This is a guest post by Zoe Herrera, an intern in the Office of Communications.
It’s the last half of the 1960s. The Vietnam War is at its height. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. The battle for civil rights stretches across the country.
Passion, grief and change come with protests, riots and strikes.
That is exactly what journalist, photographer and activist Raúl Ruiz captured when he joined La Raza, a newspaper and magazine in East Los Angeles started by Chicano activists and creatives in the last half of the ’60s.
Ruiz and the magazine focused on covering the struggles of Chicanos (Mexican Americans), his photographs capturing the community’s mobilization that flourished despite hardships.
The Library will preserve that legacy, announcing today that it has acquired the Raúl Ruiz Chicano Movement Collection, some 17,500 photos by Ruiz and original page layouts for La Raza. It also has nearly 10,000 pages of manuscripts, which include original correspondence, the unpublished draft of Ruiz’s book on Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar and handwritten minutes from the staff meetings of La Raza.
“The Ruiz collection speaks to the heart of the Chicano movement and will be an important resource for the study of journalism and Latino history and culture at the Library of Congress,” said Adam Silvia, curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division.
As an undergraduate at California State University, Los Angeles, Ruiz became active in student and community organizing during the height of the civil rights era. Once he began reporting for La Raza, it was apparent to him what role the publication played for the community.
“A lot of us wanted to bring out the truth of who we were,” Ruiz recalled years later on “Artbound,” a documentary series by Public Broadcasting SoCal. “We wanted to come out with our own news, with our own version, with our own story.”
As the Chicano community in East L.A. began to mobilize, so did La Raza’s staff. They covered school walkouts, marches and the police crackdowns that often came along with those protests.
During a school walkout, Ruiz tried to intervene when a student was being violently arrested by police.
“I was taking pictures,” Ruiz said on the “Artbound” series. “Taking pictures of the kids, taking pictures of the cops, of things that were going on and acting responsibly as a journalist.”
His attempt to deescalate the situation led to him being thrown in the back of a squad car and beaten by police in an alley. He came back and kept reporting, though, as police arrested 13 more protesters. Among them was Sal Castro, a high school teacher accused of disturbing the peace.
Ruiz, La Raza and the greater East L.A. Chicano community followed Castro’s detainment and eventual release. When the local board of education refused to allow Castro to teach again, Chicano activists held sit-ins at the school board. Some three dozen activists, including Ruiz, stayed after being told they’d be arrested if they didn’t leave.
“Determined to make our point clear, and our commitment clear, we were willing to risk arrest,” Ruiz said in the documentary.
The school board eventually allowed Castro back into the classroom, but other events ended in tragedy.
In August of 1970, more than 20,000 people marched as part of the National Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles to protest the disproportionate number of Mexican American soldiers dying in Vietnam. Ruben Salazar, the most famous Mexican-American reporter of his generation — he was the news director at a local television station and a well-known columnist at the Los Angeles Times — was also covering the event.
Police had moved in, the protest was becoming chaotic and Ruiz was taking pictures of police firing tear gas canisters into the open doorway of the Silver Dollar bar. One canister hit Salazar in the head, killing him. It became a major event in the Chicano movement, particularly as police were never charged with any wrongdoing.
“I kept thinking, ‘Oh my god, we were there,’ ” Ruiz said in the documentary.
Ruiz’s photographs ran on the on the front page of the L.A. Times and have since become well known. His images from the Moratorium, some of which have become part of the permanent collections at institutions such as UCLA and now at the Library, served as visual testimony of the violence inflicted on peaceful protestors.
After La Raza’s dissolution in 1977, Ruiz became a college professor, teaching Chicano studies and journalism at CSU, Northridge until his retirement in 2015.
Ruiz died in 2019. He was 79. He left a legacy as a witness, a storyteller and an early voice of the Chicano movement. He captured a critical era in American history from the perspective of those who lived it. His work is a testament to the idea that journalism, at its best, can be a revolutionary act.
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