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1931 -- Salvatierra v Del Rio Independent School District

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1931 -- Salvatierra v Del Rio Independent School District

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Article VII, Section 7, of the Constitution of 1876 stated that there could be segregated schools for white and black students, but Hispanic students were up for debate. From 1902 to 1940, Texas school districts opened segregated schools for Hispanic students and by 1943, there were schools operating in 122 districts. In 1930, the Del Rio School board had proposed for an expansion of schools, one of which was already designated as the "Mexican school." Jesus Salvatierra and other parents hired John L. Dodson to file a lawsuit, stating that Mexican students were not receiving the same benefits as white children. The LULAC was able to fundraise over $1000 even during the Great Depression  towards this movement against segregated schools. Although this was the first lawsuit addressing this issue of Hispanic segregation in schools, there was a failure to address the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment as seen in the 1948 Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District case.

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The first case in which Texas courts reviewed the actions of local school districts regarding the education of children of Mexican descent was tried in Del Rio in 1930. Like many other communities in the state, Del Rio had for the first six decades of the twentieth century a tripartite segregation of students in its public school system. Article VII, Section 7, of the Constitution of 1876 provided for separate schools for white and black students. From 1902 to 1940, especially after 1920, Texas school districts opened segregated schools for Hispanic children. By 1942-43 these schools were operated in 122 districts in fifty-nine counties throughout the state. On January 7, 1930, the Del Rio School Board ordered an election to be held on February 1 to vote on a proposed expansion of school facilities, including elementary schools, one of which, a brick and tile building of two rooms, was already designated the "Mexican" or "West End" school. Five rooms were to be added. Jesús Salvatierra and several other parents hired lawyer John L. Dodson on March 21 to file a suit charging that students of Mexican descent were being deprived of the benefits afforded "other white races" in the previous year. In April El Popular, the Spanish-language newspaper of the League of United Latin American Citizens, published an essay by Vito Aguirre condemning segregationists, whom he called "enemies of Mexican children," and criticizing the Mexican consulate's complacency on the issue. Also that month, lawyer and LULAC member M. C. Gonzales consulted with Dodson and joined the case free of charge. By May Salvatierra had a support group, La Comité de Defensa, later known as Comité Pro-Defensa Escolar. On May 15 District Judge Joseph Jones heard the case, ruled in Salvatierra's favor, and granted an injunction.

On June 10 the Court of Appeals of San Antonio heard the case. By June lawyers Alonso S. Perales and J. T. Canales were also assisting Salvatierra; Dodson, Gonzales, and Canales served as the appeal attorneys. The case, under the title Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra, appeared before the Texas Court of Civil Appeals in San Antonio on October 29, and the injunction was voided. On December 24 a rehearing was denied.

LULAC provided the organizational and financial base for the movement against segregated schools, and Salvatierra's case spurred the growth of LULAC. According to George I. Sánchez in 1964, the Salvatierra ruling legalized the segregation of children of Mexican descent in schools through the third grade. During the case the first chapters of LULAC were organized in West Texas at San Angelo, Ozona, Sonora, and Marfa. The case also highlighted the need for regular communication. In late 1930 LULAC sponsored bulletins in the columns of Spanish-language newspapers; El Ciudadano, El Popular, and El Paladín came to serve as LULAC's official organs; in 1931 the weekly LULAC NOTES was issued; and in August 1931 LULAC News, the official monthly magazine, began publication. Spanish-language newspapers such as the Del Rio El Popular, Las Noticias, and La Semana followed the developments, and of San Antonio reached many other Tejano communities. LULAC passed a resolution at its 1930 annual convention to assist the Del Rio chapter in its work on the case. In January 1931 Salvatierra asked LULAC chapters for contributions, and by April nine chapters had responded. In May LULAC elected Gonzales its president general, and in June he invited chapters to donate at least $5 each toward taking the case to the Supreme Court. Gonzales called a special convention in Kingsville on August 30, and by that date $493 had been raised. The convention's purpose was to convert the organization's monument fund for World War I veterans to the School Defense Fund, and at that convention each council was required to raise $45 for Salvatierra. In spite of the Great Depression, LULAC managed to raise more than $1,000. Councils in Corpus Christi, Brownsville, McAllen, Mission, La Grulla, Encino, Robstown, Edinburg, Falfurrias, San Diego, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Rio Grande City, Roma, Hebbronville, Kingsville, Sarita, San Angelo, Ozona, and Sonora collected funds. San Antonio, the largest chapter, raised $230; even the small council of Sarita raised its $45 quota. Sociedades mutualistas, Catholic groups, women's clubs, labor organizations, and Spanish-speaking PTAs sponsored dances, baseball games, meetings, interviews, and benefits to raise money for the cause. Important individual and collective fund-raising was conducted by Paul C. Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Antonio Castañon in San Antonio, Adela Sloss and Zacarias Gonzalez in San Juan, and Mrs. Jose Stillman, Mrs. Ben Garza, Mrs. Louis Wilmot, and Ernesto Meza in Corpus Christi. On October 26 the Supreme Court refused to hear the Salvatierra case and another case in which Mexicans in Menard County were prevented from jury duty for lack of jurisdiction. LULAC called a special convention in San Antonio on November 29 to discuss strategy for bringing about school desegregation. The Del Rio Comité Pro-Defensa Escolar continued to exist at least until October 1932. In 1948 in Delgado v. Bastrop Independent School District, the United States District Court, Western District of Texas, ruled that maintaining separate schools for Mexican descent children violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Nevertheless, failure to enforce this ruling resulted in continued legal challenges through the 1950s and 1960s; arguments first presented in the Salvatierra case were heard as late as 1971 in Cisneros v. Corpus Christi ISD.

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The first case in which Texas courts reviewed the actions of local school districts regarding the education of children of Mexican descent was tried in Del Rio in 1930. Like many other communities in the state, Del Rio had for the first six decades of the twentieth century a tripartite segregation of students in its public school system.

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1940 -- The US Census Reclassifies People of Mexican Descent to "White"

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1940 -- The US Census Reclassifies People of Mexican Descent to "White"

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Due to protests and lobbies by the Mexican American community and Mexican government because of the changes made in the 1930 census, Mexican Americans were re-classified as white. Exceptions to this were if they we of indigenous or other non-white race. This reclassification gave them more legal rights and privileges.

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Eleanor Roosevelt met with A. Philip Randolph, a black community leader who told Eleanor that if something wasn't done about unfair employment practices, there would be strikes. After this, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which banned unfair discrimination practices based on race, creed, or national origin in the defense industries and government.

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1942-- The Bracero Program (Mexican Farm Labor Agreement)

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1942-- The Bracero Program (Mexican Farm Labor Agreement)

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The Bracero Program in the US started in 1942 and lasted for 22 years until it was ended in 1964. It was created as an agreement between the US and Mexico to maintain US food supply needs during World War II. It was an agricultural program that involved 4.5 million people over the course of its existence. There were contracts made between Mexican workers and the US government regarding housing, wages, and labor conditions: one of these agreements was the withholding of ten percent of worker's wages for when they return back home to Mexico, although this was often disregarded in one of the most egregious acts of worker abuse by the program. A combination of abuse and poor enforcement marked the end of the program because they contradicted civil-rights era ideas about treatment of different peoples. The program facilitated greater connections between Mexico and the US through the labor market. Ending the agreement as legal didn't alter immigration behavior and laid the groundwork for the "illegal" (it shouldn't be) immigration to this day.

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During WWII the US brought Mexican laborers to work in CA, increasing racial tensions in the area. They also restricted production of zoot suits (long jacket, balloon pants), which were popular among young Mexican American men. This led to white Americans seeing those who wore zoot suits as un-American or even criminal. In June, many US servicemen went out seeking young Mexican Americans to "de zoot". They beat them, took their suits, and burned or urinated on them. Even those who weren't wearing suits were not safe, and Black Americans were also harmed. Despite all the violence and humiliation they caused, these aggressors were painted as heroes by the media, and more Mexican Americans (over 600!) were arrested for the riots.

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1944 -- Operation Bootstrap, Puerto Rico's modernization initiative

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1944 -- Operation Bootstrap, Puerto Rico's modernization initiative

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Operation Bootstrap involved a series of projects initiated by the Puerto Rican government and governor Luis Muñoz Marín’ aimed at the industrialization and modernization of Puerto Rico. Previously, Puerto Rico had been a primarily agrarian based economy. But Bootstrap involved tax exemptions for foreign corporations to boost direct investment and modernize the economy. Puerto Rico became a hub of manufacturing, especially for American corporations, and the industrialization efforts were successful. However, there were not enough jobs created by these new industries to replace old agricultural jobs, and millions of Puerto Ricans migrated to the United States during the next few decades. Additionally, much of the profits ended up in the hands of American corporations rather than within Puerto Rico's economy. Bootstrap and its lasting effects on the Puerto Rican economy are a big reason why many Puerto Ricans have migrated to the United States. Additionally, this modernization effort though effective proves some of the negative aspects of globalization, as Puerto Rico's economy is highly dependent on foreign technology and corporations.

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Proyecto del Idioma, otherwise known as Law No.51, was recognized in 1945 by the Puerto Rican government which stated that Spanish was to be the language of instruction for public schools after 39 years of English instruction. Although the law was solely based on pedagogical motive, it soon became a political matter. In 1946, President Truman responded to Governor Jesus T. Pineiro by refusing to sign the bill. By doing this, Puerto Ricans were prevented from teaching material in their own vernacular, and students, from elementary to college, struggled in the learning process. The imposing of the veto was a result of colonialism which then inhibited the needs of a colonized society. Despite all of the efforts to carry out English as the main language of instruction, very little of it was taught. This law parallels the idea of conformism and need to assimilate when immigrating to the U.S.; if a student cannot learn to speak English, they are considered to be barred from social conveniences and subject to discrimination.

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Private Felix Longoria was a Mexican American who was shot and killed fighting in WWII. He was highly decorated and received a purple heart after he died, but after 4 years in 1949 when his body was returned from the Philippines he was not allowed to be buried in his hometown cemetery. Back home in Three Rivers Texas he wasn’t allowed to be buried in the only cemetery because the “The whites won't like it.” When the news reached senator Lyndon Johnson, he was appalled and gave Longoria the honor of being the first Mexican to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. This moment was so important for Hispanics because from there conversations about civil rights for Hispanic people began nationally, and an organization called the G.I Forum was leading it. They fought for things like no more all white juries and the desegregation of Hispanics in schools. This event still matters now because it shows that things can really change, and it gives people hope that the new administration will be able to help immigrants in the same way Lyndon Johnson helped Longoria and his family.

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"The whites won't like it."

When a small-town Texas funeral home, using these words, refused to hold a wake for decorated World War II veteran Felix Longoria, the ensuing controversy sent the fight for Mexican American civil rights soaring onto the national stage-with some help from a rising U.S. senator named Lyndon Johnson.

Private Longoria, a Mexican American soldier from Three Rivers, Texas, was flushing out Japanese soldiers retreating from the island of Luzon in the Philippines when a sniper cut him down just months before the end of World War II. His heroic actions posthumously earned him the Purple Heart and other military medals.

It took the U.S. Army four years to get his body back home to Three Rivers. When his widow Beatriz Longoria went to make arrangements at the town's only funeral home, they offered to bury him in the "Mexican section" of the cemetery, segregated by barbed wire. But they told Mrs. Longoria the wake could not be held in the funeral parlor because it would anger the town's white citizens.

The local Mexican American community and its many World War II veterans, tired of being treated like second-class citizens, were incensed. Dr. Hector Garcia, chair of the new veterans' civil rights group American G.I. Forum, fired off letters and telegrams to state and local officials condemning discrimination against a Mexican American soldier who had given his life serving his country. He sent another telegram to U.S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson on January 10, 1949.

At a protest meeting the next night, which drew some 1,000 people, Senator Johnson's swift response, which arrived via telegram, was read: "I deeply regret to learn that the prejudice of some individuals extends even beyond this life," Johnson wrote. "This injustice...is deplorable."

The freshman senator went on to say that he had arranged for Longoria to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery-making him the first of the estimated 450,000 Mexican Americans who fought in World War II to receive this honor. At the interment, on February 16, 1949, Johnson, his wife "Lady Bird" and a representative of President Harry Truman stood beside Longoria's family as military musicians played "Onward Christian Soldiers."

The discrimination Longoria had faced, even in death, made national headlines. Columnist Walter Winchell, for one, declared, "The state of Texas, which looms so large on the map, looks mighty small tonight."

Correcting this injustice sparked an appetite for more. "Both Garcia and Johnson were unusually perceptive leaders who saw immediately that the Longoria case could have national implications-Garcia for the Forum, and LBJ for LBJ, who knew he would be on the right side of history," said Julie Leininger Pycior, author of LBJ & Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power.
READ MORE: The Surprising Role Mexico Played in World War II
The G.I. Forum's Fight Takes Off

For Mexican Americans in the American Southwest, the controversy drove home Garcia's main message for this pioneering movement: They were as American as everyone else-and as such, had to fight to demand their rights. With the founding G.I. Forum chapter in Corpus Christi less than a year old, Garcia took to the highways in his blue Cadillac to help veterans organize 40 new chapters in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado.

Everett Collection

A surgeon in six European combat zones by the time he returned from World War II, Garcia quickly saw what he and other Mexican American veterans were facing when he opened a clinic with his brother in a Corpus Christi barrio: Neglect and benefit delays from the Veterans Administration. Poverty wages and shacks with no running water for migrant laborers in the government's Bracero Program. Lousy, segregated schools for their children.

The G.I. Forum raised funds to pay the Texas poll tax to get hundreds more of its members to cast ballots. Their fight for improvements and against discrimination began attracting national attention. A 1951 Look magazine piece, "Texas's Forgotten People," showed how infant diarrhea, diphtheria and tuberculosis ravaged many among the 1.5 million Mexican Americans that "live on little more than hope."

Teaming with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the G.I. Forum successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that having an all-white jury denied convicted murderer Pete Hernandez equal protection under the law. The ruling in the landmark Hernandez vs. Texas case effectively broadened the protection of civil rights laws to Hispanics and all other non-white groups.

Both organizations teamed up again the following year to successfully begin challenging the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American children in four south Texas school districts.
READ MORE: The Mendez Family Fought School Segregation 8 Years Before Brown v. Board of Ed
Mexican American Rights Get a National Spotlight

The 1960s brought the G.I. Forum to a more national-and more political-stage of its civil rights struggle. Garcia became a national coordinator for presidential hopeful Senator John F. Kennedy's Viva Kennedy! campaign to deliver a large bloc of Texas votes. After President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in, the G.I. Forum gained a friend in the Oval Office.

When Johnson declared his War on Poverty program in January 1965, he cited as inspiration his college days teaching grindingly poor, hungry students at an all-Mexican school in Cotulla, Texas. "It never even occurred to me in my wildest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country," Johnson told the nation. "But now I do have that chance, and I'll let you in on a secret. I plan to use it."

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The "weapons" he deployed in that war: creating Medicare and Medicaid, early childhood program Head Start, and work-study programs; expanding social security benefits; making food stamps permanent; and sending more federal funds to poor schools.

But appointing Mexican Americans to high-profile civil rights and economic development positions-something the American G.I. Forum demanded-came late in Johnson's term, sometimes straining the relationship between Garcia and the president. After vocal protests by Garcia and his group, Johnson appointed another Forum member to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Garcia was appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and as a special representative and ambassador to the United Nations, tasked with improving Latin American relations.

Meanwhile, Johnson's landmark achievements in civil rights and voting rights in the mid 1960s seemed to center more on African Americans, and the carnage of the Vietnam War flashing on American TV screens siphoned away his attention. Mexican Americans' struggles to end terrible living conditions and segregation, and to join farmworkers' fight for better wages and working conditions, was taking a back burner in Washington.
READ MORE: The U.S. Deported More Than a Million of Its Own Citizens to Mexico During the Great Depression
Mexican American Activism Evolves

When war and continued civil unrest led Johnson to announce in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection, south Texas folks knew they were losing a friend at the White House. Newer, younger and increasingly visible-and vocal- Chicano civil rights groups emerged, decrying the war and advocating Chicano (Mexican American) nationalism.

Some goals were the same, but theirs was a starkly different message from the previous generation's activists' demand for their rights as patriots and postwar Americans. With Johnson gone, the American G.I. Forum kept up its activism in the 1970s; today, they still advocate for veterans and do job outreach.

In recognition of this pioneering postwar Mexican American civil rights movement, President Ronald Reagan awarded Garcia the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984, the nation's highest civilian honor.

"Either singlehandedly or with help, he was going to end discrimination against Hispanics," said Garcia's brother Xicotencatl P. Garcia. "It's one of those things you wonder: What kind of vision is that? The problem is so mammoth. But that's the vision he had."
READ MORE: What Was the Chicano Movement?

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When a Fallen Mexican American War Hero Was Denied a Wake, a Civil Rights Push Began

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"The whites won't like it." When a small-town Texas funeral home, using these words, refused to hold a wake for decorated World War II veteran Felix Longoria, the ensuing controversy sent the fight for Mexican American civil rights soaring onto the national stage-with some help from a rising U.S.

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1947- Mendez v. Westminster School District 

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1947- Mendez v. Westminster School District 

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7 years before the famous Brown v. Board of Education case, the 9th Circuit of Appeals court issued the first ruling in the US to declare that the school segregation was, ipso facto, unconstitutional--unlike previous rulings that decided  specific instances of segregation were unconstitutional due explicitly to the unequal distribution of resources. This case, which ruled on the segregation of Mexican American school children in the Westminster school system in California, was highly influential in shaping the legal strategies used by Thurgood Marshall in Brown, since he participated in this suit. Ultimately, this case underlined the ways in which different groups' struggles for equality often came together, and its legacy is being the precursor to court-ordered national desegregation while also granting this for Mexican American students in California.

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1948 -- Hector Garcia forms the American GI Forum in Corpus Christi, Texas 

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1948 -- Hector Garcia forms the American GI Forum in Corpus Christi, Texas 

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Born in Mexico and brought over because of the Mexican Revolution, Hector Garcia quickly grew up to be a distinguished student. He would later gain awards for his accomplishments in World War II as an infantryman, a combat engineer and a physician. However, when he began to work with the Veterans Administration, he was frustrated that Mexican veterans, most of whom served directly on the front lines of the battle, could not receive their educational and treatment benefits. He gathered 700 other Mexican veterans, and together they established the American GI Forum to push for equality for all veterans regardless of race. They came to national prominence when they were able to secure a funeral for a Mexican veteran who was previously refused by the funeral director on account of his race. The Forum gathered poll taxes, published campaign strategies, called attention to the working and living conditions of Mexicans, alongside many more efforts.

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1948 - Delgado v Bastrop Independent School District

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1948 - Delgado v Bastrop Independent School District

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The Delgado v Bastrop Independent School District lawsuit was key in ending Mexican American segregation within Texas public schools, and establishing a precedent against segregation within the state as a whole. The case was initially brought to court by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), who were filing for lawsuit on behalf of Minerva Delgado and twenty other Mexican American parents. The suit argued that segregation of Texas public schools deprived Mexican American children of equal educational facilities, services, and institutions; the suit claimed that this process violated state law. The court ruled in favor of Delgado, and this decision began the process of gradually erasing outright segregation of Mexican Americans within Texas, and America.

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1953-- American GI Forum Publishes Book Focusing on Discrimination of Latin Americans in the U.S.

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1953-- American GI Forum Publishes Book Focusing on Discrimination of Latin Americans in the U.S.

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"What Price *******" is a book published by the American GI Forum in 1953 that addresses the issue of discrimination specifically in farm labor in South Texas. In the book it is mentioned that no one with a Spanish last name had served on a jury in the county for 25 years. It also talks about some Supreme Court cases like Brown v. the Board of Education which ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The book's readers learned about the challenges of discrimination Latin Americans faced, bringing awareness to the issue.

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(above) Select photos from, "What Price Wetbacks?" by the American G.I. Forum of Texas and the Texas State Federation of Labor, 1953

Concerned about the influx of undocumented labor, this report evidences the racialization of the "wetback" - a pejorative for Mexican immigrants, named for illegal crossings via the Rio Grande -plaguing Texas officials during the Bracero Program [1]. This anti-immigrant propaganda was used to compile a profile of the "wetback," catalog the dangers of this group, and propose penal reformations to immigration policy [2].

[1] American G.I. Forum of Texas and Texas State Federation of Labor (AFL). What Price Wetbacks? Austin, 1953. Repr. 1976 in Mexican Migration to the United States. New York: Arno Press. 3-10. Print.

[2] Hernández, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Los Angeles: Berkeley UP, 2010. 252-254. Print.

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Forgotten Histories of the U.S.-Mexico Border

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(above) Select photos from, "What Price Wetbacks?" by the American G.I. Forum of Texas and the Texas State Federation of Labor, 1953 Concerned about the influx of undocumented labor, this report evidences the racialization of the "wetback" - a pejorative for Mexican immigrants, named for illegal crossings via the Rio Grande -plaguing Texas officials during the Bracero Program [1].

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Operation 🤬 is the arresting and deportation of more than 3.8 million Latin Americans under US Immigration Service and the Mexican government (due to the labor shortage). Through this process, people were stopped in the streets if they were “Mexican-looking” and and were asked for identification. Afterwards, immigrants were forced into transportation and often sent to unfamiliar parts of Mexico where they had to restart their lives. The term "wetbacks" relates to Mexicans who illegally came to Texas by the Rio Grande River.

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July is scorching in Mexicali. The Mexican city just across the border from Calexico, California, averages 108 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, but temperatures often swell into the 120s.

In 1955, thousands of disoriented people roamed the city's streets as the sun bore down on them. They had just been dumped there by American immigration officials-snatched from their lives and jobs in the United States and thrown into a city where they didn't know anyone.

These Mexican immigrants had been caught in the snare of Operation Wetback, the biggest mass deportation of undocumented workers in United States history. As many as 1.3 million people may have been swept up in the Eisenhower-era campaign with a racist name, which was designed to root out undocumented Mexicans from American society.

The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants-some of them American citizens-from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico.

With the help of the Mexican government, which sought the return of Mexican nationals to alleviate a labor shortage, Border Patrol agents and local officials used military techniques and engaged in a coordinated, tactical operation to remove the immigrants. Along the way, they used widespread racial stereotypes to justify their sometimes brutal treatment of immigrants. Inside the United States, anti-Mexican sentiment was pervasive, and harsh portrayals of Mexican immigrants as dirty, disease-bearing and irresponsible were the norm.

During Operation Wetback, tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives. In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.

It's not clear how many American citizens were swept up in Operation Wetback, but the United States later claimed that 1.3 million people total were deported. However, some historians dispute that claim. Though hundreds of thousands of people were ensnared, says historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the number of deportees was drastically lower than the United States reported-likely closer to 300,000. Due to immigrants who were caught, deported, and captured again after re-emigrating, it's impossible to estimate the total number of people deported under the program.

Mass deportations of Mexican immigrants from the U.S. date to the Great Depression, when the federal government began a wave of deportations rather than include Mexican-born workers in New Deal welfare programs. According to historian Francisco Balderrama, the U.S. deported over 1 million Mexican nationals, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, during the 1930s. Balderrama told Fresh Air 's Terry Gross that the program was referred to as "repatriation" to give it the sense of being voluntary. In reality, though, it was anything but.

Despite a widespread belief among native-born Americans that Mexicans came to the United States to steal jobs from American workers, many were invited to the country to work in its fields. In 1942, the U.S. Mexican Farm Labor Program, also known as Operation Bracero after the Spanish term for "manual laborer," began. The program funneled Mexicans into the United States on a legal, temporary basis in exchange for guaranteed wages and humane treatment-an attempt by the Mexican government to stave off the discrimination faced by earlier immigrants.

However, not all employers wanted to follow the guidelines or pay the thirty-cent-an-hour guaranteed wage (about $4.51 in modern dollars). Nor did the Mexican government want Mexicans to work in Texas, which continued its discrimination against Mexican people, and the state was excluded from the program between 1942 and 1947. That's where "wetbacks" came in. The racial epithet was used to describe Mexicans who illegally entered Texas by crossing the Rio Grande River. The government turned a blind eye to Texans' employment of these undocumented immigrants, even after hiring undocumented workers was declared illegal.

An estimated 4.6 million Mexicans entered the country legally through the Bracero Program between 1942 and 1964, and states like California soon became dependent on bracero workers. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers crossed the border without permission and found jobs on the farms of employers willing to flout the law.

In 1953, the government decided it had had enough. By refusing to participate in the Bracero Program, South Texas farmers essentially received their labor for less money than farmers who complied. And Border Patrol head Harlon B. Carter-a convicted murderer who killed a Latino as a teenager in 1931 and who later headed the National Rifle Association (NRA)-was frustrated by the sheer numbers of Mexican immigrants, both legal and undocumented, in the United States. He convinced President Eisenhower to ramp up immigration enforcement efforts.

In 1953, Carter tried to get the National Guard involved in a forerunner of Operation Wetback,, but since the U.S. military is not supposed to be used to enforce domestic laws, he couldn't gain authorization to do so. Instead, in 1954, the government introduced Operation Wetback, which used Border Patrol resources instead.

Operation Wetback may not have had troops, but it used military tactics and propaganda to achieve its goals. It was headed in part by General Joseph Swing, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and was planned like a war strike.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Carter promised sweeps of factories, farms and other workplaces, ending with the detention of undocumented workers in holding facilities to await deportation. It would be "the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history," Carter told the paper. News of the raids terrified Latinos in the United States, many of whom remembered the wave of forced deportations in the 1930s.

Historians have documented the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that the United States participated in during Operation Wetback-deals that were not publicized at the time. Immigration officials threatened South Texas employers, some of whom had resorted to hiring armed guards to fend off Border Patrol officers, with stepped-up raids and offered them watered-down versions of the Bracero Program that let them get papers for their workers without committing to all of the program's strenuous requirements. As a result, the number of immigrants in the Bracero Program grew as undocumented workers were deported.

Operation Wetback "was lawless; it was arbitrary; it was based on a lot of xenophobia, and it resulted in sizable large-scale violations of people's rights, including the forced deportation of U.S. citizens," Hernandez told CNN in 2016.

Within a few months, Operation Wetback's funding ran out and the program ended. The Bracero Program continued until 1964, when Congress terminated it against farmers' complaints in an attempt to preserve jobs for American citizens. By then, the program had created an ongoing thirst for cheap farm labor and cheap food-and a corresponding thirst for Mexican nationals to seek out their fortunes in the United States. Ironically, the program bred even more illegal immigration.

Though it took place over 60 years ago, Operation Wetback charged back into the news when Donald Trump endorsed the program during his presidential campaign. Though he did not refer to the program by name, Trump praised a policy that dumped undocumented immigrants in Mexican territory. "They never came back," he said in a 2015 speech.

Trump's statement isn't accurate-despite the best efforts of the United States and Mexico during Operation Wetback, many workers simply returned to the United States again and again. Now, it appears that Operation Wetback, or its tactics, may be serving as inspiration for the Trump administration's stepped-up deportation program and immigration policies.

But President Trump isn't the only person who remembers the program: For many Mexican-Americans, the name brings back memories of a fearful historical moment they don't want to relive.

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The Largest Mass Deportation in American History

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July is scorching in Mexicali. The Mexican city just across the border from Calexico, California, averages 108 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, but temperatures often swell into the 120s. In 1955, thousands of disoriented people roamed the city's streets as the sun bore down on them.

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This was a supreme court case which concluded that all ethnic groups were protected by Civil rights laws and the fourteenth amendment including Hispanics. The supreme court reached this decision unanimously. Hernandez was being charged with murder but his legal team appealed it because the Jury was made up entirely of non Hispanic people and that was also true for 6000 jurors over 25 years despite Texases notable hispanic population.

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American Experience | Hernandez v. Texas: A Great Moment in American History | Season 21 | Episode 4

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This Supreme Court ruling was a major civil rights achievement.

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Henry B. Gonzalez was the first Hispanic representative from Texas and worked in congress for thirty-seven years. He dedicated his career to fighting to end segregation and discrimination within the state. He was a state senator, city councilmen, and U.S congressmen throughout his life. Henry B. Gonzalez spent years attempting to abolish segregation and racist laws. In 1957 he held the longest filibuster in history, almost forty hours long. This resulted in the demolishing of eight out of ten of the segregation bills in the Brown vs. Board of Education case.

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"West Side Story" is a Romeo-and-Juliet-inspired musical that tells the story of rival gangs in New York City - one made up of white men and one made up of Puerto Ricans. Although both the playwright and composer were white men, the musical was revolutionary in that it did not portray the white people as wholly good and the Puerto Ricans as wholly bad, instead adding nuance to both sides of the story.  Additionally, while many of the hispanic characters in West Side Story were (disgustingly) played by white actors in brown face, Rita Moreno, who played Anita, was actually hispanic. She won an Oscar for her role, making her the first Latina to win an Oscar and showing Hispanic people everywhere their beauty and worth.

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Salvatore Agron was a 16 year old Puerto Rican  student in New York City. He joined a gang, called the Vampires, because of the long black and red capes they wore. In 1959, he was supposed to attack a rival Irish gang, but ended up accidentally stabbing two young white boys. There is no question that this violence is never acceptable, but the media caused an uproar over Agron, or the "cape man". Agron was tried as an adult, and sentences to death, making him the youngest person to ever be put on death row, despite the victim's own parents asking the judge for leniency in his sentence. At the time, all New Yorkers knew of Puerto Ricans came from "The West Side Story", which did not necessarily portray them in a positive light considering all of the gang violence present in the play. There was immense fear surrounding Puerto Ricans, particularly the children of immigrants, and the public outrage that followed Argon's arrest is a clear reflection of that.

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The Bay of Pigs Operation was an attempt to overthrow Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, who was considered a threat to the US. On April 17, 1961 around 1,200 Cuban exiles, who opposed Castro's Cuban revolution, entered the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Their plan was to rally Cuban citizens to rise up and overthrow Castro's government. The plan failed and many of the exiles were killed or imprisoned. Castro used this attack to solidify his control in Cuba and to request further military aid from the Soviets.

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1961 -- CIA assassinates the President of the Dominican Republic

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1961 -- CIA assassinates the President of the Dominican Republic

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Rafael Trujillo was a dictator, serving first as President and then as an unelected military ruler. His dictatorship was one of the bloodiest in the Americas. His government executed thousands who opposed him, both inside the Dominican Republic and outside, including some Americans. In 1961 with the support of the CIA, a group of conspirators assassinated Trujillo. His son, Ramfis, took control of the government and killed most of the conspirators.

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Congress passes the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which prevents any form of discrimination on the bases of race, skin color, religion, sex, and national origin. This included discrimination in public facilities, education, voting, employment, etc. This helped Hispanic or Latinx citizens, who now had the legal right to sue if they believe they were discriminated against at all based on their place of national origin. Additionally, spaces were desegregated for Latinos, who might've also been restricted from "white only" establishments.

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The National Grape Boycott was a labor strike organized by the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), a largely Filipino organization. It's purpose was to pressure grape growers in Delano, California to pay their workers fair wages as well as provide their workers suitable living conditions. The strike itself lasted for about 5 years, and it consisted of non-violent boycotts, marches, and overall resistabce. These serious of strikes resulted in a victory for farmworkers, as they came to an agreement with grape growers that granted workers better pay, benefits, and protections. Although this was a strike that revolved around grape growers, it created a long lasting impact on the farm labor movement in America.

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1966 Cesar Chavez, as director of the National Farm Workers Association, leads a 340-mile, 25-day march of thousands of Latino and Filipino farm workers from Delano, California to the state capitol in Sacramento.

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1966 Cesar Chavez, as director of the National Farm Workers Association, leads a 340-mile, 25-day march of thousands of Latino and Filipino farm workers from Delano, California to the state capitol in Sacramento.

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Cesar Chavez was an important union leader and labor organizer. When he was younger he did a lot of manual labor, which was very difficult and because of the unfair conditions he founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962. He stressed nonviolent methods, and tried to draw attention to causes by utilizing boycotts, marches, and hunger strikes. One of his most prominent marches was in 1966 and was 340- miles, and 25 days long. This included thousands of Latino and Filipion workers marching from Delano, California to the capitol at Sacramento. This was an attempt at drawing attention to the dangerous conditions that farm workers experienced. During this strike the union was able to win its first contract for better working conditions.

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Allows anti-communist Cubans who live in the US for at least one year to become permanent residents (green card). This was passed by congress following Fidel Castro’s revolution (1959-1960).

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1966 - 500-mile Farm Worker Solidarity March

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1966 - 500-mile Farm Worker Solidarity March

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During World War II the United States of America developed the Bracero Program, a program that brought immigrant workers from Mexico to Texas to alleviate the labor shortage caused by the war. These migrant workers were working for 25 cents an hour and in 1966 demanded an increase in pay, from 25 cents an hour to a dollar and 25 cents an hour, and for better working conditions in the fields of Texas. They marched from Rio Grande City to Corpus Christi for these demands. Texas governor, John Connally, refused these workers their demands but after 9 months of continuous protest by the workers, Texas legislature finally met their demands.

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David Sanchez founded the Brown Berets in the 1960s amidst the Chicano Movement, which addressed civil rights struggles and a call for liberation of Mexican-descant people. They were known for their fight against police brutality, actively protesting the abuses and killings by the LA Sheriff's Department. The Brown Berets also organized the first Chicano Moratorium in opposition to the Vietnam War. One notable issue was the sexism in the movement. Machismo was a common theme within Latinx community and so women were often neglected or were assigned smaller duties in the Brown Berets.

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1967 -- Crusade for Justice and Congreso de Aztlan are Founded by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales

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1967 -- Crusade for Justice and Congreso de Aztlan are Founded by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales

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Crusade for Justice was founded seeking to advance Chicano rights and culture, as well as Congreso de Aztlan, created to focus on the rights of Mexican Americans. Gonzales believed in educating the people around him and bringing the Chicano community together. Gonzales wrote a poem called Yo soy Joaquín, shared his new cosmological vision of the "Chicano", neither being Indian or European, neither Mexican or American, but a combination of all identities that make up what it is to be Mexican.

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1968 -- Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)

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1968 -- Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)

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Inspired by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and the peak of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, MALDEF founded itself as a civil rights law firm that has propelled equal rights for Latinos in all facets of life, from education and economic advancement to ensuring that they have a say in government policies and laws that affect them.
Among their achievements include the Plyer v. Doe case of 1982; September of 1977, MALDEF sued Texas lawmakers who wanted to prevent undocumented immigrant students from having a right to a proper and free education by enacting legislation that would defund public schools that allowed those students to attend. Thanks to the MALDEF legal team’s perseverance and fortitude, their work after 5 years of litigation  would result in the landmark case of Plyer v. Doe where the Supreme Court ruled that regardless of immigration status, all children had a right to a free public education K-12. Today, MALDEF continues to work closely with recipients of the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, from providing students with law scholarships to challenging courts for better reforms of the policy.

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Cesar Chavez, a labor activist, grew up in a Mexican-American family of migrant laborers and was determined to advocate for better working conditions for farmworkers. He organized many marches with laborers and founded theUnited Farm Workers(UFW). Like Gandhi and Dr. King, he used non-violence as he started a 25-day fast in February 1968. He went without food for 25 days, only drinking water, in order to protest the terrible conditions of Filipino-American and Latino-American workers that helped grow grapes in California. In the end, doctors said his life was in danger as he lost 35 pounds and was too weak to speak. His fast was successful and stopped the violence against the movement. This allowed the grape strike to continue and grape protesters traveled around the U.S. and Canada to tell their stories. The grape boycott united middle-class families in large cities and low-class laborers in California and encouraged millions of families to stop eating grapes. Chavez’s efforts would bring legislation in the 1960’s and 1970’s that gave laborers better pay and working conditions.

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1968 - National Chicano Draft Resistance Movement

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1968 - National Chicano Draft Resistance Movement

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In 1968 at 19 years old José Sanchez became the first Chicano to publicly refuse being drafted to the army. A year later, UCLA student body president Rosalio Muñoz also refused the draft, signing a petition and delivering a speech on the disproportionate number of Chicano soldiers killed in Vietnam. This sparked a larger antiwar and Chicano rights movement, which included the Chicano Moratorium in 1970. Prominent groups like the Brown Berets and the marching women Las Adelitas de Aztlan were present. Leaders, scholars, workers, and families all marched together for their rights and lives through the streets of LA. It began as a joyful celebration, but descended into violence once the armed police starting advancing. Some were even killed, many were injured and traumatized. However it was not all in vain as this movement led to future progress for Chicano communities, education, and opportunities.

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Inspired by similar protest movements in East Los Angeles that same year by Chicanos, students from Edgewood High School in San Antonio protested the abhorrent conditions in their schools and the treatment they received by staging a walkout. Many students were upset that the school was designed to push the students into manual labor instead of pursuing a college degree.

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Two years prior to the court case, a parent named Jose Cisneros filed a lawsuit against the Corpus Christi Independent School District (CCISD) as a result of the discrimination that his children were facing. He used the reasoning of the Brown v. Board of Education outcome which stated that "separate but equal is inherently unequal" in order to justify Mexican-Americans as a racial minority that had the potential to be discriminated against. There was a huge gap between minority and majority schools in which the former had less resources, bad conditions which inhibited their overall learning experience. Yet, the CCSID refused to acknowledge reallocating their funds to repair the schools where minority groups were. While Cisnero argued for the case of de jure segregation, the CCISD argued for de facto segregation. As a result of this case, plans for desegregation were put into effect, including busing and Mexican-Americans.

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The East LA walkouts, also known as Blowouts, began in the area of their name but spread to communities throughout the city of Los Angeles and included an diverse group of students. These walkouts were the accumulation of a larger political and cultural awakening in the Mexican American community and served as a catalyst for the Chicano civil rights movement in the city. During this time, the LA school district, as well as school districts around the country, barred Chicano students from speaking Spanish and steered them toward vocational careers instead of college. This movement rose awareness to the inequities in the school system and led to the improvement of the local schools in Los Angeles

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In January of 1970, José Ángel Gutiérrez and Mario Compean launched "La Raza Unida" (RUP) in Crystal City, Texas. RUP, or the United Race Party, was a new political party created out of a growing frustration from Mexican-Americans surrounding inequality and underrepresentation. The party quickly achieved success locally in municipal elections in Crystal City and Cotulla, Texas. They then spread to other states such as California and Colorado, even having a candidate run for senator of Colorado in 1972. The RUP, built on principles of unity amongst the Latinx and Native American communities, gave voice to these often overlooked and marginalized people. This helped pave the way for more Latinx representation, especially politically, in the future.

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Ruben Salazar was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who was killed by a police officer while he was covering a riot against the vietnam war, but the police officer was never charged with his death. Ruben Salazar was a very important figure in Latino history because he spoke about racism towards latinos and how marginalized they were. A huge topic he talked about was the mistreatment of latinos by the police, including the planting of evidence on suspects and beating them in order to get them to say what they wanted to hear. It is believed that the police was out to get him because he spoke out about these things. Although this is true, he has not been brought justice. This is important today because so many people like him who speak out against law enforcement end up dead or injured, but no one is charged. This has sparked outrage which is evident in the protests of the past summer.

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The fax machine beeped and screeched as it transmitted a two-page document to the FBI. I was a low-level reporter for the Los Angeles Times working out of a storefront news bureau on Exposition Boulevard in South L.A., chasing answers to questions that the newspaper should have asked decades earlier about the death of one of its own.

Without the knowledge of my editors and unsure of what I might be dredging up, I faxed a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, searching for clues to a momentous but neglected chapter in Los Angeles history: the slaying, by a sheriff's deputy, of Los Angeles Times columnist and KMEX-TV news director Ruben Salazar.

The Times is taking a look back at the legacy of the Chicano Moratorium in 1970. See more stories

What was the Chicano Moratorium?+

That letter, which I sent to the FBI on June 14, 1994, launched me on a journey that has continued to this day. It led me to investigate and challenge the actions of law enforcement agencies in the months leading up to Salazar's slaying, as well as to try to uncover new details surrounding his death amid a tumultuous anti-Vietnam War and civil rights protest in East Los Angeles on a hot, smoggy afternoon - now 50 years ago.

The more I dug into the past, the more I began to question the historical role of The Times in failing to deeply investigate the killing of a trailblazing journalist who opened the city's eyes to the hopes and frustrations of its long-overlooked Mexican American community.

I also questioned my role as a Chicano journalist who was hired at a time - not unlike now - when the Los Angeles Times was under fire for the failure of its newsroom to mirror the ethnic and racial diversity of the communities it covered.

Salazar was a pioneer whose award-winning journalism opened the door for a generation of Latino reporters like me. I felt a responsibility to focus attention on a grave injustice. But most of all, I was hoping to break news that might shed light on a killing that remains a source of speculation and suspicion to this day.

Was Salazar's slaying nothing more than a tragic accident at the hands of a deputy who was operating under "riot" conditions, as law enforcement authorities contend? Or was Salazar targeted, as some of his closest friends and activists believe, to silence his hard-hitting reporting of police actions in Los Angeles' Mexican American neighborhoods?

Over the years, the story kept pulling me back as I tried to answer these questions, and eventually I came to my own conclusions about what happened that day on Aug. 29, 1970, when sheriff's deputies swooped down on the Silver Dollar Bar & Cafe.

Early code switcher

In death, Salazar became a mythic symbol for a movement and the people he covered as a journalist. In reality, he was a complicated figure, a skilled code switcher who could easily navigate between white and Latino worlds.

Colleagues at the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where Salazar was the Petaluma bureau chief in 1956, told me how he exposed secret government meetings and searched for restaurants that served menudo, the familiar Mexican stew of red chile pepper, tripe and hominy. After joining The Times, Salazar lived with his family in Orange County, the land of Richard Nixon and the right-wing John Birch Society.

Salazar became a foreign correspondent, one of the Los Angeles Times' most prestigious assignments. He covered a U.S. military invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, reported on the war in Vietnam at a time of growing U.S. involvement, and became the newspaper's Mexico City bureau chief.

In January 1969, Salazar returned to Los Angeles to cover a Mexican American community that had transformed dramatically. The civil rights movement had swept across the barrios of the Southwest, where activists had begun calling themselves Chicanos. Emboldened by cultural pride, Chicano protesters were speaking out against generations of racism and discrimination, substandard educational opportunities, law enforcement abuse and the war in Vietnam, where Latinos were dying in large numbers.

A year after returning to Los Angeles, Salazar left The Times to become news director at Spanish-language KMEX-TV. But he agreed to write a weekly column for the newspaper focusing on the Mexican American community.

His columns were a radical departure from the straightforward news articles he had written as a reporter. In his first column, he offered an unapologetic explanation of why Chicanos resented being told by whites that speaking Spanish was a problem. "Chicanos will tell you that their culture predates that of the Pilgrims and that Spanish was spoken in America before English," Salazar wrote. "So the 'problem' is not theirs but the Anglos' who don't speak Spanish."

Salazar understood the power of television to reach large audiences in a growing Spanish-language community. Each weeknight, his hour-long "Noticiero 34" newscast attracted nearly 300,000 viewers, making it one of the most-watched local news shows. "The reason, undoubtedly, is a newly gained pride in the Spanish language by the nation's second largest minority," he wrote in one of his columns.

Death at the Silver Dollar

At KMEX, Salazar's small news crew aggressively covered growing tensions between Chicano activists and the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Concerned about the reporting, police visited Salazar at the station and warned that he was damaging the reputation of the LAPD. "Besides, they said, this kind of information could be dangerous in the minds of barrio people," Salazar wrote in a July 24, 1970, column.

On Saturday morning, Aug. 29, 1970, Salazar met KMEX cameraman Octavio Gomez and reporter Guillermo Restrepo near Belvedere Park in East Los Angeles, where crowds were gathering for the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War.

As the summer sun burned through a smoggy haze, at least 20,000 men, women and children marched nearly three miles to a rally at Laguna Park (later renamed Ruben F. Salazar Park). They chanted "Chicano Power!" and hoisted banners - "Houston," "Denver," "Albuquerque" - proclaiming the far-flung places from where they had traveled for the historic gathering.

It was the high point of a burgeoning movement and at the time was one of the largest civil rights marches in Los Angeles history. But the rally exploded into violence after sheriff's deputies responded to reports of thefts at a liquor store near Laguna Park. Deputies decided to clear the peaceful gathering, firing tear gas canisters into the multitudes sprawled on the grass as helmet-clad, baton-wielding officers charged forward.

Protesters battled with police and dark clouds of smoke rose into the air as buildings were set on fire along Whittier Boulevard. Salazar and Restrepo worked their way east, stopping at the Silver Dollar Cafe to use the restroom, then decided to grab a quick beer.

Meanwhile, sheriff's deputies responded to a report of two armed men inside the bar, a report that later proved false. Deputies fired several tear gas projectiles through the curtained doorway, including a 10-inch torpedo-shaped missile designed to rip through plywood in barricade situations. It struck the 42-year-old Salazar in the head, killing him as he sat at the bar next to Restrepo, who crawled out through a back door while choking smoke filled the small space.

Finding the rift

On a hot summer day in El Paso, I sat in a conference room packed with reporters at the 1995 National Assn. of Hispanic Journalists convention. Four panelists were lauding the groundbreaking work of Salazar, who was raised in the Texas border city and had cut his teeth as a cub reporter at the El Paso Herald-Post.

A year had passed since I sent my letter to the FBI. My request for records was being processed and it was unclear how long that would take. I had sent similar requests to the LAPD and Sheriff's Department but was told they didn't have the records I was seeking.

The Los Angeles Times wanted to publish something substantial for the 25th anniversary of Salazar's slaying, which was just two months away, and it was my job to make that happen. But as the panel in El Paso was winding down, I didn't have a story. Until a respected journalist spoke up.

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Charlie Ericksen, easily recognizable with his glasses and grizzled beard, stood from his chair and looked at the panelists. "I'm one of those people who still firmly believe that Ruben was a victim of a political assassination," he flatly said.

A founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Hispanic Link news service, Ericksen, who started his career as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Mirror, had helped launch the careers of many Latino reporters. Without elaborating, he told the gathering that Salazar believed police were after him. I scribbled into my reporter's notebook. I had a lead to chase.

As I later found out, Ericksen and Salazar were close friends. Ericksen and two other friends - a Catholic priest and the director of the L.A. office of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights - had met the newsman at an Olvera Street restaurant three days before he was killed. In separate interviews, the three men described Salazar as shaken, worried that he was being followed by police. He feared police would do something to discredit his reporting, they recalled.

Their recollections were compelling. Salazar was a veteran journalist who had covered combat overseas. Early in his career, he had pretended to be drunk and was arrested by El Paso police. The ruse enabled him to expose wrongdoing in the city's notorious jail. Clearly, he was not a man who was easily scared.

Restrepo, the former KMEX reporter, said he and Salazar were investigating allegations that Los Angeles police and sheriff's deputies had planted evidence on some suspects and beaten others. The two journalists had been tipped off: Authorities knew about their investigation.

"We were in hot water," Restrepo told me.

I landed another promising lead. A year earlier, the LAPD had responded to my records request, saying the counterterrorism division had no records of Salazar. That was true, but through my reporting I learned that an intelligence file on Salazar had been compiled for former Chief Ed Davis. It was buried in city archives.

I went to the cavernous warehouse where tens of thousands of boxes of historical city records are stored. The LAPD file revealed a bitter rift between Salazar and Davis. The chief had accused Salazar of reporting a "total lie" regarding comments he made in a meeting with Latino journalists. Davis demanded that Salazar apologize - which the journalist refused to do, saying his report was accurate.

"I'm one of those people who still firmly believe that Ruben was a victim of a political assassination."

Charlie Ericksen, founder of Hispanic Link

The file, which contained transcripts of KMEX news reports and photocopies of Times articles, disclosed a disturbing detail: A "reliable confidential informant" at the newspaper had passed information about Salazar to the LAPD. Salazar, police were told, was a "slanted, left-wing-oriented reporter." I never confirmed the name of that informant but knew through my reporting that Salazar didn't trust some of his colleagues.

I contacted Davis, who criticized Salazar, saying he lacked objectivity and was "not some kind of diplomat or peacemaker." The former chief said in the 1995 interview that he wasn't aware of police shadowing the newsman, but he acknowledged it might have occurred. "If he was surveilled, it might have been done unauthorized by some lower level officer," said Davis, who died in 2006.

On Aug. 26, 1995, the Los Angeles Times published my 3,200-word article on Salazar. It was a solid story that featured details not previously reported by the newspaper. Still, I had found no conclusive evidence that law enforcement authorities were tailing Salazar or knew he was in the tavern when the deadly projectile was fired.

I hoped that the FBI documents, which I was still waiting for, would provide new clues.

Opening the files

Tourists strolled past colorful piñatas, intricately woven shawls and other handicrafts as I sat with a colleague, then-Times columnist Héctor Tobar, at La Luz del Dia Restaurant on Olvera Street in late June 2010.

It was the same restaurant where a shaken Salazar had met his three friends, telling them he suspected police were after him. We were there to meet a powerful Los Angeles County official who might be able to help us uncover new information about Salazar's slaying.

After 15 years, my search for records had largely resulted in one disappointment after another. Documents from the U.S. Department of Justice were of little help. A request to the CIA prompted a cryptic response: Agency officials could neither confirm nor deny the existence of any records on Salazar, saying such information was classified.

But the biggest setback came from the FBI. More than five years after I had requested records, I finally received more than 200 pages of documents. Some portions were redacted, for what officials said were national security reasons. The records failed to yield any new information on the circumstances of Salazar's slaying.

I had hit the end of the reporting road - until a tip pulled me back.

The Times hosted a virtual forum on the Chicano Moratorium that featured authors of the series, including Daniel Hernandez, Carolina A. Miranda and Robert J. Lopez. Watch recordings via The Times Facebook page, YouTube or Twitter.

In early 2010, I learned from a source that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had more than half a dozen boxes filled with files related to Salazar and the Chicano Moratorium. The existence of these records had not been disclosed to me when I filed my original request with the department in 1994.

I sent a new California Public Records Act request to the Sheriff's Department seeking to review the files. On March 10, then-Sheriff Lee Baca denied my request.

Hoping to avoid a battle for the records, I met the department's media liaison on March 18 and told him it was in everyone's interest to open the secret files. He indicated that Baca was reconsidering his denial of my request and was "inclined to release" the records.

I had yet to receive a response from Baca about the files when Tobar and I had lunch at the Olvera Street restaurant with a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

The five supervisors on the board wielded considerable influence over Baca because they controlled his department's budget. During an off-the-record conversation, Tobar and I played the game of asking questions, yet we made it clear we believed the files should be unsealed and that any assistance from the supervisors would be in the public interest.

In early July, Tobar wrote a column about Salazar and called on the Sheriff's Department to open the files, saying it could help heal the wounds of a 40-year-old case.

Baca denied my request again on Aug. 9. At that point, I knew that the best strategy was to keep this story in the news. Over the next three weeks I produced five articles and a news video. The newspaper published a strong editorial saying it was time to end decades of obfuscation.

The day after my first article was published, the Board of Supervisors ordered the county counsel to prepare a report about whether the files should be made public. Around the same time, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund was working with a documentary filmmaker to press the Sheriff's Department to release the files.

On Aug. 19 I met a source at a downtown street corner, where I was handed a large envelope with a copy of the confidential report from the county counsel to the Board of Supervisors. I raced back to the newsroom to write a story. The county's own attorneys had concluded that some of the records should be made public under state law.

Baca had turned over the files to the Office of Independent Review, a civilian watchdog agency created to monitor the department. Over the next six months, the office reviewed the records and took the unprecedented step of investigating a 40-year-old case. The office announced it would prepare a public report of its findings.

A few days before the report was made public, I was given a copy by my source and wrote a front-page story published Feb. 19, 2011. The report said deputies made a series of tactical errors that led to Salazar's killing but found no evidence that he was targeted or had been under surveillance. The report acknowledged that its findings were limited regarding whether Salazar was targeted because that line of investigation was not pursued by homicide detectives assigned to the case.

In early March 2011, the Sheriff's Department finally opened the eight boxes of files for reporters to review. I pored over the voluminous records. They contained interesting revelations, including details of law enforcement surveillance of community groups involved in the Chicano Moratorium.

But the files contained no new information answering the questions that I had first set out to investigate more than 15 years earlier.

Role of The Times

I never wanted to be pigeonholed into writing stories focusing solely on Latino issues. But this was a story about a fellow Los Angeles Times journalist who was killed. It transcended simplistic boundaries.

When I first came up with the idea of sending a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI, I was sure that someone at the newspaper had already done so. No one had.

I spent years asking questions and reporting facts that the Los Angeles Times should have asked and uncovered in the weeks and months following Salazar's slaying. By the time I got involved, the trail was cold. People's memories had faded and key records could have been lost or destroyed.

After Salazar's slaying, The Times largely covered breaking events about the case - including a 16-day coroner's inquest, a fact-finding proceeding that focused more on the unrest and less on the circumstances of Salazar's death. It also produced an investigative piece that called into question the use of the deadly projectile. But for the death of one of its own, the newspaper should have launched a crusade to find additional new evidence and hold people and agencies accountable.

Had the newspaper looked hard enough, it could have discovered key details, including that federal prosecutors had convened a grand jury to investigate Salazar's slaying. I learned of the grand jury in 1995 from Jerris Leonard, former U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights. The Catholic priest who met with Salazar at Olvera Street told me he testified before the panel. The federal investigation quietly closed in March 1971 without any charges being filed against the deputy who fired the deadly projectile, according to U.S. Justice Department records I obtained.

Bill Thomas directed local coverage for the Los Angeles Times when Salazar was killed and later became editor of the newspaper. In a 1995 interview, he insisted that his reporters were thorough in their coverage. "I don't know how you could have been any more aggressive than we were," Thomas told me. He died in 2014.

A former high-ranking Times editor offered a different narrative.

Frank del Olmo was well respected and the first Latino named to the masthead of the Los Angeles Times. Hired in 1970, he was mentored by Salazar and became a columnist and associate editor. He died in 2004, after suffering an apparent heart attack in the newsroom.

Del Olmo was on the Salazar panel at the 1995 El Paso journalism conference, where he acknowledged that he and other Los Angeles Times reporters "never really were allowed" to fully investigate the newsman's slaying. He said the killing created an emotionally difficult situation and that Thomas was not comfortable with launching an exhaustive reporting effort, according to a transcript of the panel discussion.

"The comfort level wasn't there - to allow his reporters to go out and find out what happened, and as a result, we let that ball slip right between our legs," Del Olmo said. "So, we bear some responsibility."

Salazar's death, Del Olmo told the journalists in the room, was "a painful issue" for his newsroom colleagues.

"They just wanted to be done with it as quickly as possible."

Circumstantial evidence

In recent months, I've seen history repeating itself.

I was hired by the Los Angeles Times in 1992, as part of a grand experiment called "City Times," a section created for neighborhoods historically neglected by the newspaper - the "hole in the doughnut," as editors called the area.

At the time, the newspaper was criticized for not doing enough to hire journalists of color. It had largely failed to recognize social and economic forces fueling civil rebellion that exploded in April 1992, after a jury acquitted four LAPD officers who had brutally beaten Rodney G. King, an unarmed Black man. City Times was a zoned news section launched in September 1992 in response to the criticism. It was shuttered in August 1995.

Today, the Los Angeles Times is under fire yet again for failing to hire and promote more reporters of color. The issue spilled into the public realm during the coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests in Los Angeles and across the country following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

As I watched news of the protests, I saw police fire tear gas projectiles at reporters doing their jobs and thought of Salazar. But there are important differences between then and now.

For one, our ability to fully comprehend what happened to Salazar during a monumental chapter in L.A. history is limited without real-time video. There were black-and-white photos of deputies wielding weapons at the Silver Dollar, and there were conflicting eyewitness accounts. But there was no real-time video footage.

Imagine the King beating without George Holliday's camcorder footage of LAPD officers swinging their batons. Imagine Floyd's graphic killing without Darnella Frazier's cellphone footage capturing a pivotal moment in the history of race relations and police violence in the United States.

In part because of the technological limitations of the early 1970s, we've been left with pieces of circumstantial evidence that allow us to draw our own conclusions about the tragic slaying of Ruben Salazar.

My conclusion? When sheriff's deputies descended on the Silver Dollar 50 years ago, they didn't think about whether their actions would result in injury or death. They didn't care who was inside that bar.

This incident would not have played out the same way in a white neighborhood. But this was East Los Angeles, a Mexican American barrio. Sheriff's deputies were never held accountable for their actions.

In the end, Salazar died from the very type of law enforcement abuse he was trying to expose.
Lopez was part of the team of Los Angeles Times reporters that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

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Why did Ruben Salazar die? A reporter's years-long quest

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The fax machine beeped and screeched as it transmitted a two-page document to the FBI. I was a low-level reporter for the Los Angeles Times working out of a storefront news bureau on Exposition Boulevard in South L.A., chasing answers to questions that the newspaper should have asked decades earlier about the death of one of its own.

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Escuela della Raza Unida (School of the United Race), was founded as a non-profit, non-traditional and holistic school in Blythe, California, 1972. Its founding was a response to the oppressive conditions Hispanic students faced in public school systems, and was immediately triggered by a "physical altercation" between a public school principal and a 13 year-old female student. Students staged a walk-out and picketed for 6 weeks, which ultimately ended in the foring of this education center by concerned parents and community leaders. They were significant for their sincere focus on serving their community in a healthy way while offering a safe alternate to the difficult public school life Hispanic students faced at the time (and still today).

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1973-- Dade County unanimously passes Mayor's resolution to add Spanish as an official language

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1973-- Dade County unanimously passes Mayor's resolution to add Spanish as an official language

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In 1973, Miami's population is about 25% Hispanic, which primarily consisted of Cubans. Emergency workers, service workers, and government officials had trouble communicating with Spanish speakers, and thus,  Metro Commission passed Mayor Jack Orr's resolution declaring Dade County to be officially bilingual and bicultural, making Spanish the county's second official language. However, after the Mariel Boatlift incident in 1980, the residents, led by the Anglo-speaking Citizens of Dade United, fearing that the refugees would bring disaster, overwhelmingly voted to overturn the 1973 ordinance as well as mandating official documents to be English only. In 1988, voters again overwhelmingly to make English the official language of the state - a symbolic move against "Latinization" and immigrants more than anything else. Anglo-Americans feared that Spanish and Hispanic culture were being "forced down into Americans' throats" and were alarmed by the little Havanas. After a federal ruling in 1992 regarding the racial make up of commissioners, a much more diverse Dade County Commission finally overturned the 1973 ordinance in 1993. In 2013, Doral Mayor Boria suggests making Spanish a second language in Doral to improve local economy, but it was unanimously shot down yet again.

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THE LATINIZATION OF MIAMI; MIAMI MIAMI (Published 1980)

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5 See the article in its original context from September 21, 1980, Section T, Page 11 Buy Reprints TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Full text is unavailable for this digitized archive article. Subscribers may view the full text of this article in its original form through TimesMachine.

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1973 - Espinoza v Farah Manufacturing Company

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1973 - Espinoza v Farah Manufacturing Company

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In 1973, Mrs. Espinoza, a woman of Mexican descent, filed for lawsuit on the grounds that she was facing employment discrimination based on her citizenship status. This case was taken to court after the Farah Manufacturing Company had refused to hire Espinoza as an employee, a decision which she interpreted as a violation of the Civil Rights Act. In court, Espinoza’s argument reasoned that it was unlawful for any employer to discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex or in her case, national origin. However, the Supreme Court eventually came to the ruling that an employer’s refusal to hire somebody based on their United States citizenship status does not fall within the grounds of discrimination based on ‘national origin’. The Court ruled in favor of Farah. This set a precedent going forward for Americans of Latinx descent, establishing the difficulty of attaining employment as a non-citizen. Even in modern times, Latinx Americans face the same kinds of challenges.

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Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Company, Inc.

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1974-The Equal Educational Opportunities Act

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1974-The Equal Educational Opportunities Act

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On August 21 1974, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act took action. The EEOA banned discrimination of students based on their, race, nationality, or gender. It also stated public schools to have more opportunities to students that did not speak English. Many regard the EEOA as an addition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which stated the ban of racial discrimination as segregation was outlaws in schools and businesses.

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In 1973, Miami officially became bilingual in an effort to create an inclusive community for Cuban immigrants. Emmy Shafer, a Russia-born immigrant, creates a campaign with goals of English becoming the official language of the city. She claimed that it would bring unity because everyone would speak and understand the same language. Despite some thinking this was an anti-immigrant campaign, it gained many supporters after Fidel Castro allowed anyone who wanted to leave Cuba to do so, including criminals. The ordinance was approved in 1980.

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Forum

Bilingualism issues are common when there is a high amount of immigration anywhere in the world. Early on when parts of the Americas were being colonized by Spain, Spanish was obviously forced on the indigenous peoples, and it eventually won out across the great majority of every country Spain colonized. More recently, this is a large issue regarding immigration in the modern United States. There are many people on both sides of the bilingualism argument. What is your stance?

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The bilingual referendum in Miami, Florida of 1973 is important because it shows the large influence of Spanish-speakers in the United States. It is also very interesting to see that there was (and still is in some places) such a strong backlash to speaking a language besides English in the United States.

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1980- Mariel Boatlift/Cuban migration to Florida

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1980- Mariel Boatlift/Cuban migration to Florida

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After sharp economic downturn and Fidel Castros permission to leave the country along with president Jimmy Carter removing restrictions on Cuba, 125,000 Cubans immigrated into Miami in just 1980. Castro released political enemies and other opposition. Cuban immigrants were widely criticized by American Media which called them either mentally ill or criminals.

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies