Politics, the Border, and Braceros, 1959-1965

Ironically, Salazar seems not to have been very keen on being assigned to cover Mexican American issues when he first began at the Times . City editor Bill Thomas recalls that Salazar's concern was that he would be typed only as a "Mexican" reporter. Thomas believes that Salazar's reaction also involved a certain snobbishness. Nevertheless, as a good reporter, Salazar accepted his assignments and in time became quite committed to the Mexican American community.^[38]

During his first period of reporting for the Times , between 1959 and 1965, Salazar focused on the concerns of, and protests by, Mexican

[35] Thomas interview.

[36] Ibid.

[37] On the "blowouts," see Carlos Muñoz, Jr., Youth , Identity , Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso Press, 1989), 64-68.

[38] Thomas interview.

Americans in the pre-Chicano movement years. Although these protests were not framed in the militant terms of the later movimiento , they revealed the origins of both the problems and the issues to be taken up by the Chicano generation. In writing about these more moderate efforts at social reform by Mexican Americans in the early 1960s, Salazar reflected and influenced the moderate objectives of Mexican American leaders and their faith that the system could work for them. The Chicano generation, by contrast, despaired of the system, for the most part rejected it, and instead looked to alternative political strategies to obtain justice.^[39]

Salazar's reporting in the early sixties reveals a growing sense of frustration among Mexican American leaders. Having worked to elect John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960 through their organization and participation in the Viva Kennedy Clubs, Mexican Americans expected important concessions, patronage, and programs designed specifically for them. Instead they received only token appointments and meaningless efforts on the part of the Kennedy administration.^[40] By 1963, before Kennedy's assassination, Mexican American leaders in Los Angeles were openly criticizing the administration for its poor record concerning Mexican Americans. Salazar reported these complaints in his coverage of a meeting between Mexican American leaders and Vice President Lyndon Johnson during the summer of 1963 (July 29, 1963). The grievances brought to Johnson's attention were varied. They included Mexican American opposition to the bracero program, which since World War II had brought thousands of Mexican contract laborers to work in the fields of California and the Southwest. The program resulted in the dislocation and alienation of many domestic Mexican American farmworkers, while the braceros met with hardship and exploitation.^[41]

Other issues taken up with Johnson were the continued segregation of Mexican Americans in low-wage jobs, the lack of educational mobility, extremely low median family incomes, the insensitivity of the schools to the language and cultural backgrounds of Mexican American students, and the pressing problems of newly arrived immigrants from Mexico. The inability to obtain relief and attention from the Kennedy

[39] See García, Mexican Americans , and Muñoz, Youth , Identity , Power .

[40] See Mario T. Garcia, Memories of Chicano History: The Life and Narrative of Bert Corona (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 193231.

[41] On the bracero program, see Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte and Santa Barbara: McNally & Loftin, 1964).

administration disillusioned many Mexican American leaders with the Democratic party. As Salazar noted in "Papacitos [bosses] Era Seen on Way Out" (June 13, 1964), new aggressive Mexican American leadership, characterized by groups such as the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), was less willing to tolerate Mexican American Democratic "papacitos" who only worked to ensure Mexican American support for the Democratic party. Instead, MAPA and other groups moved toward a more independent political position.

Besides writing on other aspects of Mexican American politics of the early 1960s in Los Angeles, such as urban problems and growing tensions between Mexican Americans and African Americans over the division of the meager allotments of federal programs, Salazar devoted considerable attention to the issue of education and its relationship to Mexican Americans. Education, of course, had always been central to Mexican American political and community concerns; it was viewed as the key vehicle for social and economic mobility.^[42] However, Mexican Americans had historically been denied access to greater educational opportunities. Teachers, school administrators, employers, and others believed education was wasted on Mexican American children because of their "cultural deficiencies" and "intellectual underdevelopment." They saw the primary value of Mexican Americans as cheap manual labor. As a result, segregated and inferior "Mexican schools" came to characterize the public school system's relationship with the Mexican American population.^[43]

Earlier efforts to deal with these and other problems led Mexican American leaders to struggle on two fronts: to improve the conditions of the segregated schools by obtaining more resources for them and to litigate actively for desegregation of the schools. Some of these struggles created improvements and legal breakthroughs (for example, the Westminster case in Orange County in 1946) that threw the weight of federal law behind the Mexican American contention that segregation on the basis of race and culture was unconstitutional.^[44] By the early 1960s, as Salazar's reports indicate, Mexican American leaders were becoming convinced that educational reforms had to take into account the lan-

[42] See García, Mexican Americans , and Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Quest for Educational Equality in Texas , 1918-1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).

[43] See Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso , 1880-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 110-126, and Gilbert G. González, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia: Balch Institute, 1990).

[44] See García, Mexican Americans , 53-59.

guage and cultural backgrounds of Mexican American children. The inability of the schools to address these issues effectively and positively led to the high dropout or "kick-out" rates of Mexican Americans.

Salazar's articles on the educational concerns of Mexican Americans not only brought attention to this issue but, by his positioning of arguments and quotes, favored a Mexican American perspective. In a piece on dropouts (October 22, 1962), Salazar quoted the educational scholar George R. Borrell, who astutely observed that what was lacking in the earlier debates on the issue of education and Mexican Americans was the Mexican American perspective. "What we need," Salazar quoted Borrell, "is the inclusion of that basic element that has been conspicuously absent in the discussions, the Mexican American himself." And in writing about the plight of Pablo Mendez, a dropout, Salazar noted, "Though he looks like a Mexican, Pablo is not. He's an American, but doesn't think of himself as one, and in many respects is not looked upon as one by non-Mexican-Americans."

In covering important conferences in the Southwest during the early 1960s on the educational needs of Mexican Americans, Salazar reinforced the key theme of educational alienation. This involved frustration over the efforts by the schools to force acculturation on Mexican American children without any sensitivity to Mexican culture and the Spanish language as spoken by Mexican Americans. The answer, as Salazar reported, was effective bilingual and bicultural education, which would include a curriculum that focused on the cultural heritage of Mexican Americans. On September 16, 1963 (Mexican Independence Day), Salazar reported on a Mexican American ad hoc education committee that attacked the Los Angeles Board of Education for ignoring Mexican American problems. "We recognize that an educational philosophy based primarily on the principle of assimilation has proven historically inadequate," the committee asserted. Instead, it suggested an acculturating process that is "basically the acceptance of the plurality of culture as a functional principle. This entails the implementation of both cultures (Mexican and Anglo) to the greatest advantage possible in creating a personality who will find dignity in both."

Specifically, the committee called for the teaching of Spanish at all levels of education, the introduction of Mexican and Latin American literature into the curriculum, and the hiring of bilingual teachers, counselors, and administrators, as well as other reforms that would assist in supporting the retention of Mexican American children in the schools. The failure of the Los Angeles school system, and other school systems

in the Southwest, to implement these recommendations led to intense confrontation later in the decade and to the polarization of the issues as occurred, for example, in the 1968 blowouts in East Los Angeles.

In early 1963, Salazar brought attention to some of the conditions affecting Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in an award-winning six-part series, "Spanish-speaking Angelenos." In this series Salazar focused on the unique history and identity of Mexican Americans. Anticipating the later Chicano movement's search for historical and cultural roots, Salazar recognized that Mexican Americans could not be understood as simply another immigrant ethnic group. Instead, Mexican American identity and culture were rooted in the earlier, pre-U.S. history of California. "Los Angeles has one of the largest Spanish-speaking urban populations in the Western Hemisphere," Salazar wrote (February 24, 1963).

Most are "Mexicans," but historians tell us this does not accurately describe these people because in many respects they are "indigenous" to Southern California and the Southwest. Though they also help make up what generally is known as California's "Spanish heritage," Spain is not their "mother country." They are so highly heterogeneous they can not be adequately understood by studying the cultures of Spain or Mexico. This [the series] is an attempt to trace where they came from, what they are and where they are going.

It was this history that was responsible for the unique biculturalism of Mexican Americans. As would later Chicano activists and intellectuals, Salazar insisted that Mexican American culture was guaranteed its existence by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which had ended the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) and had led to the U.S. annexation of the Southwest. American society, according to Salazar, had to understand and appreciate this biculturalism and its value for Mexican Americans. It was the failure to do so, especially by the schools, that had led to the continued marginalization of Mexican Americans. At the same time, Salazar stressed that Mexican Americans themselves had to appreciate their own bicultural backgrounds. Faced with hostility and discrimination, Mexican Americans too often turned their backs on their own cultural legacy. This was wrong, Salazar contended, and until Mexican Americans could be proud of their own identity, little social progress could be achieved.

Other issues that Salazar addressed in this series were Mexican American residential segregation in Los Angeles, what Salazar referred to as the creation of a "Serape Belt," and the lack of political unity among

Mexican American leaders. Challenging the stereotype that all Mexican Americans are marginalized, Salazar called attention to the presence of successful middle-class Mexican Americans who had "made it" and who were committed to uplifting less fortunate Mexican Americans.

Readers responded both positively and negatively to Salazar's series. In a letter to the editor (March 2, 1963), one reader, Manuel Lopez of Los Angeles, wrote that Salazar had done more damage than good and specifically criticized Salazar for employing "barroom dialogue." Other readers believed differently. "This is the first letter I've written to a newspaper," wrote Mrs. Julia Cereceda of Montebello, "but I feel I have to thank Ruben Salazar for the articles he has written. I am glad he works for a newspaper such as The Times that allows him to write blunt truth." Salazar was awarded a California State Fair Gold Medal for the best local story to have appeared in California newspapers with a circulation of over one hundred thousand in 1963.

Besides writing on specific Mexican American political and social issues of the early 1960s, Salazar reported on border conditions between the United States and Mexico. The border, of course, has been a factor not only in relations between the two countries but also in relations between the peoples on both sides. Rather than divide people, the border in some instances has brought people together as communities have become intertwined economically and culturally. Unfortunately, since its creation following the U.S.-Mexican War, the border has likewise been a source of political and racial tensions as, for example, during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and during periods of increased alarm over mass immigration from Mexico. This has resulted in efforts to restrict and/or deport Mexican immigrant workers during the Great Depression of the 1930s, during "Operation Wetback" in 1954, since the 1970s, and more recently in 1994.

In his writings on the border and particularly in a series on Mexican border towns written in 1962, Salazar tended to see border conditions in an optimistic light. Obviously influenced by the Kennedy administration's efforts to improve U.S.-Latin American relations in the wake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 through the Alliance for Progress, Salazar suggested that life in the Mexican border towns had significantly improved. He applauded, for example, the development of the Border Industrialization Program, which sponsored the relocation of U.S. industrial plants (referred to as maquiladoras ) to the Mexican side, in order to take advantage of cheaper Mexican labor. In his report on the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso communities (January 10, 1962), Salazar idealistically

proposed that El Paso represented a "model of democratic living" for its lack of overt racism toward Mexicans and for the earlier election of Raymond Telles as mayor of El Paso in 1957.^[45] In the piece, Salazar expressed a hope for even more improved race relations and revealed his own border background when he wrote,

The southwest is the area in which the American and Mexican cultures can blend most successfully because the Mexican side and the American side of the southwest are geographically really one. The only thing that divides the nations physically is an easily crossed bridge or a border line.

This rather uncritical view, often belied by inequities between U.S. and Mexican border towns and the disparity of wealth and power between Anglos and Mexican Americans in the United States, reveals Salazar's generally liberal temperament in the early 1960s. Such liberalism, which Salazar never fully moved away from even during the Chicano movement years, was linked to accomplishing reforms through established channels. In the area of foreign policy, this translated into support for international reform programs such as the Alliance for Progress, which by the mid-1960s had been greatly reduced in scope and was replaced by the Johnson administration's counterinsurgency programs to combat popular revolutionary movements, some of which Salazar would later cover as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times . Salazar did report on the particular problems of the Mexican border communities: unplanned growth, burgeoning populations as a result of migration to the border from the interior of Mexico, the lack of water, the widespread availability of drugs, and so on. In an article that appeared on December 9, 1962 (not included here), Salazar noted that precisely because of these problems, a viable radical movement had surfaced in northern Mexico. However, he cast doubt on the movement and suggested that it represented an "anti-American peasant movement."

Another news issue on which Salazar concentrated during his initial assignment with the Times was the controversial bracero program. According to Thomas, the Times's focus on this program was indicative of the newspaper's growing social awareness.^[46] The bracero program was initiated as an emergency measure during World War II to provide Mexican contract labor for U.S. agriculture and was continued into the 1950s. With the election of Kennedy in 1960, antibracero groups such as the

[45] On the election of Telles, see García, Mexican Americans , 113-141.

[46] Thomas interview.

AFL-CIO, the Catholic church, and Mexican American organizations exerted sufficient pressure to terminate the program by the end of 1964. Opposition focused not on the exploitation of the braceros but on the unfair labor competition that allowed agribusiness to keep wages low for domestic farmworkers (mostly Mexican Americans in the Southwest) and to obstruct unionizing efforts of farmworkers by using braceros as scabs (strikebreakers).

The bracero program also was blamed for the continued poverty of Mexican American farmworkers. Salazar wrote extensively on the ways in which the program helped maintain what Michael Harrington called at the time "the Other America," consisting of the poor, the aged, and the displaced.^[47] In his reports, Salazar highlighted the terrible living and working conditions of domestic farmworkers. While he conveyed the arguments of the growers that the lack of domestic workers made it imperative for them to rely on braceros, Salazar at the same time provided a forum for antibracero opponents such as Dr. Ben Yellen of Brawley in the Imperial Valley (November 27, 1962), who for years had waged a one-man crusade against the growers. Salazar quoted Yellen's denunciation of the bracero program:

This amounts to a government handout to the big farmers, the handout being Mexican labor. You do not see the government importing Mexicans to factories so that the manufacturers can have low labor costs. If the lettuce growers need farm workers, let them pay decent wages and they will get farm workers. But they do not want to pay American wages. They want the cheap labor from Mexico.

During the 1963 fall harvest, Salazar visited a number of bracero camps in the San Joaquin Valley and wrote a series of articles on labor conditions affecting both braceros and domestic farmworkers. These stories resemble the classic accounts of the plight of migrant workers in California during the Great Depression by John Steinbeck and Carey McWilliams.^[48] Reporting from Stockton (October 21, 1963), Salazar observed the despair and squalid living conditions of domestic workers trying to find jobs. They rose early in the morning in the hope that they would be selected by the labor contractor and put on a bus for an op-

[47] Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963).

[48] See John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939), and Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1935).

portunity to earn a day's wage. "It's like a mechanized slave market," one labor organizer told Salazar. In Firebaugh the next day, Salazar reported on the apathy he perceived among domestic farmworkers concerning the possibility of a union for farm labor. Here Salazar interviewed a young César Chávez who agreed that there was apathy but was able to put it into perspective. "Let's face it: Most agricultural workers are in the lowest educational level and don't even understand what unionization means. Many are Mexican immigrants who think joining a union could get them in trouble."

While Mexican Americans, including many farmworkers, opposed the bracero program because of its detrimental effects on domestic labor, many felt a pang of guilt as it involved mexicanos like them who had no other recourse for survival than to enter the United States as braceros. "I suppose it's wrong in a way to want the bracero program to end," Juan Contreras told Salazar in Tracy (October 23, 1963). "It means the end of jobs they probably need very much . . . . After all many of us and our parents came from Mexico not too long ago." On January 1, 1965, Salazar wrote about the last braceros to leave California.

While a clear image of Salazar the journalist emerges from his writings of the early 1960s, we know little about his personal life during these first years at the Times . By all accounts he maintained his privacy and tried to separate his professional from his family life. In 1959, he met and married Sally Robare, who was from Alhambra, east of Los Angeles. Sally had worked in classifieds at the Times but was employed as a department store clerk when she was introduced to Salazar by a mutual friend. After their marriage in 1960, the Salazars lived first in Alhambra and then in Whittier. Three children were born during the 1960s: Lisa Marie, Stephanie Ann, and John Kenneth.^[49]