I’ll say it and then shut up.

Journalist Rubén Salazar had no pretensions about being a Latino leader. Or even of becoming the Mexican-American on commemorative 42-cent U.S. postage stamp for leading his tribe out of the Western desert. (He got one on April 22, 2008.)

That’s how at least a few brown college kids who majored in Chicano Studies extol him every August 29th, the date in 1970 he was killed by a cop.

His blonde late wife Sally used to say that RUben — not ruBEN (she put the accent on the first syllable of his name) was a steak-and-Scotch person, not a taco-and-tequila connoisseur, as do those of us who toast him with cold Coronas, con limón.

She would quote her children, all of whom were under 10 at the time he was killed at age 42, as inquiring if he really was that person being lionized as schools and streets were being named after him. They knew him as the dad they splashed with in their backyard swimming pool in Orange County.

Associates who knew him best recognized him as both persons. Culturally, he was raised in a hyphenated world, Mexican and American.

But don’t mislabel him as a “Mexican-American journalist.” He was a journalist — period. With his depth of understanding of people in our polyglot world, he stood out as a foreign correspondent in a profession overstaffed with Ivy Leaguers who parachute into Latin America and the simmering Middle East wearing trenchcoats and blinkers and pose as global experts. Rubén was the real thing. Vietnam was another beat on his resumé.

He integrated the near-lily-white Los Angeles Times news staff in 1959 after demonstrating his multiple reporting talents at the El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post, Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat and San Francisco News.

Arriving in Southern California, he accepted no activists’ claims that the police were habitually discriminatory and brutal in their treatment of Latinos until he himself witnessed the pattern.

That’s when he started reporting on the realities of living and dying in L.A.’s barrios — a journalistic journey that ultimately led to his untimely death.