Los Angeles and the Chicano Movement in the Raul Ruiz Papers – The Metropole

Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles as our theme this month. This is our third post; you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city here. In addition, check here for information on the conference, including accommodations.

By Ryan Reft

When journalist, photographer, activist, and educator Raul Ruiz ascended the podium at the 2018 history symposium held by the Boyle Heights organization Self-Help Graphics and Art, many in the audience “had no idea who Raul was,” symposium organizer Carlos Montes told the Los Angeles Times. Once Ruiz began speaking, however, the crowd became transfixed. In particular, his discussion of the August 29, 1970 National Chicano Moratorium anti-war protest, where he and 20,000-30,000 Chicano activists marched in the largest antiwar demonstration by any ethnic or racial group in the nation’s history, drew their attention. Everyone was just fixated….he was just real,” Montes told the Los Angeles Times.[1]

Recently added to the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division’s holdings, the Raul Ruiz Papers represent one of division’s most significant forays into documenting the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. His legacy extends past the Chicano Moratorium and includes numerous other demonstrations, as well as his role as co-editor at La Raza magazine, the premier Chicano publication of its time from 1969 until its closure in 1977.

The collection documents Ruiz’s long career as a Los Angeles-based journalist, photographer, editor, political activist, and university professor. The papers include Ruiz’s unpublished manuscript evaluating Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar, his legacy, the circumstances surrounding his death, and the official inquest that followed. Ruiz believed the inquest to be a farce, which helps to explain his dedication to the manuscript.[2] As referenced earlier, Ruiz played a key role in the August Moratorium, notably when he snapped a photograph of police firing tear gas into the Silver Dollar Café, which resulted in Salazar’s death. The photo became an iconic image of the movement and is part of his collection.

The Ruiz donation includes an estimated 17,200 photographs along with negatives, contact sheets, prints, and original page layouts for select issues of La Raza, which are housed in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. The Library’s Newspaper Division added La Raza as well as select issues of over a dozen other Chicano serials from the Western United States.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Los Angeles served as ground zero for the Chicano Movement, a social movement led by mostly younger Mexican Americans to promote the civil rights of the region’s Latino/a population or, as historian Lorena Oropeza defines it, “a dynamic endeavor to address social injustices [such] as poor educational equality, lack of political representation, poverty and discrimination.”[3]

The city’s schools, in particular their deficiencies in serving the Chicano population, sparked the larger movement. Beginning in the late 1960s, Ruiz co-founded the local East Los Angeles newspaper Inside the Eastside and subsequently the Chicano Student Movement, both attempts to cover local Chicano youth culture and activism while rejecting the negative portrayals of Latino/a Americans that dominated contemporary press accounts. According to a 2010 UCLA oral history that is also part of the collection, Ruiz and others worked to organize the Eastside school walkouts (sometimes referred to as the Chicano Blowouts) in 1968, in which thousands of students walked out of classes to protest education policies that marginalized Latino/a students.

Ruiz in the Chicano Movement Constellation

If the 2018 audience had little clue who Ruiz was when he stepped to the podium, perhaps that is due to the attention that more militant voices have drawn from historians over the past few decades. For example, the Brown Berets, while undoubtedly significant, often dominate narratives from this period, and one might argue have in moments obscured the efforts of others. “Inspired by both the [Black] Panthers and the iconography of the Mexican Revolution, [they] cut a striking, audacious figure in the community” but lacked the Panthers’ “clear political identity,” writes historian Mike Davis.[4] 

Yet, the Berets, for all their militancy and paramilitary dress, were one star in the Chicano movement’s universe. Though F.B.I. Freedom of Information Requests (FOIAs) regarding Ruiz sometimes identified him as a member of the Berets, he was not but he did often work with the group while adopting a somewhat dim view of the organization: “To me extremism never impressed me [because] I never thought that a lot of these students-–they had rhetoric. I don’t care how jaunty you look in your beret or your field jacket. I don’t care.”[5] Brown Beret leader, Gloria Arellanes noted the same. “Quite frankly, I don’t think that we were the favorite people of other activists such as Eliezer Risco and Raul Ruiz,” she told historian Mario T. Garcia. In the end, Arellanes chalked it up to generational difference more than anything. “They looked at us as younger and probably thought we were somewhat foolish. I don’t know if that is true, but this is what I felt…compared to most Berets, they were already more mature, into their twenties.”[6]

Expanding on this point, the Chicano Movement’s galaxy included the Brown Berets but extended much further. For example, Ruiz, Vickie Castro, and Hank Lopez, among many others, played central roles in LA’s Chicano Movement from 1968–1977. Whatever the impact of generational differences among activists, it would be youth, particularly adolescents, who fueled the larger movement. According to fellow activist Rosalio Munoz, who was also a key figure in the Moratorium anti-war protests, the Blowouts were the catalyst for activism. “This was the defining moment for the Chicano movement in LA. It really got the movement going,” he noted in a 2015 oral history.[7]

The Blowouts

Over the course of roughly two weeks in early March 1968, over ten thousand largely but not exclusively Chicano students at Wilson, Lincoln, Belmont, Roosevelt, and Garfield high schools in Los Angeles walked out of class to protest unequal education facilities and policy. Among their demands were calls for bilingual education, smaller classes, and more rights for students, along with a better understanding of Chicano students by educators. “Teachers, administrators, and staff should be educated,” noted the March 15 issue of the Chicano Student Movement, adding “they should know our language…and understand the history, traditions, and contributions of Mexican culture.”[8] Interoffice correspondence within the Los Angeles City Schools confirms these demands as one school official documented conversations he held with students as they walked out: “the food was bad in the cafeteria, that they were fenced in like animals and the school in general was no good.”[9]

The flyer pictured here from the collection conveys its emotional heart and call to ethnic unity. “We’re gonna show those gabachos we’re human too, not ‘animales’…No more humble and sell-out Chicano students. But Proud Chicano Students.”[10]  The fallout took months to negotiate, but its impact was immediate. The protests had spread to other schools such that by its conclusion, one leader estimated 20,000 students had walked out across the city thereby, making Los Angeles the “uncontested national capital of the 1960s high school rebellion.” Julian Nava, the first Chicano elected to the Los Angeles School Board in 1967, told Superintendent Jack Crowther, “The schools will not be the same after.”[11]

The “blowouts” served as the first major step of the larger Chicano movement in which Ruiz played a critical and central role. He later organized protests against the Los Angeles Catholic Church and its diocese for its neglect/poor treatment of Latino/a parishioners by organizing the protest group, Catolics de La Raza in 1969; he helped to organize the third party La Raza Unida in the early 1970s, even running for election three times; he also accumulated several boxes of FOIA requests regarding F.B.I. surveillance of the Brown Berets, the Moratorium committee and protest, La Raza Unida, La Raza, Ruben Salazar, and Ruiz himself. Numerous other examples abound in the collection, which includes La Raza meeting minutes, correspondence, memoranda, ephemera, and other materials offering incredible insight into the dynamics of politics at the local municipal level in Los Angeles, especially in regard to education policy and Chicano journalism.

In the end, Ruiz believed that in Los Angeles, the Chicano Movement, more than Black nationalism, represented a wider swath of the city: “We were the civil rights movement. We were also the anti-war movement.” Considering his role in creating the Chicano press, it should be unsurprising that when evaluating its impact, he argued that more than anything, it was Chicano journalism that “legitimized the movement” and linked it across the nation. “[The Chicano newspapers] serve as an invaluable tool for historians. It’s a shame that they don’t seem to be utilized very much.”[12] The Raul Ruiz Papers offer researchers a chance to remedy this incongruity and to delve into a Los Angeles history that remains relevant to the current moment.

Featured image (at top): National Chicano Moratorium Anti-Vietnam War March, August 29, 1970, La Raza Magazine, Vol. No. 3 Special Issue, Box 5, Raul Ruiz Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Image is not for commercial use.

[1] Lorena Orepoza, Raza Si, Guerra No: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Viet Nam War Era (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 6; Gustavo Arellano, “Raul Ruiz, Journalist and Activist for the Chicano Movement in L.A., Dies at 78,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2019.

[2] Mario T. Garcia, The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015), 80. According to Ruiz, “The hearings proved to be a big farce.”

[3] Orepoza, Raza Si, Guerra No, 4.

[4] Mike Davis and Jon Weiner, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties. New York: Verso, 2020, 379-80

[5] Raul Ruiz, University of California Los Angeles oral history interview, 2010, 90, Box 9, Raul Ruiz Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[6] Garcia, The Chicano Movement, 136.

[7] Garcia, The Chicano Movement, 226-227

[8] “Student Demands” Chicano Student News, March 15, 1968, p. 3, Box 3, Raul Ruiz Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[9] Arnold Rodriguez, “Garfield High School Student Walkout of Tuesday March 5, 1968,” March 5, 1968, Box 3, Raul Ruiz Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[10] Chicano Students statement, ‘Tu Carnal’, 1968, Box 3, Raul Ruiz Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[11] Davis, Set the Night on Fire, 389-90

[12] Garcia, The Chicano Generation, 110.