Reporting for the Los Angeles Times, Rubén Salazar was the first Mexican American journalist to cover the Chicano community. On August 29, 1970, during his coverage of the National Moratorium March in East Los Angeles, California, Salazar was killed by a tear gas projectile fired by a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy.
In East Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s, a group of young activists used creative tools like writing and photography as a means for community organizing, providing a platform for the Chicano Movement in the form of the bilingual newspaper/magazine La Raza. In the process, the young activists became artists themselves and articulated a visual language that shed light on the daily life, concerns and struggles of the Mexican-American experience in Southern California and provided a voice to the Chicano Rights Movement.