in the day, Salazar and his KMEX crew ducked into a bar some distance from the scene.
A Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy, responding to an apparently false report of an armed man in the Silver Dollar Cafe, fired a heavy, bulletlike tear gas canister through the curtained doorway of the bar.
The projectile hit Salazar in the head and killed him instantly. A two-week-long coroner's inquest made headlines, but the deputy, Tom Wilson, was not charged with a crime. Salazar's family was eventually awarded $700,000 in an out-of-court settlement with Los Angeles County.
Speculation has long swirled around the shooting, including suspicions that Salazar was targeted by law enforcement, who had been pressuring his employers to make him tone down his critical coverage of police, according to Garcia.
UC Berkeley journalism Professor Bill Drummond, who was working as an assistant editor on the Times city desk the night Salazar was killed, believes it was "a horrifically embarrassing" botched police action.
"We got the story into the paper," said Drummond, who counted Salazar as a role model, professionally and personally. "Then it just hit me: This was a huge, huge thing. ... He was gone, and that was that."
"Ruben was the road map for my life," Drummond added. "He stood up for himself and what he believed in."
'Equality of opportunity'
Another Los Angeles Times journalist, Frank Sotomayor, became so inspired reading Salazar's columns while serving in the Army in Japan that he applied for a job at the paper. But the day he was discharged at the Oakland Army Base also happened to be the day Salazar was killed, so the men never met, although Sotomayor was hired two months later.
"In his columns, he was saying things that resonated with me and I had never seen published in the mainstream media," said Sotomayor, now associate director at the University of Southern California's Institute for Justice and Journalism. "It wasn't revolutionary. It was just calls for equality of opportunity."
Parks, libraries and schools have been named for Salazar in the years since his death. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists grants scholarships in his name, and the California Chicano News Media Association gives awards to journalists in his honor.
Stamps honor 4 others also
"My interest in getting a stamp was to tell the nation who he is, because outside of (Los Angeles) you really don't kn(ow," Briseño said. "We are a part of the fabric of building this nation. At a time when there's so much criticism of Latinos, these stories are important."
Salazar's 42-cent stamp is being released with others recognizing the brave work of World War II correspondents Eric Sevareid, Martha Gellhorn and John Hersey, as well as George Polk, a CBS reporter who was murdered while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948. The price of a first-class stamp is increasing by 1 cent on May 12 from the current 41 cents.
"We're so happy that he's on a (sheet of stamps) with four other journalists and that it's titled 'American Journalists,' " said Johnson, Salazar's daughter. "I remember him telling my mother, 'I don't want them to give me the story because I can speak Spanish. I'm a reporter. I can cover anything.' "
Online resource
For information on the Ruben Salazar Archive, go to: www.mdpi.arizona.edu.
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
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* 500 YEARS OF CHICANA HISTORY * ....
Category: Life
March 10, 2008
500 years of Chicana history
Betita Martinez started writing her newest book, "500 Years of Chicana Women's History, 500 Años de la Mujer Chicana," eight years ago.
With the help of a 17-member advisory board, she collected more than 800 photographs to accompany her text, women left out of mainstream history books, viewed as bystanders not actors in their lives.
But from "the very moment Spaniards invaded Mexico, there were women on rooftops throwing rocks on Spanish soldiers," Martinez says.
That non-stop resistance to oppression hasn't stopped, she says, pointing to more contemporary Chicanas such as the high school girls that participated in student blowouts in Los Angeles in the 1960s, protesting discrimination and lack of resources in Chicano schools.
Martinez found their stories inspiring and exciting to discover. She also found them worthy of the attention they never received in mainstream media and history texts.
Rutgers University Press describes the book as "a powerful antidote to this omission with a vivid, pictorial account of struggle and survival, resilience and achievement, discrimination and identity."
Martinez, who'll speak about her book at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 19, at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, draws her inspiration from stories of women like Modesta Avila of Southern California.
When the United States took half of Mexico's territory after the U.S.-Mexican War, Avila protested, especially as the Santa Fe Railroad set down its tracks on her family's land without compensating them.
"She laid heavy fence posts on the tracks and put up a sign saying that the railroad can pay her family $10,000 for the land they took," Martinez said.
Avila was arrested, tried in Orange County and found guilty of stopping a train.
"She got three years in prison," Martinez says, and "died at age 26 in San Quentin in 1893. I found a wonderful picture of her in San Quentin. It's her mug shot."
It was 1890.
The book is filled with a mixture of intriguing and powerful pictures, Martinez says, pointing to the photos of women making tortillas in early California history.
Rather than passive women, she saw powerful ones.
"What's striking about some of these is that they're all smoking in the pictures," Martinez laughs. "They all have cigarettes dangling out of their mouths."
Martinez, who worked at the United Nations after World War II and participated in the Civil Rights Movement, has written about social justice issues her whole life.
At 82, that's a long time.
Martinez is hopeful.
"I have to be. That's in my nature. I've been hopeful for 50 some years now."
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Monday, March 10, 2008
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ZOOT SUIT Riots -- Sleepy Lagoon Conviction overturned! Viva!!!
Current mood:  jubilant
Manuel Reyes, 82; Conviction in Sleepy Lagoon murder case later overturned
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By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 7, 2008
Manuel Reyes, a defendant in the infamous 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder case in which 12 young Mexican American men were unjustly convicted of the murder of a Mexican national and served nearly two years in prison before their convictions were reversed, has died. He was 82.
Reyes, the former owner of a South Los Angeles taco stand, died of cancer Feb. 5 in the Los Angeles home of his eldest son, Manuel, said Mario Reyes, his youngest son.
A Los Angeles native who dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and began helping his uncle on his garbage-collecting route, Reyeswas 17 when he was arrested in connection with the murder of Jose Diaz, a young farmworker who died Aug. 2, 1942, after being found brutally beaten and stabbed at a ranch in Montebello.
Reyes was among 24 young Mexican American men who were charged in the case, and the ensuing trial of 22 of them became one of the largest mass trials in American history.
"My dad just told me he was guilty by association because they were Hispanic," said Mario Reyes. "He said they just rounded up a bunch of Mexicans and let some go. He never went into details about anything that happened that night."
Some of the defendants, according to trial testimony, had been assaulted by a gang called the Downey Boys earlier in the night at a reservoir dubbed Sleepy Lagoon, after a popular song of the day.
When they and other young men from their 38th Street neighborhood later returned to the reservoir to retaliate, the Downey gang was gone. They then crashed a birthday party at the nearby ranch, where, according to testimony, some of the defendants demanded to know the whereabouts of the "men who had beaten them up."
After some of the 38th Street boys entered the house, a fight broke out.
After the intruders had departed, Diaz was found lying unconscious in the dirt outside the fence south of the house.
The trial, which raised constitutional issues and continues to be cited today when appeals are made on the basis of an unfair trial, has been called "one of the darkest chapters in Los Angeles court history."
While being held in Los Angeles County Jail, the 22 defendants were denied haircuts, and they were not allowed a change of clothes during the first month of the 13-weektrial.
When defense attorneys objected that the unkempt "boys looked like mobsters, like disreputable persons," Judge Charles W. Fricke ruled against the motion.
The judge also ignored defense attorneys' objections to the courtroom's seating arrangements: Rather than sitting next to their lawyers, the defendants sat in two rows of seats facing the jury, which prevented them from consulting with their attorneys during the proceedings.
Jurors also were allowed to go home at night and had access to the frequently sensationalistic media coverage of the trial, as well as stories on juvenile delinquency that focused on Mexican American gang members.
The all-white jury found three of the defendants guilty of first-degree murder; nine, including Reyes, were found guilty of second-degree murder. Five other defendants were convicted of assault, and five were acquitted.
Carey McWilliams, a noted advocate for social justice, headed the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee to publicize the injustice of the trial and to raise money to fund the appeal.
"It was a racist trial," Alice Greenfield McGrath, who was present at the trial and served as the committee's executive secretary, told The Times this week. "The judge was unfailingly supporting the prosecution and on many instances was even insulting the defense attorneys."
After 12 of the defendants were sent to San Quentin State Prison, McGrath kept them updated on committee activities and visited them about every six weeks. She remembered Reyes being "one of the quieter ones -- a few of them had pretty interesting personalities -- and he was a pleasant person. He was never in any kind of trouble before or after."
In October 1944, the 2nd District Court of Appeal reversed all the convictions, citing insufficient evidence to show that the defendants had conspired to commit the crimes and saying that there was "no evidence to show that any of the defendants murdered the deceased."
The court also said the trial judge was "guilty of prejudicial misconduct in making undignified and intemperate remarks" to the defendants' counsel and admonished the judge for providing inadequate seating arrangements that isolated the defendants.
Soon after, a Superior Court judge dismissed the charges.
The last time McGrath saw Reyes was in 1997 when he and other surviving defendants met in El Monte for a reunion to celebrate McGrath's 80th birthday.
Then 71, Reyes could still recite his prison number: 69597.
"I wasn't 'Mr. Reyes' or 'Punk,' " he said. "I was a number."
Two decades earlier -- in 1979 -- Reyes had joined the seven other surviving defendants in an invasion of privacy suit against writer-director Luis Valdez and others involved in the production of Valdez's critically acclaimed play "Zoot Suit," which was inspired by the Sleepy Lagoon murder case.
An out-of-court settlement resulted in the eight men being awarded financial participation in performances of the play and 1% of the net profits of the ensuing film to be divided among them, their lawyer, Paul Fitzgerald, said in 1981.
It was not until the suit was filed, Mario Reyes said, that he and his siblings learned that their father had been involved in the case.
"We had no clue," he said. "My dad was very quiet about his growing up. We never knew anything" until the suit "started to surface. He said, 'I might as well tell you; it's going to come out anyway.' "
Reyes was born in Los Angeles on July 13, 1925. After he was released from prison, he served stateside in the Army during World War II.
He held a variety of jobs, working as a tailor, a shop steward in a warehouse and a truck driver, before he and his wife, Maria, opened El Taco Mexicano in South Los Angeles in 1958.
Reyes' son Manuel took over the taco stand in 1969. In 2002, it was taken over by Mario Reyes, who still owns it.
In addition to his sons Manuel and Mario, Reyes is survived by another son and a daughter; a brother, two sisters and six grandchildren.
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Currently
listening
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Spill the Wine
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War feat. Eric Burdon
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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Effort to Win National Holiday for Farm Worker Leader Cesar E. Chavez
Carlos Santana, Martin Sheen and Edward James Olmos Agree to Co-Chair Effort to Win National Holiday for Farm Worker Leader Cesar E. Chavez
Support Action for Cesar Chavez's Birthday March 31, 2008
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LOS ANGELES, Jan. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- The Los Angeles-based public benefit organization Cesar E. Chavez National Holiday is proud to announce that three of our nation's top entertainers, GRAMMY(R) Award winning musician Carlos Santana, and acclaimed actors Martin Sheen and Edward James Olmos, have agreed to serve as National Co-Chairs of the effort to win a national holiday for the late founder and president of the United Farm Workers, Cesar E. Chavez, to take place on his birthday March 31.
Santana, Sheen and Olmos supported Chavez during the historic movement to win rights for farm workers in California in the 1960's and 1970's. Their participation in the current effort to win national recognition for Chavez coincides with the organizing of national actions and events in support of the national holiday to be held on March 31 of this year. Organizations in forty cities in twenty-five States have already agreed to hold events.
"Carlos Santana, Martin Sheen and Edward James Olmos give the national holiday effort a tremendous boost and inspiration," said Evelina Alarcon, Executive Director of Cesar E. Chavez National Holiday, the organization spearheading the effort to win national recognition for Cesar Chavez. "These internationally recognized entertainers bring their own unique history of support for Cesar Chavez, farm workers rights and social and economic justice."
"A national holiday honoring Cesar Chavez would secure his profound legacy, while future generations may scarce believe that such a man existed," said Martin Sheen.
"It's supremely important that a day be selected to honor the life of Mr. Cesar Chavez for his quality of service to all humanity. His supreme cry of si se puede will forever resonate as a positive motivator as words of light," stated Carlos Santana.
Carlos Santana supported the effort to win a legal holiday in California in 1999 by inviting organizers to collect signatures on a petition for the holiday at concerts on his Supernatural tour; thousands of signatures were collected. The following year, the State of California's legal holiday for Cesar Chavez was established; becoming the first time that a Latino or labor leader was honored in this way in our nation.
Edward James Olmos also supported the state holiday in California at his Family Book Fair and Festival in Los Angeles, where thousands also signed petitions. Mr. Olmos called Cesar Chavez "a gift to humanity" who "deserves to be honored with a national holiday ... He, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther king Jr., Mother Teresa and others understood the meaning of non violent social change and used it to elevate the human condition ... We as a nation should celebrate his life at least once a year, by way of a National Legal Holiday. We ALL deserve it!"
Ten states have now established Cesar Chavez Days on March 31 including Arizona, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Michigan, Wisconsin and Rhode Island.
Over 250 organizations, fifty-three members of Congress, many elected officials and celebrities support a national holiday for Chavez. The City Council of Philadelphia passed a resolution unanimously calling for the national holiday for Chavez in December. The city of Los Angeles has done so as well.
If you would like more information about this topic phone Evelina Alarcon at (323) 333-7589 or e-mail her at EvelinaAlarcon@cesarchavezholiday.org or see: http://www.cesarchavezholiday.org
For interview with Edward James Olmos phone: 818/560-8651.
Website: http://www.cesarchavezholiday.org/
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Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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ANCIENT MAYA SACRIFICED BOYS NOT VIRGIN GIRLS: study
Wed Jan 23 07:38:20 UTC 2008
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The victims of human sacrifice by Mexico's ancient Mayans, who threw children into water-filled caverns, were likely boys and young men not virgin girls as previously believed, archeologists said on Tuesday.
The Maya built soaring temples and elaborate palaces in the jungles of Central America and southern Mexico before the Spanish conquest in the early 1500s.
Maya priests in the city of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula sacrificed children to petition the gods for rain and fertile fields by throwing them into sacred sinkhole caves, known as "cenotes."
The caves served as a source of water for the Mayans and were also thought to be an entrance to the underworld.
Archeologist Guillermo de Anda from the University of Yucatan pieced together the bones of 127 bodies discovered at the bottom of one of Chichen Itza's sacred caves and found over 80 percent were likely boys between the ages of 3 and 11.
The other 20 percent were mostly adult men said de Anda, who scuba dives to uncover Mayan jewels and bones.
He said children were often thrown alive to their watery graves to please the Mayan rain god Chaac. Some of the children were ritually skinned or dismembered before being offered to the gods, he said.
"It was thought that the gods preferred small things and especially the rain god had four helpers that were represented as tiny people," said de Anda.
"So the children were offered as a way to directly communicate with Chaac," he said.
Archeologists previously believed young female virgins were sacrificed because the remains, which span from around 850 AD until the Spanish colonization, were often found adorned with jade jewelry.
It is difficult to determine the sex of skeletons before they are fully matured, said de Anda, but he believes cultural evidence from Mayan mythology would suggest the young victims were actually male.
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United Farm Workers say: “VIVA HILLARY” and I agree!!! VIVA!
January 23rd, 2008
SALINAS, California - Sen. Hillary Clinton won the endorsement of the United Farm Workers on Tuesday in Salinas, California, where she was greeted by supporters chanting "Viva Hillary, Viva Hillary."
The farm workers union said it "believes Hillary Clinton to be the strongest, most experienced candidate for President of the United States. She will be able to tackle our nation's toughest problems - health care, improving the economy for working people and repairing our country's standing in the world."
Founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, the UFW now represents some 27,000 workers.
"The farmworkers are problem solvers and we're together going to solve the problems facing agriculture, fixing our broken immigration system and giving people just wages and fair working conditions," Clinton said at a rally in Salinas, an agricultural area immortalized in the novel "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck, who was born in Salinas.
"As Cesar Chavez said, the fight is never about grapes or about lettuce, it is always about people and that is what this campaign is about," Clinton said.
Many of those in the enthusiastic crowd greeting Clinton were Hispanic, shouting chants of "Viva Hillary." Clinton and her Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama have been vying for the support of Hispanic voters who could play a key role in nominating contests in such states such as Calfiornia and Arizona, where Clinton campaigned later on Tuesday.
Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.
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