Read the articles I have posted on ERES from Rodriguez and Salazar.
Then, if you have time, read the Hunter S. Thompson one. Think about the branches, the webs, if you will, that go out from these writers, articles. Think about the ethnic social constructions embedded in their work, their careers. Think about how mainstream journalism, nonfiction publishing reflects and does not reflect those constructions.
You can also Google, research, seek out more about these writers and others who resemble these writers.
Here is a link to a site for Luis Rodriguez.
http://www.tiachucha.com/nonprofit/index.htm
Make connections when you read.
Post your comments here. Or you can post a link to your own blog where you respond to the reading.
BH
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Mario Garcia’s biography of Ruben Salazar paints a poignant picture of both the person and the journalist that Los Angeles tragically lost in a café in August 1970. And in doing so, it speaks volumes about the Chicano movement and its struggle during the Vietnam era that Salazar had so closely covered.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, Luis Rodriguez’s writing in Always Running tells his own tale of life as a father, journalist, and former gang member in the streets of L.A. Rodriguez uses stark detail and vivid dialogue as he chronicles his conflict-laden childhood and introduction to gang culture.
Tellingly, both readings evoked a common reaction as I read them: disbelief and disturbance. Paragraph after paragraph, and page after page I was taken aback by the conditions of these two individuals’ lives and moreover, the environments that they emerged from. For Salazar, it was the story of an immigrant from Juarez, Mexico to El Paso, Texas, breaking racial barriers in newsrooms. For Rodriguez, it was a chaotic childhood dotted with memories of running from sheriffs, being abused by his brother, and all the adventures that came with the gang lifestyle; only then to see his son fall into the same traps he had broken free from.
And I couldn’t help but be struck by a culture-shock in how vastly those experiences contrasted from my own. As the product of an overwhelmingly white suburbia in middle America, I’d like to think I’m consciously aware of my lackluster, sheltered roots. At 23, I’ve never been offered an illegal drug; never seen an illegal drug in fact. The closest thing I’ve witnessed to a riot is 20,000 Mizzou fans rushing Faurot Field. And I’ve certainly never encountered the barriers Salazar faced because of my heritage.
So these narratives were eye-opening windows into an alternative American experience – partly attributed to a generation gap, but moreso due to happenstance. Born into a barrio, an inner city, or a suburb, the hands we are dealt play a powerful part in who we are. But as both of these readings show, it’s what we do given those circumstances that inevitably controls who we become. For Salazar and Rodriguez, they became legacies in Los Angeles using their own backgrounds as an intangible journalistic skill in their reporting on issues they were all too familiar with themselves.
What struck me the most about Always Running was how Rodriguez drew his childhood in schizophrenic terms. He’s the son of his stoic father, but he’s also the son of his emotional mother. His brains should make him a top student, but he’s always in trouble at school. He’s Mexican, but he’s also American. This dichotomy pulls Rodriguez in two directions. Geography should afford him fair treatment under the law, a decent education, and job opportunities, but his last name and his skin color made that unlikely in his East L.A. neighborhood. He writes of schools utterly incapable of working with him and his Spanish-speaking siblings—his brother was put in a class with handicapped students because he could not be understood—and how they were beat up by white teenagers for daring to cross town for some groceries. Rodriguez received a clear message from teachers, from the police, and from those teenagers: you’re here, but you shouldn’t be. You live here, but you’ll never belong. The acceptance and sense of belonging he didn’t find anywhere else he would later find in gangs.
ReplyDeleteParticularly poignant to me was Rodriguez’s description of the “suicidal” behavior of the kids standing on the street corner, flashing gang signs and inviting death (9). They welcome violence, and they inflict violence, Rodriguez writes, usually against people who look just like them. This description of a divided person, one who hates part of himself, made me think of a suicidal schizophrenic. Take Rodriguez. He’s Mexican, and his family history is rooted in Mexico, but if he speaks a word of Spanish in school, he’ll be punished. Just appearing on the wrong side of town with a dusky face invites violence. How could this not create a sense of self-loathing amongst some Mexican-Americans? It would be difficult to value your heritage if you were constantly told that that part of you was bad, and easy to feel no loyalty to other Mexican faces that walked by your corner.
Read in the context of Mario Garcia’s profile of journalist Ruben Salazar, Rodriguez’s story takes on greater poignancy. Always Running offers not just an interesting account of a former gang member, but a name and face to represent the difficulties of Mexican-American assimilation in L.A that Salazar reported. Salazar wrote about the dual identity of Mexican-Americans, and how the pull of the two cultures could leave a person with nothing more than the hyphen. Salazar himself likely felt that pull, like when he recoiled at being called a “Chicano newsman” rather than just a newsman. Like the borders that Rodriguez wrote about—separating the United States and Mexico, separating the Hispanic and Anglo parts of L.A.—that hyphen was one more division that Mexican-Americans had to straddle.
The Ruben Salazar and Luis Rodriguez readings are interesting to compare for a number of reasons. On the one hand, Salazar and Rodriguez share a similar Mexican-American perspective, and this viewpoint seemed to fuel a passion in both journalists when covering the Mexican-American community. On the other hand, this passion that came from being deeply invested in their subject matter produced different kinds of writing in terms of structure, language and levels of subjectivity.
ReplyDeleteSalazar and Rodriguez contributed greatly to coverage of a community that is often ignored. In the excerpts we read for class, Salazar’s approach follows a more traditional news format while the Rodriguez reading is in a memoir style. Interestingly, however, though Rodriguez’s writing is much more personal, Salazar’s writing shows a clear amount of subjectivity. Mario Garcia’s introduction to Salazar explains that Salazar thought, “there was not a single reporter who believed in ‘objectivity’” (29). Although he strived to produce balanced reporting, there was no pretending that his perspective did not affect his work. This idea reminded me a bit of Ida B. Wells’ coverage of lynching in the South. While the supposedly objective media overlooked the reality of situation, it was Wells’ passion and attachment to the subject matter that fueled her pursuit of the truth, an observation that some scholars use as an argument against objective reporting. Like Wells, Salazar had an insider’s perspective that helped him deliver stories that were more factual, intuitive and comprehensive than those written by much of the mainstream press. At the same time, he was a sympathetic writer no matter what community he covered. In his story about PFC Jimmy Williams, a young African-American soldier who died in the Vietnam War, Salazar wrote: “Jimmy Williams’ platoon has suffered heavy casualties. All of Williams’ buddies killed with him were resting this Memorial Day where their survivors wanted them to be. All but Williams” (23). In only a few words, Salazar made clear the injustice in Williams’ family not being able to bury him in the local, all-white cemetery.
Because Rodriguez’s Always Running is about the writer’s own experiences in L.A. gangs, his writing is both personal and empathetic. Perhaps more interesting than this observation, however, is Rodriguez’s skillful use of language to jump from one subset of the community to another. Salazar does a bit of switching between Spanish and English to illustrate certain points, but Rodriquez’s use of language characterizes a culture. On multiple occasions he refers to the language barrier his family experienced when they came to the U.S. His brother was put in a class with special needs students because of his inability to speak English, and his father lost a job because students could understand his accent. Throughout the piece, Rodriguez weaves in Spanish words and phrases, oftentimes with no translation. Rodriguez takes this technique a step further when he describes particular scenes from his childhood. When, after going through many moves and many schools in the U.S. already, his mother decides she and the kids will return to Mexico, Rodriguez flows into the language of a confused, apathetic kid. “What does it matter? I’ve been a red hot ball, bouncing around from here to there. Anyone can bounce me. Mama. Dad. Rano. Schools. Streets. I’m a ball. Whatever” (33). The words are an interesting blend of a writer’s phrasing and an adolescent’s perspective, and it gives readers a more honest view of the subject.
Overall, I think I appreciated these readings more because of the comparisons I was able to make between them. Salazar and Rodriguez are great examples of how important structure and perspective are to storytelling, and it was interesting to see how two journalists writing about the Mexican-American community utilized techniques to tell completely different stories.
Although just two years separate the 1993 publication of Luiz J. Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and Mario Garcia’s 1995 “Rubin Salazar: Border Correspondent,” the two could not be more different, despite their shared Mexican-American subject matter. Rodriguez’s controversial book (banned in some U.S. high schools) is a deeply personal autobiography about his life in Latino gangs and his escape to a life of writing, poetry and public service through activism. Rodriguez paints achingly—sometimes shockingly—vivid pictures of his violent and chaotic childhood: witnessing his first death of a childhood friend at age 10, enduring multiple beatings, frequent relocations, abject poverty and poor education. Even so, there is no self-pity, hostility or even preaching in Rodriguez’s book. Instead, he fills it with a keen eye for detail and dialogue, an optimist’s storytelling energy, and even a bit of humor. Despite the brutal subject matter, there is imbued throughout the sense that Rodriguez’s personal story—if not his son’s—has a happy ending. This is a survivor talking—with a voice and an ability that lifted him out of hell. Interestingly, on his website recently (www.luizjrodriguez.com) Rodriguez posted a blog entitled, “Poetry in the Blood,” about the large number of people in his extended family who share the gift of writing. Yet the phrase could easily be a metaphor for Rodriguez’s life—of his finding a life of poetry and writing within a life that has experienced so much blood and pain.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, Garcia’s biography of Rubin Salazar, his life and his work, is very different reading. Part history, part biography, Garcia’s essay often reads more like a report than a call to arms following the death of a martyr. But then, maybe that’s the point: Salazar himself chose not to be a “Chicano journalist,” and Garcia makes it very clear Salazar did not incite so much as cover events. Perhaps Garcia is following suit with his detailed account of Salazar’s history-making life and reports. Both of them—Garcia in his essay and Salazar in his articles—share a reportorial style that tends toward social rather than personal commentary. The strength in both is insight and detail (Salazar’s “Serape Belt” for instance), but the feeling is that of distance. Perhaps Salazar felt a need to distance himself personally from the prejudices and repression faced by Mexican-Americans. He was, after all, middle class and college educated, things most of the Chicanos he covered were not. Perhaps he was getting set to more fully embrace his solidarity with those who were oppressed, or perhaps try to do more to fight that oppression by taking the job at KMEX. Unfortunately, however, these types of insights are beyond the scope of Garcia’s work. Readers will have to content themselves with a picture of a man who was “the best and bravest” Latino reporter of his day, even if that picture comes not from bringing him to life (there is not, after all, even a physical description of Salazar in Garcia’s essay), but rather from the eulogies of others.
Oh, the limits of objectivity. One could spend an entire graduate school career on such a thing...
ReplyDeleteLast semester I read Existential Journalism by John C. Merrill. The book is a complete trip through intellectual ponderings of the modern journalist, to which it makes an assertion, among others, that subjectivity - or "the right to subjectivity" - is an expression of the freedoms of democracy. I am sure some in this class or at MU would disagree with my assessment of Merrill, and I would give contextual quotes from the book in this regard to let us duke it out, but unfortunately my home computer - to where such quotes exist - is now deceased.
Anyway, my point is that Rodriguez and Salazar are heralded attestations to this explicit exercise of democracy through subjectivity. They are giving themselves the right to EMOTE IN CONTEXT (sorry there is no italic option for comments) the experience that others are forced to suppress. Suppression = subjectivity, as in the most important advocacy Rodriguez and Salazar are committing in their own time and space is the exercise of the democratic freedom they have and the people they represent don't. Of course objectivity is a joke to Salazar - who has time for it? People are getting their heads blown off in local bars.
And to me, this is what Hunter S. Thompson's style is all about. Thompson sees the layout of all of his mannerisms as indicative of democratic principle; even the greatest of his vices are expressions of democratic right, that his off-topic garbles are another form of wagging the finger to the oppression embedded in a topic like this. He even lies and swindles his way into getting the facts he needs - but again, taken one way, another rite-of-passage American vice.
I wanted to talk a bit about the effectiveness of Thompson's piece. He may be the outsider, but through his perspective we discover how a single incident in the East LA community pervades public life. The name Salazar flies off the tongue of the locals as if indicative of an era, now the post-Salazar era. When the hotel worker seems "freaked" to Oscar and Thompson, Oscar says, "These guys are scared of everything now. Every merchange on Whittier Boulevard is sure he's living on borrowed time, so they go all to pieces at the first sign of anything strange going on [such as Oscar, a lawyer, checking into Hotel Ashmun]. It's been this way ever since Salazar." Here, in the first two pages of the story, is the real issue - left in the flood that poured out after the actual death of the reporter and into the streets of East LA. The question is not "was Salazar's death a product of murder?" but "when the spokesman dies, who speaks next?" And the "objective" journalists of LA aren't going to report that. Rodriguez, and Salazar, would agree.