Joanne Salas Collection

Joanne Salas was born in Houston, Texas in 1957. She was raised by her parents and grandparents in a working-class family. She lived in Houston and Los Angeles, California before her parents settled in Austin, Texas in 1973. She was introduced to El Movimiento Chicano in Los Angeles through her high school's MEChA organization (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán).

Joanne took a journalism class her senior year in high school. Her dream was to be an investigative reporter – to expose injustice and tell the stories of Mexican Americans. She was discouraged from this field during freshman orientation at the University of Texas at Austin. Older Mexican American students, serving as mentors to first generation college students, told her the College of Communications was too competitive.

She joined the Austin Chapter of the Brown Berets while she was a freshman in college and stayed active until she graduated in May 1979. Her primary contribution to the Brown Berets was initiating and editing La Conciencia along with fellow Brown Beret, Angelina Torres. The Brown Berets hand delivered the newspaper to people's homes – knocking on doors and talking to neighbors was instrumental in organizing the barrio, especially in the struggles against the national drag boat races held in East Austin and police brutality.

After graduating college with a B.A. in History in 1979, Joanne moved back to Los Angeles where she taught English as a Second Language (ESL). She applied for and was accepted into the Summer Program for Minority Journalists (SPMJ), largely due to her work on La Conciencia. SPMJ was an 11-week intensive program, housed at U.C. Berkeley, whose aim was to diversify newsrooms. Joanne got a job as a reporter with the Tucson Citizen. A highlight of her experience as a reporter, was winning the Gannet Corporation's annual award for outstanding newspaper series. She worked with two editors and a photographer for several months to document the experiences of undocumented workers. This resulted in a week-long series of articles.

When she returned to Austin in 1982, she volunteered to pick up the reigns at El Aviso, (La Conciencia had been renamed to El Aviso and was now a publication of El Centro Chicano). It's focus remained on neighborhood issues.

Joanne was unable to get hired at the Austin American Statesman because staff at the Tucson Citizen had told editors at the Statesman that she did not work well with white editors – a reputation she had earned for speaking up to address racism in an article written by a reporter at the Tucson Citizen.

While volunteering at El Centro Chicano, Joanne was recruited for a counseling position at a local mental health center. She was hired based on her volunteer work with youth in East Austin during her undergraduate years. Ten years later, she returned to college and earned a PhD in Educational Psychology from UT Austin. She remains active in neighborhood preservation, social and environmental justice issues in San Marcos, Texas, her home for the past 21 years (as of 2023). She currently serves on the Tomas Rivera Children's Award Regional Committee and supports Mano Amiga and Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos.

Source:

Biographical information provided by Dr. Joanne Salas.