The Chicano Moratorium: August Twenty-Ninth, Nineteen Seventy

They assembled at Belvedere Park on the morning of August twenty-ninth, nineteen seventy: twenty to twenty-five thousand people, the largest demonstration the Mexican American civil rights movement had yet organized. The National Chicano Moratorium Committee had spent months planning the march. The cause was a war.

Chicano soldiers were dying in Vietnam at approximately double their share of the general population. The documentation had been assembled carefully: casualty rosters, census data, military records. The organizers brought it to the march. The marchers brought their families. They proceeded through East Los Angeles along Whittier Boulevard toward Laguna Park, which later was renamed Salazar Park.

The march was peaceful until Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies moved on the crowd in response to a reported disturbance at a nearby liquor store. The confrontation that followed was documented in contemporaneous press coverage and in subsequent historical scholarship. Three people died that day, including Ruben Salazar, the Los Angeles Times's first Mexican American staff reporter, killed at the Silver Dollar Cafe by a tear-gas projectile fired through a closed door. The two others who died have been less widely memorialized. Their deaths were equally documented.

No law enforcement officer was charged in connection with the three deaths.

The Chicano Moratorium is considered the pivot point of the Chicano civil rights movement: the moment when the demand by a community to be recognized as fully American collided, publicly, with the governmental response to that demand. Belvedere Park is where this story starts. The Silver Dollar Cafe is where it ends.