The prominent Chicano writer Roberto Cintli Rodríguez has died at the age of 69. His books include “Justice: A Question of Race,” which chronicled his quest for justice after being brutally beaten in 1979 by four sheriff deputies in East Los Angeles while he was on a reporting assignment for Lowrider magazine. In 1986, a jury awarded him $205,000, which he used to start a bilingual magazine. He later became a Mexican American studies professor at the University of Arizona. He also served as director of the Raza Database Project to track the killing of Latinos, Asian and Indigenous peoples by law enforcement. He appeared on Democracy Now! in 2021.

Roberto Cintli Rodríguez: “And then, again, it’s all about dehumanization. And I’m not exaggerating when I say I track this violence to 1492, which means when Europeans came here, they decided that the people here, like myself, that we were not human. Africans that were brought here also were not human, according to them. In my opinion, it’s the same dynamic taking place today; otherwise, we wouldn’t see this massive amount of both the killings and the disparity.”

Roberto Rodríguez speaking in 2021. He has died at the age of 69.