Frankly, I’d much prefer to do the Vietnam thing—mainly because it looks like a fantastically good story that I could look right into. That’s one I’d really like to do—and I don’t get many of those. But I see the natural advantage in getting it from Herr, if you can ... so let me know, & meanwhile I’ll check with Oscar & see what’s happening in LA.
Meanwhile, I’m still in the foul grip of the IRS & heading for a $3500 showdown on Feb 7—or actually only $1000 on that date, with the rest still hanging while I hassle with Scanlan’s distributor. This is like having the hounds of hell on your neck while you’re trying to think. My American Express card was just seized for expenses incurred on Scanlan’s stories . . . but fuck all that for now. Let me know on the Vietnam/LA-Chicano thing, and also about the Aspen fotos & the idea of running a bit more than just my letter. OK for now.
HST
Letter from HST to JSW
Jan 30 ’71
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, Colorado
Dear Jann . . .
This comes in the midst of a certain amount of work/priority/message chaos—some of which resulted from those fucking telegrams of yours that got here three days late. Jesus, you should know by now—don’t ever fuck with Western Union.
Anyway, the nut of what’s left hanging here is some ideas of consolidating what we have on Aspen, along with some hazy ideas on LA/Chicanos vs. Vietnam (with lengthy notes and samples) ... along with a very definitely double-edged idea about the notion of doing a regular sort of column for RS—which is always a good idea, in abstract, but I remember I agreed to it once for Ramparts, & the idea of filling one page a month was never quite hashed out between [Ramparts editor Peter] Collier & myself—much less with that wiggy bastard Hinckle. But it was a good idea; I never denied that—although it was hard to lock into for $150 or $200 a month. Because what happens to anybody who gets into any kind of forced/regular writing is that he’s bound to make a useless fool of himself now & then ... and it’s hard to set a price on that kind of reality.
But to hell with that for now; at best it’s just a vague notion—maybe born of my continuing frustration at always having to dump about nine-tenths of everything worth writing about, the inevitable freelancer’s compulsion to always fire your best shot ... which kills a lot of fast raps & left jabs enroute to all those classic Kayos . . .
Right ... but let’s not forget that the KO’s are where the main survival/nerve$ live, and we all have to scrape those evil fuckers once in a while, if only to pay the rent. Or maybe the real word is “dues.” Which I suspect you might have a hard time understanding. No fault of your own—or anyone else’s, for that matter . . . just some accident of history. But what the hell . . . ?
Strange Rumblings in Aztlan:
The Murder of Ruben Salazar
April 29, 1971
The . . . Murder . . . and Resurrection of Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department . . . Savage Polarization & the Making of a Martyr ...Bad News for the Mexican-American . . . Worse News for the Pig . . . And Now the New Chicano . . . Riding a Grim New Wave . . . The Rise of the Batos Locos . . . Brown Power and a Fistful of Reds . . . Rude Politics in the Barrio . . . Which Side Are You On ...Brother? . . . There Is No More Middleground ...No Place to Hide on Whittier Boulevard ...No Refuge from the Helicopters ...No Hope in the Courts . . . No Peace with the Man . . . No Leverage Anywhere . . . and No Light at the End of This Tunnel ...Nada...
Whittier Boulevard has not been a peaceful street, of late. And in truth it was never peaceful. Whittier is to the vast Chicano barrio in East Los Angeles what the Sunset Strip is to Hollywood. This is where the street action lives: the bars, the hustlers, the drug market, the whores—and also the riots, the trashings, killings, gassings, the sporadic bloody clashes with the hated, common enemy: the cops, the Pigs, the Man, that blue-crusted army of fearsome gabacho troops from the East L.A. Sheriff’s Department.
The Hotel Ashmun is a good place to stay if you want to get next to whatever’s happening on Whittier Boulevard. The window of no. 267 is about fifteen feet above the sidewalk and just a few blocks west of the Silver Dollar Cafe, a nondescript tavern that is not much different from any of the others nearby. There is a pool table in the rear, a pitcher of beer sells for $1, and the faded Chicano barmaid rolls dice with the patrons to keep the jukebox going. Low number pays, and nobody seems to care who selects the music.
We had been in there earlier, when not much was happening. It was my first visit in six months, since early September when the place was still rancid with the stench of CS gas and fresh varnish. But now, six months later, the Silver Dollar had aired out nicely. No blood on the floor, no ominous holes in the ceiling. The only reminder of my other visit was a thing hanging over the cash register that we all noticed immediately. It was black gas mask, staring blindly out at the room—and behind the gas mask was a stark handprinted sign that said: “In memory of August 29, 1970.”
Nothing else, no explanation. But no explanation was necessary—at least not to anybody likely to be found drinking in the Silver Dollar. The customers are locals: Chicanos and barrio people—and every one of them is acutely aware of what happened in the Silver Dollar on August 29, 1970.
That was the day that Ruben, the prominent Mexican-American columnist for the Los Angeles Times and news director for bilingual KMEXTV, walked into the place and sat down on a stool near the doorway to order a beer he would never drink. Because just about the time the barmaid was sliding his beer across the bar, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy named Tom Wilson fired a tear gas bomb through the front door and blew half of Ruben Salazar’s head off. All the other customers escaped out the back exit to the alley, but Salazar never emerged. He died on the floor in a cloud of CS gas—and when his body was finally carried out, hours later, his name was already launched into martyrdom. Within twenty-four hours, the very mention of the name Ruben Salazar was enough to provoke tears and a fist-shaking tirade not only along Whittier Boulevard but all over East L.A.
Middle-aged housewives who had never thought of themselves as anything but lame-status “Mexican-Americans” just trying to get by in a mean Gringo world they never made suddenly found themselves shouting “Viva La Raza” in public. And their husbands—quiet Safeway clerks and lawn-care salesmen, the lowest and most expendable cadres in the Great Gabacho economic machine—were volunteering to testify; yes, to stand up in court, or wherever, and calling themselves Chicanos. The term “Mexican-American” fell massively out of favor with all but the old and conservative—and the rich. It suddenly came to mean “Uncle Tom.” Or, in the argot of East L.A.—“Tio Taco.” The difference between a Mexican-American and a Chicano was the difference between a Negro and a Black.
All this has happened very suddenly. Suddenly for most people. One of the basic laws of politics is that Action Moves Away from the Center. The middle of the road is only popular when nothing is happening. And nothing serious has been happening politically in L.A. for longer than most people can remember. Until six months ago the whole place was a colorful tomb, a vast slum of noise and cheap labor, a rifle away from the heart of downtown Los Angeles. The barrio, like Watts, is actually a part of the city core—while places like Hollywood and Santa Monica are separate entities. The Silver Dollar Cafe is a ten-minute drive from city hall. The Sunset Strip is a thirty-minute sprint on the Hollywood Freeway.
Whittier Boulevard is a hell of a long way from Hollywood, by any measure. There is no psychic connection at all. After a week in the bowels of East L.A., I felt vaguely guilty about walking into the bar in the Beverly Hills Hotel and ordering a drink—as if I didn’t quite belong there and the waiters all knew it. I had been there before, under different circumstances, and felt totally comfortable. Or almost. There is no way to ... well, to hell with that. The point is that this time I felt different. I was oriented to a completely different world—fifteen miles away.
My first night in the Hotel Ashmun was
not restful. The others had left around five, then there was the junkie eruption at seven ... followed an hour later by a thundering, low-fidelity outburst of wailing Norteño music from the jukebox in the Boulevard Cafe across the street ... and then, about nine thirty, I was jerked up again by a series of loud whistles from the sidewalk right under my window, and a voice calling, “Hunter! Wake up, man! Let’s get moving.”
Holy Jesus! I thought. Only three people in the world know where I am right now, and they’re all asleep. Who else could have tracked me to this place? I bent the metal slats of the venetian blind apart just enough to look down at the street and see Rudy Sanchez, Oscar’s quiet little bodyguard, looking up at my window and waving urgently: “Come on out, man, it’s time. Oscar and Benny are up the street at the Sweetheart. That’s the bar on the corner where you see all those people in front. We’ll wait for you there, okay? You awake?”
“Sure I’m awake,” I said. “I’ve been sitting here waiting for you lazy criminal bastards. Why do Mexicans need so much fucking sleep?”
Rudy smiled and turned away. “We’ll be waiting for you, man. We’re gonna be drinkin’ a hell of a lot of Bloody Marys, and you know the rule we have down here.”
“Never mind that,” I muttered. “I need a shower.”
But my room had no shower. And somebody, that night, had managed to string a naked copper wire across the bathtub and plug it into a socket underneath the basin outside the bathroom door. For what reason? Demon Rum, I had no idea. Here I was in the best room in the house, looking for the shower and finding only an electrified bathtub. And no place to righteously shave—in the best hotel on the strip. Finally I scrubbed my face with a hot towel and went across the street to the Sweetheart Lounge.
Oscar Acosta, the Chicano lawyer, was there; leaning on the bar, talking idly with some of the patrons. Of the four people around him—all in their late twenties—two were ex-cons, two were part-time dynamite freaks and known fire-bombers, and three of the four were veteran acid-eaters. Yet none of this surfaced in the conversation. The talk was political, but only in terms of the courtroom. Oscar was dealing with two hyperpolitical trials at the same time.
In one, the trial of the “Biltmore Six,” he was defending six young Chicanos who’d been arrested for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel one night about a year ago, while Governor Ronald Reagan was delivering a speech there in the ballroom. Their guilt or innocence was immaterial at this point, because the trial had developed into a spectacular attempt to overturn the entire Grand Jury selection system. In the preceding months, Acosta had subpoenaed every superior court judge in Los Angeles County and cross-examined all 109 of them at length, under oath, on the subject of their “racism.” It was a wretched affront to the whole court system, and Acosta was working overtime to make it as wretched as possible. Here were these 109 old men, these judges, compelled to take time out from whatever they were doing and go into another courtroom to take the stand and deny charges of “racism” from an attorney they all loathed.
Oscar’s contention, throughout, was that all Grand Juries are racist, since all grand jurors have to be recommended by superior court judges—who naturally tend to recommend people they know personally or professionally. And that therefore no rat-bastard Chicano street crazy, for instance, could possibly be indicted by “a jury of his peers.” The implications of a victory in this case were so obvious, so clearly menacing to the court system, that interest in the verdict had filtered all the way down to places like the Boulevard, the Silver Dollar, and the Sweetheart. The level of political consciousness is not normally high in these places—especially on Saturday mornings—but Acosta’s very presence, no matter where he goes or what he seems to be doing, is so grossly political that anybody who wants to talk to him has to figure out some way to deal on a meaningful political level.
Acosta has been practicing law in the barrio for three years. I met him a bit earlier than that, in another era—which hardly matters here, except that it might be a trifle less than fair to run this story all the way out to the end without saying at least once, for the record, that Oscar is an old friend and occasional antagonist. I first met him, as I recall, in a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen, when he lumbered up to me and started raving about “ripping the system apart like a pile of cheap hay,” or something like that ... and I remember thinking, “Well, here’s another one of those fucked-up, guilt-crazed dropout lawyers from San Francisco—some dingbat who ate one too many tacos and decided he was really Emiliano Zapata.”
Which was okay, I felt, but it was a hard act to handle in Aspen in that high white summer of 1967. That was the era of Sgt. Pepper’s, Surrealistic Pillow, and the original Buffalo Springfield. It was a good year for everybody—or for most people, anyway. There were exceptions, as always. Lyndon Johnson was one, and Oscar Acosta was another. For entirely different reasons. That was not a good summer to be either the president of the United States or an angry Mexican lawyer in Aspen.
Oscar didn’t hang around long. He washed dishes for a while, did a bit of construction work, bent the county judge out of shape a few times, then took off for Mexico to “get serious.” The next thing I heard, he was working for the public defender’s office in L.A. That was sometime around Christmas of 1968, which was not a good year for anybody—except Richard Nixon and perhaps Oscar Acosta. Because by that time Oscar was beginning to find his own track. He was America’s only “Chicano lawyer,” he explained in a letter, and he liked it. His clients were all Chicanos and most were “political criminals,” he said. And if they were guilty it was only because they were “doing what had to be done.”
That’s fine, I said. But I couldn’t really get into it. I was all for it, you understand, but only on the basis of a personal friendship. Most of my friends are into strange things I don’t totally understand—and with a few shameful exceptions I wish them all well. Who am I, after all, to tell some friend he shouldn’t change his name to Oliver High, get rid of his family, and join a Satanism cult in Seattle? Or to argue with another friend who wants to buy a single-shot Remington Fireball so he can go out and shoot cops from a safe distance?
Whatever’s right, I say. Never fuck with a friend’s head by accident. And if their private trips get out of control now and then—well, you do what has to be done.
Which more or less explains how I suddenly found myself involved in the murder of Ruben Salazar. I was up in Portland, Oregon, at the time, trying to cover the National American Legion Convention and the Sky River Rock Festival at the same time ... and I came back to my secret room in the Hilton one night to find an “urgent message” to call Mr. Acosta in Los Angeles.
I wondered how he had managed to track me down in Portland. But I knew, somehow, what he was calling about. I had seen the L.A. Times that morning, with the story of Salazar’s death, and even at a distance of two thousand miles it gave off a powerful stench. The problem was not just a gimp or a hole in the story; the whole goddamn thing was wrong. It made no sense at all.
The Salazar case had a very special hook in it: not that he was a Mexican or a Chicano, and not even Acosta’s angry insistence that the cops had killed him in cold blood and that nobody was going to do anything about it. These were all proper ingredients for an outrage, but from my own point of view the most ominous aspect of Oscar’s story was his charge that the police had deliberately gone out on the streets and killed a reporter who’d been giving them trouble. If this was true, it meant the ante was being upped drastically. When the cops declare open season on journalists, when they feel free to declare any scene of “unlawful protest” a free fire zone, that will be a very ugly day—and not just for journalists.
Ruben Salazar was killed in the wake of a Watts-style riot that erupted when hundreds of cops attacked a peaceful rally in Laguna Park, where five thousand or so liberal/student/activist type Chicanos had gathered to protest the drafting of “Aztlan citizens” to fight for the U.S. in Vietnam. The police suddenly appeared
in Laguna Park, with no warning, and “dispersed the crowd” with a blanket of tear gas followed up by a Chicago-style mop-up with billyclubs. The crowd fled in panic and anger, inflaming hundreds of young spectators who ran the few blocks to Whittier Boulevard and began trashing every store in sight. Several buildings were burned to the ground; damage was estimated at somewhere around a million dollars. Three people were killed, sixty injured—but the central incident of that August 29, 1970, rally was the killing of Ruben Salazar.
And six months later, when the National Chicano Moratorium Committee felt it was time for another mass rally, they called it to “carry on the spirit of Ruben Salazar.”
There is irony in this, because Salazar was nobody’s militant. He was a professional journalist with ten years of experience on a variety of assignments for the neo-liberal Los Angeles Times. He was a nationally known reporter, winning prizes for his work in places like Vietnam, Mexico City, and the Dominican Republic. Ruben Salazar was a veteran war correspondent, but he had never shed blood under fire. He was good, and he seemed to like the work. So he must have been slightly bored when the Times called him back from the war zones, for a raise and a well-deserved rest covering “local affairs.”
He focused on the huge barrio just east of city hall. This was a scene he had never really known, despite his Mexican-American heritage. But he locked into it almost instantly. Within months, he had narrowed his work for the Times down to a once-a-week column for the newspaper, and signed on as news director for KMEX-TV—the “Mexican-American station,” which he quickly transformed into an energetic, aggressively political voice for the whole Chicano community. His coverage of police activities made the East Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department so unhappy that they soon found themselves in a sort of running private argument with this man Salazar, this spic who refused to be reasonable. When Salazar got onto a routine story like some worthless kid named Ramirez getting beaten to death in a jail fight, he was likely to come up with almost anything—including a series of hard-hitting news commentaries strongly suggesting that the victim had been beaten to death by the jailers. In the summer of 1970 Ruben Salazar was warned three times, by the cops, to “tone down his coverage.” And each time he told them to fuck off.