Remembering the Chicano Moratorium and Ruben Salazar

*Reyes: “By the end of that day, scores of marchers had been arrested and three people were dead. Among them was Ruben Salazar, a pioneering Hispanic journalist … ” VL

By Raul A. Reyes, NBC News

Growing up, I was used to sitting through my dad’s long stories, whether or not I wanted to hear them. At the dinner table or in the car, my brothers and I listened to my father tell us about his childhood in El Paso, about serving in the Army, about meeting Robert F. Kennedy. My usual response was to zone out. I had heard all of these stories a million times.

There was one story, however, that intrigued me. The only problem was that my father didn’t like telling it.

From the few times I heard it, the story went something like this: It was a hot day in August when my father left work early to attend a “Peace March” in East Los Angeles. Billed as The National Chicano Moratorium, it was a protest against the number of Mexican-Americans dying in Vietnam.

This alone piqued my interest, because my dad never called himself a Chicano. He was a straight-arrow striver. He was a bank manager. It was hard to imagine him at a protest, especially among the kind of people he usually referred to as “militants.”

But that day was different, my dad said. The anger about the Vietnam War was so great that everyone seemed to turn out for the march, including many of his co-workers and friends. There were all sorts of people there, from children to senior citizens, even a wedding party. The march wound its way through East L.A., and then ended with a rally in a park. As he told it, my father was under the shade of a tree, listening to the speeches. All of a sudden he heard a pop-pop-pop sound and the crowd began to disperse in panic.

Click HERE to read the full story.

[Photo courtesy LA Times]

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