BBULLETI N N moratorium March 50 CHicano Ruben Salazar’s Death 50th anniversary of the death of journalist Ruben Salazar
Special E-Edition
California StateUniversity, University, Dominguez California State DominguezHills Hills
AUG 28, 2020 • VOL. 25, NO. 1
csudhbulletin.com
@dhbulletin
th A n n i v e r sa ry
See March, Page 4
Crusading journalist, and civil rights advocate killed accidentally, so they say, by an LApd
Soldaderas, the unspoken heroines of the Mexican Revolution, symbolizing strength for Chicana feminists.
See Page 4 for Salazar
see Page 3 for Soldaderas A landmark piece of Chicano art currently hanging in the Smithsonian called the Death of Ruben Salazar
By Frank Romero
The following stories will be part of a special issue about the 50th anniversary of the death of journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed in East Los Angeles during the Chicano Moratorium march. Rubén Salazar Enlightened the The eerie parallels Unenlightened Careers of Latinx between 1970 and 2020, in Journalists, Myself Included. both politics and Society
BYSee BRENDA FERANDA VERAN Page 3 Parallels Staff Reporter When I first told my father about my interest in pursuing journalism as a career, he asked me questions that most of those who have also chosen this path have heard before; “Have you given some thought to (insert a common profession here) instead?” followed by, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” As a junior in highschool, who loved to write but had never taken a journalism class,
Married in the morning, marching in the afternoon See Page 6
I was. Throughout the years and now being a junior in college my level of certainty has only increased and I bet that if they’d ask me again in ten years my answer will remain the same. But from time to time, as I begin to build my own voice whinin my writing, I start wondering if any of the stories that I choose to write and report on will jeopardize my safety?” As the media industry expands and journalists face a more hostile climate in today’s
society, this is a question many other journalists have had to think about, especially those that have been arrested, attacked, or killed while on duty. Ruben Salazar was one of these journalists. Salazar was one of the most prominent Latinx reporters at the time of his death. He worked at The Los Angeles Times as a columnist, reporter and later a bureau chief in Mexico City. By 1970, Salazar had developed a reputation for his reporting, as he focused on a full range of problems facing marginalized and racial groups like immigration, police brutality, segregation and educational inequity . Months before his death Salazar was elected Chairman of the Chicano Me-
dia Council and was the news director of KMEX. Félix Gutiérrez, an emeritus professor in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC and director of the “Ruben Salazar Project” remembers reading Salazar columns every Friday, while he was a freshman at California State University, Los Angeles little did he know they would become close friends years after. Gutierrez said the only reason he decided not to major in journalism was because he was afraid of not obtaining a job in the field after college. “At that time [media outlets] didn’t present any efforts to recruit people of color, [journalism} was largely a
white men’s business, journalists pride themselves in being subjective and leaving who you were outside the newsroom.” Salazar challenged this narrative as his journalism became more personal. According to Gitierrez,“Salazar viewed his background, language, culture and his nationality as assets to tell better stories of our people. He showed how one could build an understanding across borders” That was until his career was cut short by a ten-inch tear gas projectile. On the afternoon of his death, August 29, 1970, Salazar sat at the Silver Dollar
“Chicano meant looking at oneself through one’s ‘own’ eyes and not through Anglo bifocals” - Ruben Salazar
[See Café, page 2]
los angeles times 1928-1970
2
FRIDAY , August 28, 2020
Special E-Edition
CSUDH BULLETIN
March Into Hi stor y :
Just 5 in 1970, CSUDH growth shaped by historic event BY ROBERT RIOS
Campus Editor
Only 15 miles separate California State University, Dominguez Hills and East Los Angeles, the most heavily populated Latinx neighborhood is LA County. But in late August, 1970, it was hard to imagine they were in the same country. The previous semester, fewer than 2,000 students attended what was then known as California State College (although within four years that number would triple). Classes were split between two small clusters of buildings on either side of Victoria
anti-war protesters, killing four and wounding nine. Eleven days later, at Jackson State in Mississippi, city and state police opened fire, killing two and wounding 12. Along with the anti-war protests, people of color were organizing, militantly, demanding changes to the systemic racism that kept so many locked in a cycle of poverty, their neighborhoods neglected, their aspirations stifled, their access to higher education denied. No group was organizing as swiftly, at least in Southern California, than Chicanos, the younger generation of Mexican Americans who rejected their elders’ at-
band, he dressed in a threepiece and she the wedding gown they were married in that morning; a sliver of recollection from one of the march’s chief organizers, of a professor from this school. And maybe others represented that fateful day. But though the extent of this university’s involvement in the march is shrouded in the fog of memory, this much seems certain: the echoes of that march and the movement behind it reverberate on this campus 50 years later. CSUDH’s journey to becoming a majority Latinx campus, about 65 percent, and the second highest percentage of first-genera-
COURTESY OF CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
The high school walkouts of 1968 and the Chicano Moratorium March of 1970 were set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement.
Street. Of the 83 members of its 1970 senior class, fewer than 20 were people of color, including two with Hispanic surnames. As one student wrote in the 1970 yearbook, “It was not uncommon to see to see cows grazing within a few hundred yards of the (buildings)…A little school stuck in the sticks, attended by less than 1,000 students and generally unheard of by many more.” But college campuses across America were anything but silent. Just three months before, in reaction to the news that President Richard Nixon had secretly expanded the Vietnam War by bombing Cambodia, students at 883 universities around the country staged a national strike, this campus one of them. Some held protests, such as Kent State in Ohio on May 4, where National Guard troops fired into groups of student
tempts at assimilation into an Anglo culture that had so long ignored, repressed or scapegoated them. They embraced a language they were often forbidden to speak in school, championed the slogan “Viva La Raza! Chicano Powerl!” and questioned their inferior position in a country whose borders they had never crossed, but whose borders had crossed them And the restless, seething epicenter of El Movimiento lay that 15 miles from this campus, in East Los Angeles, where concerns over the war and education would dovetail in the Chicano Moratorium March planned for Saturday, August 29. How involved people who attended or worked at this campus is difficult to know, but there are traces. A glimpse of an iconic photo of one of our students marching alongside her hus-
tion college students in the country has been shaped by the triumph and tragedy of that march. For even if, as some have speculated, the Chicano Moratorium March marked the beginning of the end of the dream of a Chicano movement as a potent, unifying political force, it was a monumental step in the long, uneasy and far from unresolved march toward a society of true equality and justice. And this is its story If you were young and Mexican. American in the U.S. around 1970, particularly if you lived in LA County, there was plenty to be pissed about. What few jobs there were paid low and were menial. You, or people who looked like you were constantly terrorized by law enforcement. You were a second-class citizen in a land your family may have lived in far longer than those who held you in contempt. and
COURTESY OF CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
The East LA Walkouts in May 1968, in which hundreds of students walked out of their classes to protest unequal conditions in the Los Angeles Unified School District, are considered the first mass protest of Mexican American in the U.S.
maybe Your high schools were sick jokes, with high drop-out rates as high as 55 percent, a counselor to student ratio of 4,000 to 1, and class sizes averaging about 50. And you were Grade A meat for the military war grinder. Don’t get a high school diploma, you can’t get a college deferment. Forget about a possible ticket to a career and better life through a college degree; you were looking at a ticket across the Pacific Ocean to fight a war against a people who had done far less to you than your own countrymen. And to top it all off, in 1966 the military lowered the test scores on its basic entrance exam, meaning that the lack of education that kept you out of college, actually helped you get in the military. The systemic failure of the Los Angeles Unified School District compelled legendary high school teacher Sal Castro to help organize the May, 1968 Blowouts, in which thousands of predominately Mexican American students, without the aid of Tik Tok, Twitter or YouTube, walked out of classes in 13, mostly
Eastside high schools. That infuriated law enforcement even more. Student leaders were arrested. Activist groups were infiltrated and spied upon. Police harassment, beat downs and even deaths increased. But El Moviemento had arrived in the barrio. And a Los Angeles Times columnist and KMEX-TV reporter named Ruben Salazar began writing about it. Rosario Munoz, a product of the barrio, was also the first Mexican American student body in UCLA history. After graduating he became an activist, using his notoriety to build an anti-draft coalition across the state. He was also one of the principal organizers for what would become the largest political gathering of Mexican Americans in the country history. The three-mile, Aug. 29 procession down Whittier Boulevard began gloriously. The mood was celebratory and inclusive, with Black, brown, white and Asian faces, young people, families withal children, older people joining in a peaceful march intended to show the unity and strength of a movement [See March, page 4]
COURTESY OF CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
After the march ended, participants gathered in Laguna Park to await scheduled speakers, including Cesar Chavez. Law enforcement also came.
CSUDH BULLETIN
Special E-Edition
FRIDAY , August 28, 2020
3
Soldaderas :
The Unspoken Heroines of The Mexican Revolution
PHOTO BY NOVA BLANCO-RICO
Translation of the song “La Adelita” by Antonio Gil del Rio Armenta.
BY DESTINY TORRES
Staff Reporter
The Chicano movement of the 1960s was led by passionate men and women striving for change for their people. The women, however, faced endless accounts of machismo, or strong masculine pride, which kept them from flourishing in the movement. As the first wave of the Chicana feminist movement
began to gain momentum, the women looked to the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution for strength and pride. The year is 1910, and the Mexican Revolution is in full force. Men are drafted into the war, and while women are expected to stay behind at home, many decide to follow the men and fight alongside them while also taking the role of caretakers and nurses.
The soldaderas (female soldiers), also known as adelitas due to a ballad popular during the time, cooked, cleaned, carried equipment, and set up campsites for the male soldiers. Adelitas were unrecognized major contributors to the fight to revolutionize Mexico. Thousands of women of all ages, sizes, and social classes joined the fight from all sides of the war. There were many sides to this decade-long war. Some fought for the federal side, the rebellious side, and the side that wanted to overthrow the government in power at the time. Soldaderas could be found fighting for whichever side they believed in. Despite being strong soldiers, adelitas were romanticized greatly due to misogyny and the popular song “La Adelita” by Antonio Gil del Rio Armenta. The ballad is based on a specific soldadera who Armenta was in love with. Since her identity was unknown at the time, soldaderas were renamed
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Soldaderas carrying the heavy equipment for their fellow soldiers during the Mexican Revolution
adelitas symbolizing their beauty, softness and love for the male soldiers rather than their passion. CSUDH Chicano studies professor Alexandro Hérnandez said the inspiration for the song was a young soldadera named Adelita Velarde Pérez who served as a nurse for the Mexican Red Cross for about a year and a
Parallels: 1970 and 2020
COURTESY OF CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS More than 150 people were arrested and three were killed at the Chicano Moratorium March. in August, 1970.
BY IRACEMA NAVARRO
Politics Editor
Streets filled with protesters. Minorities demanding change. A divisive president. Police departments under the microscope. If you think they’re stories that could be trending on social media platforms any day of the past three months, you’d be right. But they could just as easily be drawn from headlines in August 1970.
Whether coincidence or a conspiracy, they serve as reminders that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. See for yourself: PROTESTS: In 2020, outrage over George Floyd’s death turned into the largest protest movement in U.S. history. In 1970, protests over the Vietnam War led to university students across the country staging a national strike, and to the largest political gathering
of Mexican Americans in the country’s history, at the August 29 Chicano Moratorium March Essential Workers. The National Chicano Moratorium March was spurred in great degree to the disproportionate numbers of Mexican-Americans being drafted, and dying, in Vietnam compared to their numbers in the country’s population. Today, 2020, Latinx people in California make up 59% of
positive COVID-19 cases and 47% of deaths. A major factor in those rates is Latinx people working in areas deemed essential in agriculture, construction, and food services. Tear Gas, In the summer of 2020, tear gas was fired by law enforcement at more than 100 protests, and became a point of contention during President Trump’s Bible photo opportunity. It was also used in 1970 pro-
half. She was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and became a soldadera as a young teen. “This soldier at the time falls in love and creates a romantic view of her by saying she joined because she was so in love with him and had to follow him around everywhere, but the story is much bigger than that,” Hérnandez said.
[See Heroines, page 5]
tests, including the Chicano Moratorium March when journalist Ruben Salazar was struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired by an LA County sheriff’s deputy. Divisive Presidents The “silent majority” term used currently by President Trump and his championing of law and order both echo what an equally divisive president attempted 50 years ago. Both were appeals to a supposed mass of law-abiding white voters whose views did not side with the black and brown voices that, in the presidential rhetoric, were the real threat to America. In 1972, Nixon’s dog-whistle seemed to register, as he rolled to a landslide victory over George McGovern in the presidential election. We will all see what results from Trump’s call out in November. THE POST OFFICE? In 2020, the Trump administration targeting of the U.S.. Postal Office is seen by many as a way to suppress voting in the upcoming election, and to cast doubt on the process in case he loses. In 1970, the Great Postal Strike saw up to 200,000 postal workers refuse to work over a pay raise they deemed too low. President Nixon tried to break the strike by sending 23,000 members of the U.S. military to do the job in New York City, but it backfired.
4
FRIDAY , August 28, 2020
Special E-Edition
CSUDH BULLETIN
T h ou g h E x t i n g u i s h e d Fa r t o S o on , S a l a z a r St i l l L i g ht s t h e Pat h f or Jou r n a l i s t s
COURTESY OF CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTION This photo of an LA County Sheriff at the entrance of the bar where LA Times Journalist Ruben Salazar was killed, ran on the cover of “La Raza.”
BY BRENDA FERNANDA VERANO
News Editor When I first told my father I was going to be a journalist, he didn’t take it well. Not just because he had hoped for me to pursue the law degree he had to leave behind when I was born in order to raise a family. But because he didn’t want his only daughter to be killed. My father grew up in Mexico, the second most dangerous country in the world for journalists. After we immigrated to the U.S. ,that perspective was one thing he brought with him to America. And no matter how I tried to tell him that the situation is not as severe here, he was unconvinced. But I must admit that as I begin constructing my own
voice within my writing, I hear a little whisper occasionally asking if my dad’s fears have any legitimacy. Am I digging my own grave as I write about immigration, capitalism, radical education, the working class, nationalist supremacy and other urgent issues affecting people like me, those who I’m determined to report and write about? These are dangerous times to be a journalist, from being surveilled, attacked by those who are supposed to protect, and criminalized for exposing the truth. I found myself with shivers up my spine as I scrolled down my Twitter feed during the protests over the murder of George Floyd and saw the pictures of journalists being terrorized and assaulted by police all across the country.
March
From Page 2
that many outside it still misunderstood. Munoz was the first speaker at the rally after the approximately 90-minute march ended at Laguna Park. As he finished his remarks, the scene turned from one what participant said “mariachi to mayhem” in a heartbeat. Accounts differ, but basically a cadre of LA Sheriff deputies stormed the park, claiming that it needing to be cleared to dispel troublemakers who had caused a scene at a liquor store on the route.
Most of the participants fled, but some stayed and fought with the officers. Things escalated, protesters accused the cops of starting everything, the cops blamed the protesters and after nearly five hours of combat, smashed store windows up and down Whittier Boulevard, and more than 150 arrests three people were dead, including someone who was there to chronicle, Ruben Salazar There would be two more marches after the August, 1970 one, both ending in violence. But plagued by
It is impossible to not be concerned when I see my future self in these reporters. But then I think of Ruben Salazar, a person who would seem to confirm my father’s worst fears. But to me, Salazar is an inspiration. Salazar, a long time LA Times reporter and columnist, as well as news director of KMEX, was killed Aug. 29, 1970 while covering the Chicano Moratorium March. Officially, he was shot in the head with a tear gas canister by an LA County Sheriff’s deputy, who had fired into the bar that Salazar was sitting in. But to this day, there are some who think that Salazar may have been targeted, a victim of political assassination. According to a special report from the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review, “Salazar had told officials of the U.S Commission on Civil Rights in the weeks before his death that he was being tailed because his coverage of police brutality had angered law enforcement
BY IRACEMA NAVARRO Journalist Ruben Salazar was honored when the former Laguna Park in East Los Angeles was renamed after him.
officials.” Salazar was the first person from a major media outlet to extensively cover the emerging Chicano movement. He focused on the full range of problems facing marginalized and racial groups, like police brutality, segregation and educational inequity. Félix Gutiérrez, an emeritus professor in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC and director of the “Ruben Salazar Project” remembers reading Salazar columns every Friday while he was a freshman at California State University, Los Angeles “At that time [media outlets] didn’t present any efforts to recruit people of color,” Gutiérrez said. “ [journalism] was largely a white men’s business, journalists prided themselves in being
subjective and leaving [their identity] outside the newsroom.” Salazar challenged this narrative as his journalism became more personal, and community centered, such as his columns about the unjust treatment of Mexican Americans by the court system and law enforcement. According to Gutierrez, “Salazar viewed his background, language, culture and his nationality as assets to tell better stories of our people. He showed how one could build an understanding across borders.” Salazar’s reporting conveyed the struggle and triumph of Chicanos to the outside world. That was until his career-and his life--was cut short while he was doing his job. Daniel Hernandez, a Los Angeles Times reporter who [See Salazar, page 5]
BY IRACEMA NAVARRO “The Wall That Speaks, Sings, and Shouts” mural located outside the Ruben F. Salazar Park recreation center.
in-fighting, a backlash from Mexican American community leaders, police informants and the lingering devastation over Salazar’s death and how quickly a peaceful march ended in chaos, by 1971 any sense of coordinated organizing in the East LA movement had vanished. The two main concerns of the Aug. 29 march, the Vietnam War and educational inequities, took different trajectories. The war raged for two years, until shortly before the November, 1972 election, the U.S. and North Vietnam reached a peace settlement. It took longer to improve education for Mexican Americans, at least in hard num-
bers. The nationwide status dropout rate for all Hispanics fluctuated, but 20 years later was nearly the same, around 34 percent as 1970, Not until 2000 did it begin steadily declining, and even at 9.5 percent in 2017, it was still double that of whites. But if one considers education as process as much as results, there is one enormous impact wielded by the movement and march. “Ethnic studies,” Dr. Vivian Price, a professor in interdisciplinary studies, said. “We just signed AB 1460 [which will now require all CSU students to take a class focusing on either Black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American studies.
Price said AB 1460 is a culmination, or direct line, of the demands of groups like Chicanos in the late 1960s to not be relegated to the margins, to stand up and say, “yes, we matter.” Higher high school graduation rates translate into more college students, and CSUDH has seen tremendous growth since more Hispanics have successfully navigated high school. In 2000, Hispanics comprised 27 percent of the campus population, 2 percent higher than Black students. It inched up that decade, but in 2010 there was an explosion, with 40 percent of the population Hispanic, and
[See March, page 5]
CSUDH BULLETIN
Heroines From Page 3
Adelita is buried at San Felipe Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas, coincidentally the same town CSUDH’s Hérnandez grew up in. She remains such a powerful symbol of the revolution that her original headstone has been replaced by a monument of her in war attire. Flash forward to the Chicano movement of the 1960s; a crusade of ethnic empowerment and protests, like the East Los Angeles Walkouts, and the image of soldaderas and Adelita is just as important. Hérnandez said one of the biggest failures of the movement was that men didn’t recognize equity between men and women.
Special E-Edition
Despite wanting more equality for the Chicano/a community, the male leaders of the movement enforced their own misogynistic ideals and traditionalist values on the Chicana women involved by expecting them to be caretakers of the men, according to Hérnandez. By doing this, the men were gatekeeping women from promotions and leadership roles within organizations. In the late 1960s, a Chicano organization emerged called The Brown Berets. The organization focused on farmer workers’ rights, police brutality and anti-war presentations. The group began to lose strength when women involved grew tired of being left out of larger jobs.
by 2017, it had topped 60 percent. Additionally, the way the Latinx population responded to the punitive threats of Proposition 187 in 1994 and, more recently, DACA, shows that it has “developed more,” Munoz said. “People [are] more motivated[and have] a greater appreciation of what we could achieve with unity and focus.” But it’s hard to dispute that the idealism so many in
the movement shared ended that hot summer day in 1970 “Organizing the massive demonstration of Mexican Americans’ opposition to the Vietnam War was a huge achievement for the Chicano movement,” Mario T. Garcia, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, told the Los Angeles Times Aug. 23. “But it turned into a riot, which had the ironic effect of tagging the movement as violent even though deputies had caused most of the trouble.” “The Chicano movement,”
Salazar
From Page 4
has previously written about Salazar said seeing how law enforcement in L.A. treated journalists in the last few months feels like “historical deja vu.” “The repressing actions towards [journalists] during the Chicano Moratorium and the George Floyd protest should serve as a reminder to law enforcement, political leaders and to anyone... that one of the first signs of a society in decline is a society that does not uphold the standards of a free and independent press,” Hernandez said. Hernandez reminds journalists that undeniable strides have been made in effort to increase the representation of people of color within the media industry, but there’s still a long way to go. He asked me a very important question that made me think about my future and the future of Latinos, “The LA Times has never had a Latino editor in chief or managing editor but we’ve had a Latino mayor, we’ve had Latino sheriffs, so do
you see yourself as the first [Latina] editor in chief?” I understand these are dangerous times for journal-
Hilda Reyes Jensen, a 16-year-old Brown Beret, who helped in the organization of the Chicano Moratorium March
COURTESY OF ROSALIO MUNOZ Rosalio Munoz speaking at the Aug. 29 march.
he added, “never fully recovered.” But, Munoz said, it never fully died either. “I’m still a Chicano,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of friends that are still here in politics, in law, with children, with activities to help the community and still working to build a community. It didn’t disappear, the idealism is not gone. It was transferred to help your kids, help your grandkids and others in your family or people that are going to your school.” What also remains, Munoz said, is an example of a people long marginalized and scapegoated, who finally
decided to claim their own identity defined by their own terms. And that progress takes work. “They wanted us to go away, they acted as if we went away or we stopped fighting. Who’s gonna really stop fighting when they treat you wrong continuously? You can’t put up with it. If you have any kind of self pride, you have to stand up, you have to help other people that have been knocked down and pick them up….but the other thing is we also know from a lot of experience, never give up. If we fight, eventually we win. If we don’t fight, ain’t no progress.”
understand my father’s concern for me. But while concerned, I choose to not see in Salazar’s death as a cautionary tale about being a journalist. I find myself finding inspiration from his
the kind of journalist he was, one committed to accurately reporting and telling the stories of those whose stories are so often untold or under-represented . I also find inspiration in
guest speaker for The Bulletin twice in the past three years, and who last week was named the new California columnist for the Los Angeles Times. This is in a time when Latinx Journalists at the paper are demanding more people of color representation in the newsroom, giving people like me and so many others a possible path to becoming professional journalists. But to me, journalism isn’t about the job, it’s about the work, just as it was to Ruben Salazar. And to be that kind of journalist, I know I must accept any possible costs to do that work. To uphold his values and those of other journalists who hold power accountable, I must withstand the attacks on a free press from the highest office, endure tear gas and police batons, and overcome any obstacles in my path to share my voice and, more important, to share those voices that have been silenced for far too long . My loyalty as a journalist is first and foremost to the people. They deserve truth and representation, even if it means I put myself in harm’s way.
Photo by George Rodriguez
COURTESY OF CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Univision hosts a virtual screening and Q&A of the Ruben Salazar documentary beginning at 5 p.m. Click here for more information.
ists, even in a country with what seems a built-in shield: the First Amendment.. I
5
“The image of the soldadera was absolutely and continues to be a major source of inspiration for women, especially Chicana women,” He said. “But there’s a difference there when you use the term soldadera, and men were seeing them as ‘las adelitas,’ so there’s a gender divide in the understanding of the roles.” Soldaderas were reimagined through Chicana activists like Dolores Huerta, Gloria Saldura, and more female activists, who along with fighting for the rights of the Chicanx community, they also were fighting for their right to be treated equally by their male counterparts. Today women in the United States and Mexico look to the soldaderas as a symbol of motivation and hope. Her image is a powerful representation of feminine strength and perseverance.
March From Page 4
FRIDAY , August 28, 2020
career. I believe any potential risks are a challenge worth taking in order to be
people like Gustavo Arellano, a former editor of OC Weekly, who has been a
6
FRIDAY , August 28, 2020
Special E-Edition
CSUDH BULLETIN
CSUDH in 1970
SAL CASTRO, LA PUBLIC LIBRARY PHOTO COLLECTION Miguel and Silvia de la Pena were married the morning of Aug 29, 1970 and then marched in the Chicano Moratorium March. Miguel attended USC at the time, and Silvia was a student at what is today California State University, Dominguez Hills. In 1995, they were profiled in a story by George Ramos of the Los Angeles Times.
In the morning she marched down the aisle. In the afternoon, she marched in the street. In 1995, on their 25th anniversary of their wedding and the Chicano Moratorium March they participated in afterwards, Silvia de la Pena, who attended CSUDH at the time, and Miguel de la Pena were featured in a Los Angeles Times story. The de la Pena’s lived in San Pedro in 1995, had a high school son, and she served on the LAUSD’s Mexican American Education commission. We tried social media and the school district,but had no luck tracking down the de la Penas. But if you know the family, or are part of the family, email us at editorial@csudhbulletin. com. We’d like to know what Silvia remembers best about the earliest days of Toro Nation. The poem by Victoria Ortiz to the right is from the 1970 Dominguez yearbook. We don’t know if Ms. Ortiz participated .n the march, but considering the poster was hanging during a time when Chicanos were definitely announcing their collective identity to the world, we thought the last two lines particularly fitting. Como una raza as a raza en busca de identidad in search of identity And if you read the Chicano Moratorium March story on page 2, you’ll get the cow reference below. If you didn’t: these are a bunch of cows.
CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS CSUDH GERTH ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
