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Remembering the Chicano Moratorium

Members of Los Illegals and Tierra recall that day. They


and others will mark the 40th anniversary with concert
and other festivities Saturday.
August 27, 2010|By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times

Last Friday evening, in an East L.A. living room, a group of musicians gathered to discuss finishing
a concert that ended prematurely, and tragically, 40 years ago.

Willie Herron III and Jesus Velo of the Chicano punk-new wave band Los Illegals and their friend
Rudy Salas of another legendary Chicano group, Tierra, were teenagers and young men on Aug. 29,
1970. That was the date, among the most significant in modern Mexican American history, of the
National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War.

An estimated 30,000 people marched that day through East Los Angeles in what began as a peaceful,
festive get-together, with songs in the air and young and old united in chanting political slogans.

"It was so beautiful, when you were there," recalled Salas, a guitar player. "They had music there and
it was a family-oriented type of situation."

But the day ended in a flurry of beatings and flying objects when law enforcement officials clashed
with marchers, and three people were killed. Among those slain was Los Angeles Times reporter
Rubn Salazar, whose columns had championed Latino rights. He died after being struck by a tear gas
canister fired by a sheriff's deputy into the Silver Dollar Bar.

In the days that followed, the march helped to galvanize Mexican Americans politically and culturally,
not only in Los Angeles but in the United States as a whole. "People talk about 1968 as a flashpoint for
change in America," Velo said. "For Chicanos, it was 1970."

On Saturday, at East L.A.'s Belvedere Park, Los Illegals and brothers Rudy and Steve Salas of Tierra
will be among the bands and performers paying homage to the moratorium's 40th anniversary and
celebrating its enduring legacy. The free all-day event will include a photo exhibition documenting the
Chicano Moratorium and a 2 p.m. rock concert, emceed by music-historian authors David Reyes and
Tom Waldman, that will spotlight some of the musicians who were slated to perform that day in 1970
but never got to play after the melee broke out. Other performers will include Mark Guerrero and
CAVA.

For some participating artists, the occasion evokes mixed feelings. On the one hand, bitter memories
linger: Ghostly tear-gas clouds. Panicked children running and screaming. The thud of body blows.
Whittier Boulevard on fire. While specifically targeted at the Vietnam War, and the swelling numbers
of Latinos who were serving and dying in it, the moratorium also expressed the community's growing
frustration over its lack of economic and political power.

Velo said that on that day, he was working as a volunteer driver for the Mexican-American Political
Assn., shuttling out-of-town visitors from LAX to East L.A. When violence broke out, he parked his
car and went to hide in a friend's basement, listening to Bob Dylan, Beatles and Pete Seeger records.
"That's how I rode out the evening, hiding from the police," he said. "They were just patrolling the
street, beating everybody up."

Salas' entire family took part in the moratorium. He remembers that a pair of newlyweds left their
wedding party to join the march. "It was that kind of atmosphere. A lot of pride."

In the days after the tragedy, Salas said, he and his friends wanted to take revenge, and even spoke of forming
vigilante squads. But gradually, his group, Tierra, which started out as a largely apolitical night-club band
playing covers of Motown hits, found that it could express deeper sentiments though its music.

"We realized that we can say something and make a difference," Salas said. "Before nobody was listening."

The moratorium instilled a sense of creative mission in other young Chicano artists, said Herron, who
besides playing for Los Illegals was a member of ASCO, the influential Chicano artists collective that
also included Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk and Patssi Valdez.

"The moratorium just made us blossom," Herron said, comparing the Chicano arts movement to the
great muralist projects of post-revolutionary Mexico. "It was like, this is my purpose for my art now:
the police riots, the [student] walk-outs that had happened in the late '60s."

In some ways, Saturday's activities will underscore how much has changed since 1970 in East Los
Angeles, an unincorporated area whose population is more than 95% Latino. The concert will take
place at a bucolic amphitheater on the edge of Belvedere Lake, abutting the East Los Angeles Civic
Center, a park-like complex of municipal government buildings, fountains and a bilingual library,
near a new Metro Gold Line station. Saturday's activities will overlap with the East L.A. Chamber of
Commerce-sponsored third annual Taste of East L.A. food festival.

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