Genevieve Huizar holds a poster of her son, Manuel Diaz, that has been used in demonstrations. Sadaf Syed for Al Jazeera America

ANAHEIM, California — On July 21, 2012, police here killed Manuel Angel Diaz, an unarmed, 25-year-old man, when he ran away as officers approached. The next day, 21-year-old Joel Acevedo was killed by police after he allegedly fired shots at them.

Days of protests followed as hundreds took to the streets. Most were peaceful but rocks were thrown, store windows broken and cars vandalized. Police fired rubber bullets into the crowd.

The Anaheim riots received some national attention (pages A-11 and A-13 of The New York Times) but never reached the recent heights of similar events in Ferguson , Baltimore or Staten Island . Those protests sparked demonstrations in cities across the country and were covered around the clock by news networks, reviving the national dialogue over race relations.

Diaz and Acevedo are not household names. Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner are.

The obvious distinction: Diaz and Acevedo are Latinos, while the other victims of recent police incidents were African American.

The starkly different response to police shootings of minorities and deaths of minorities in police custody raises a question that is being asked more and more by activists and experts every day: Don’t brown lives matter, too?

But the reasons why the deaths of Latinos have not sparked the same national outrage as those of blacks are tangled in a complex web of history, debate over immigration and lack of government statistics on the number of brown lives lost at the hands of police.

“Police violence on African Americans hits a deeper resonant note because of our history,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that tracks hate crimes. “The oppression of African Americans goes right at the core of our history.”

The legacy of slavery and segregation fueled the civil rights movement and created a well-oiled organizing machine from national advocacy groups to black churches that continue to fight for the rights of African Americans.

“State-sanctioned murder of African Americans is an old powerful issue,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California. “It isn’t a matter of these incidents alone sparking this outrage. It’s more than that. It’s symbolic of lynchings and other killings that have been an instrument of suppression in the past. These incidents gain force because they speak to a whole range of other considerations.”

Latino civil rights groups are more focused on immigration issues and lack a galvanizing figure such as the Rev. Al Sharpton who can mobilize protesters and attract inevitable media coverage in an instant.

“It’s a real problem beyond the issue of police abuse,” said Angelo Falcón, president of the National Institute for Latino Policy . “It’s a recurring complaint among Latino leaders. No matter how much people talk about how multicultural things are and how diverse they are, it seems to revert to black and white … How the hell do you break through that black-white way of looking at policy issues?”

In Anaheim, where more than half of the population of 345,000 is Hispanic, “there were at least seven killings (by police) between 2011 and 2012,” said Gabriel San Roman, a contributing writer for the alternative OC Weekly , who covers police brutality in Anaheim and throughout Orange County. Five were Latinos. Two more Latinos were wounded by police during that period, he said.

Three years after the deaths of Diaz and Acevedo, “there are no politicians, no advocacy organizations,” he said. “They’re not there anymore. It’s abysmal.” By contrast, large protests happened in Ferguson for the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing.