The USC Libraries recently produced an audio documentary about the life, career, and death of trailblazing journalist Rubén Salazar as part of a project made possible with a generous grant from the California Humanities’ California Documentary Project.
Now publicly available through SoundCloud, the forty-eight-minute pilot episode of Case Closed: Investigations in the Archives draws on rarely heard archival recordings and original interviews to revisit Salazar’s accomplishments, his killing by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy in 1970, and the unanswered questions that have surrounded his death for more than half a century. The audio documentary was produced both as a pilot for a proposed podcast series about the criminal investigations that shaped California history, and as a stand-alone examination of Salazar’s remarkable life and legacy.
Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1928 and raised in El Paso, Texas, Salazar began his career as an investigative reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post. He later joined the Los Angeles Times, covering the Dominican Republic and Vietnam War before serving as the paper’s Mexico City bureau chief. After returning to Los Angeles, he became news director of Spanish-language television station KMEX while continuing with the Times as a columnist.
Salazar’s reporting and commentary brought national attention to the burgeoning Chicano movement and to allegations of law-enforcement abuse in Southern California’s Mexican-American communities. On August 29, 1970, he covered the National Chicano Moratorium, a major antiwar demonstration in East Los Angeles. After unrest broke out, Salazar and a colleague stopped at the Silver Dollar Bar on Whittier Boulevard. Responding to an erroneous report of an armed man inside, a sheriff’s deputy fired a tear gas projectile through the bar’s curtained doorway. It struck Salazar in the head and killed him.
No one was ever charged in his death. Official investigations did not satisfy Salazar’s family or his fellow journalists, and suspicions that he had been deliberately targeted have never quieted. The audio documentary explores those suspicions while also asking a broader question at the heart of the proposed Case Closed series: What can archival evidence reveal decades after an investigation has officially ended?
The audio documentary draws heavily from two separate collections that form part of the Boeckmann Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at the USC Libraries.
The Ruben Salazar papers document his personal life and professional career through correspondence, photographs, reporting files, manuscripts, clippings, and other materials. Donated by his family in 2011, the collection has since supported scholarship, documentaries, student research, digital projects, exhibitions and public programs exploring Salazar’s career and legacy.
Among its most evocative objects is the battered Samsonite briefcase Salazar carried on the day he died. For the podcast, USC Libraries producers Nathan Masters and Micaela Rodgers joined audio journalist and producer Avishay Artsy in a Doheny Library reading room, with microphones recording as they opened the briefcase and examined its former contents.
Inside had been old newspaper articles, legislative materials, notes from community members, and other ephemera accumulated through Salazar’s daily work. These materials illuminated not only the important stories Salazar covered, but also the habits, concerns, and personality of the man who had carried them.
The documentary also draws liberally from a related collection, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Records on the Investigation of the Homicide of Ruben Salazar, which preserves the official investigative record surrounding his death. Its contents include interviews with eyewitnesses and law-enforcement officers, recordings of sheriff’s department radio-car traffic, and a deputy’s later reconstruction of his movements through East Los Angeles on the day Salazar was killed.
The production team reviewed roughly one-hundred hours of Salazar-related audio and worked with preservation specialists at the USC Digital Repository to digitize recordings stored on fragile or obsolete media. Some of those voices had rarely, if ever, been heard by the public. In the finished episode, speaking through these newly digitized recordings, eyewitnesses, deputies, and bystanders describe the police response to the Chicano Moratorium and the moments before and after the fatal projectile entered the Silver Dollar Bar.
Journalist Robert J. Lopez and documentary filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez had previously plumbed the depths of this historical “cold case.” Lopez, a former investigative reporter for the Times, spent years pursuing government records and reconstructing the circumstances of Salazar’s death. Rodriguez, meanwhile, drew extensively on the USC Libraries collections for his award-winning documentary Ruben Salazar: Man in the Middle. Rodriguez also played a pivotal role in the efforts to secure the release of the sheriff’s department records.
Artsy served both as a humanities advisor and as a key member of the production team. An experienced audio journalist whose credits include KCRW’s dna: Design and Architecture and Vox’s Today, Explained, he also helped produce Western Edition, the podcast of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. Artist’s experience translating scholarly research into accessible audio storytelling helped shape the pilot’s structure, pacing, and approach to archival sound.
Among the project’s other humanities advisors was Félix Gutiérrez, professor emeritus at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a longtime scholar of race, media, and Salazar’s career. Along with his colleague Robert Hernandez, Gutiérrez previously directed one of the earliest public projects to draw on the Ruben Salazar papers, the Ruben Salazar Project, created in 2012 by USC Annenberg journalism students. This digital project combined student-written articles with photographs, news clippings, and other documents from the Salazar papers and included an interactive timeline of his life and career.
Gutiérrez is also featured in the episode, reflecting on how Salazar’s reporting gave Mexican American communities a depth and seriousness rarely found in mainstream coverage at the time. Other featured voices include Lopez and fellow journalists Bill Drummond, Gustavo Arellano, and Carolina A. Miranda. Their recollections situate Salazar within the histories of American journalism, Los Angeles, and the Chicano movement while restoring dimensions of the person behind the public icon.
Drummond recalls the difficult afternoon in the Times newsroom when word arrived that his former colleague had been killed. Arellano describes his annual ritual of visiting Salazar’s grave with a bottle of Spanish wine. Miranda explains how Salazar remains present within the culture of the Times, where journalists use an internal Slack emoji bearing his likeness.
Media archivist Yuri Shimoda, who advised the team on recorded-sound collections and the historical technologies through which the audio had been created and preserved, also served as humanities advisor.
Case Closed does not claim to solve the circumstances of Salazar’s death. Instead, it examines the evidence, the failings of the original investigations, and the reasons competing interpretations have endured. At the same time, it redirects attention toward Salazar’s achievements as a reporter, foreign correspondent, columnist, and television news director—and toward the archival collections that preserve the record of his work.
Case Closed: Investigations in the Archives is available now through SoundCloud.
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit www.calhum.org.