Guest commentary: El Baruyo. Context in understanding history’s unforgettable characters

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By Rodolfo F. Acuña / Guest contributor

Context is everything in understanding what happened in the past.

“Historical context refers to the moods, attitudes, and conditions that existed in a certain time. Context is the ‘setting’ for an event that occurs, and it will have an impact on the relevance of the event. Context is an important factor to consider when describing something in history.”

It is difficult to understand the sixties without the proper context even if you lived through them. Much of what is being written today overly relies on oral histories or war stories as they are called.

While I take pride in having lived through the sixties, I realize that living through the decade does not guarantee that you know what happened. The closest that I can get is to develop a feeling for the decade. Even newspapers and documentaries are often as opinionated as oral interviews.

The sixties were an awakening for me. They were an escape from the fifties that were stifled by the army, marrying young and hustling a degree, as well as working 40 to 60 hours a week and carrying 16/18 units. The sixties’ baruyo (the commotion, the disorder and the chaos) seduced me. I was the last one leaving a meeting because I thought I was going to miss something.

Los Angeles in 1950 was the whitest major American city (78 percent white). The 1960 Census counted 3,464,999 Spanish-surnamed persons (an undercount) in the Southwest.  Texas and California housed 82 percent of them. During the 1960s, Los Angeles County’s Mexican population doubled from 576,716 to 1,228,593—an increase of 113 percent. The white population decreased from 4,877,150 to 4,777,909—a 2 percent drop.

During the sixties, Los Angeles became a Mexican City, not just because it had more Mexicans outside of Mexico City and Guadalajara, but because it was a media center.

At the center of the baruyo was the Los Angeles Times that ruled Los Angeles. By 1959, the Times’ ruling elite realizing that LA was changing hired Ruben Salazar, an El Paso reporter, as a foreign correspondent and columnist.

It is safe to say that the baruyo seduced Salazar who became more engaged. Being a columnist for the Times put Salazar in the eye of the storm. At the time the rap was that if you wanted to read the funnies (comics) or the sports page buy the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner; if you wanted serious news read the Times.

Salazar had an immediate impact on Mexican Americans. Most the Chicana/o activists anticipated Salazar’s articles, and we would discuss them. Mexicans in print then were as rare as people of color in the reader Dick and Jane.

When I read about the sixties, I am dismayed that no one has really put Salazar’s articles into a historical context. His 1963 and 1964 articles are keys to understanding Mexican American identity.

By 1963 Salazar hit his stride, reviewing the disparate labels describing Mexican Americans: la raza, pocho, Mexican-American, cholo, American born-Mexican, Spanish-American, and Latin American. Salazar covered the rare Mexican American conferences and the school dropout problem.

Salazar opened an article with a photo of “Hoyo Mara” (Maravilla or Marvelous hole). He explored problems that plagued Mexican Americans that many thought they had left behind, interviewing gang members and exposing the tuberculosis epidemic that was a serious threat in Mexican American barrio.

By then the journalist began identifying with his readers. In March 1963 he wrote an article titled “Mexican-Americans Have Culture Protected by 1848 U.S. Treaty.” Salazar wrote critically about assimilation and bilingualism. Admittedly most of us knew little about our history or its problems.

One of the unforgettable characters Salazar relied on for information was Marcos de Leon, a Los Angeles City School Spanish teacher. According to de Leon, the Mexican American was the marginal man; he had a hamburger in one hand and a taco in the other. He was obsessed with cultural blending, and he prophesized that one day the Anglo would be culturally deprived if he did not correct the error of his ways and become bilingual.

De Leon never used the word “if” in predicting the inevitability of bilingual-biculturalism. For him it was a hemispheric cultural blending. He made war on the schools’ attempt to assimilate or absorb Mexican children. To many of us, Marcos was the reincarnation St. Paul the apostle.

Thus far, the link between Marcos and Salazar has not been explored. However, Salazar’s articles are replete with interviews and references to Marcos.

Another of the many disciples for educational reform was Uvaldo Palomares,  one of the best presenters I have ever met. We did not have a lot in common but worked together. At one point he wanted me to team up with him on the condition that I tone down my presentations because white teachers felt threatened.

Uvaldo’s pitch was the “Magic Circle”; as one follower put it “Consider the circle.  That shape has been a universal symbol for God.  It suggests the infinite, never-ending inclusion of all.” The Magic Circle facilitated student participation. The objective was for students to develop self-awareness, positive self-concepts and behavior.

Uvaldo was a guru. A consultant to various school districts, he founded the Human Development Training Institute.

Another pied piper was Leonard Olguin who wrote Shuck loves chirley: A non-technical teaching aid for teachers of bilingual children. The title says it all. The manual was about cultural awareness, cultural difference, intonation, responses, and phonology, as well as student and teacher attitudes, all in under 100 pages.

An education professor at California State University, Long Beach, I rarely see him cited, but he was a huge influence on the development of my course on “cultural conflict.”

Leonard developed the Olguin Diagnostic Test of Auditory Perception (ODTAP). It had six scales each intended to represent six phonological categories of juncture, consonants, vowels, digraphs, airflow, and intonation. In other words “Shuck loves Chirley.”

The baruyo was a time of hope. We honestly believed that we could educate Mexican children and bring about equality. The importance of Ruben Salazar was that he gave us a common purpose and a unified vision. De Leon was an apostle spreading the gospel that there was nothing wrong with us. We were not disadvantaged; it was society that was culturally deprived. Both Uvaldo and Leonard experimented with pedagogy. Within the Magic Circle Uvaldo incorporated history and culture while Leonard examined specific language blocks to English language acquisition by native speakers of Spanish.

The baruyo seduced us; we believed that educational reform was doable. Today the baruyo has quieted and the innovation of those times has been disregarded. Experimentation has become a bad word, and dropping out of school has become like high unemployment – it is part of the cost of doing business doing business.

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