The Library of Congress has acquired a gold mine of resources that document the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles.
The cultural institution in Washington, D.C., now has a collection from activist and journalist Raul Ruiz that includes more than 17,000 photos and almost 10,000 manuscripts. The vast archive was donated by Ruiz’s daughter, Marcela Ponce, and Marta E. Sánchez, a close friend of Ruiz and a professor at Loyola Marymount University.
Ruiz, who died in 2019, was a co-editor of La Raza, a pioneering Chicano newspaper that documented Mexican American life across the country from 1967 until it folded in 1977. The publication ran Ruiz’s photo of slain former L.A. Times reporter and columnist Ruben Salazar’s purported killer on its cover under the headline in English and Spanish, “The Murder of Ruben Salazar.” He let The Times reprint and syndicate the shot worldwide to expose what he called a “farce” of an investigation into the columnist’s death.
“We captured it. No one else was covering it,” Ruiz said of the events of the Chicano Moratorium in an interview with PBS. “It turned out to be a police riot. The police rioted against the people. The police assaulted the people.”
Ruiz ran for a state Assembly seat in 1971 under the La Raza Unida Party banner, a political party created by activists who believed the Democratic Party ignored Chicanos. Ruiz earned 7% of the vote, enough for Bill Brophy, Democrat Richard Alatorre’s Republican opponent, to pull off a stunning upset.
Ruiz taught for 45 years in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge, retiring in 2015.
Included in the trove of documents are unpublished drafts of Ruiz’s book on Salazar, photographs from La Raza’s coverage of the Chicano protests of the 1960s and ‘70s, a photo of Salazar being tear-gassed by L.A. County sheriff’s deputies during a Vietnam protest, handmade layouts of several important issues of La Raza and a photo of Cesar Chavez protesting. Audio recordings, photo negatives, correspondences and videos are also a part of the collection.
“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, the Library of Congress curator of photography in the prints and photographs division.
Parts of the collection will be available to see only at the physical Library of Congress location in Washington. Select photographs will be available for viewing through the institution’s online catalog in the coming weeks.
Times columnist Gustavo Arellano contributed to this report.
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