Zoot Suit Riots: Difference between revisions

The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of riots in 1943 during World War II that broke out in Los Angeles, California, between Anglo American sailors and Marines stationed in the city, and Latino youths, who were recognizable by the zoot suits they favored. Mexican Americans and European-American military personnel were the main parties in the riots, and some African American and Filipino/Filipino American youths were involved as well.^[1] The Zoot Suit Riots were in part the effect of the infamous Sleepy Lagoon murder trial which followed the death of a young Latino man in a barrio near Los Angeles. The incident triggered similar attacks against Latinos in Beaumont, Chicago, San Diego, Oakland, Detroit, Evansville, Philadelphia, and New York City.^[2]

The zoot suit riots began in Los Angeles, California amidst a period of rising tensions between Anglo American servicemen stationed in Southern California and Los Angeles' Mexican-American population. Although Mexican-American men were over-represented in the military as a percentage of their population,^[3] many European-American servicemen resented the sight of Latinos socializing in clothing considered extravagant and unpatriotic during wartime.^[4][5]

During the 20th century, in addition to those whose families had already been in the American Southwest before 1848, many Mexicans immigrated to places such as Texas, Arizona, and California.^[6] In the early 1930s in Los Angeles County, more than 12,000 people of Mexican descent—including many American citizens^[7]—were deported to Mexico (see Mexican Repatriation). Despite the deportations, by the late 1930s there were still about 3 million Mexican Americans in the United States. Los Angeles had the highest concentration of Mexicans outside of Mexico.^[8] The Latinos were segregated into an area of the city with the oldest, most run-down housing.^[8] In addition to this, job discrimination in Los Angeles forced many Mexicans to work for below-poverty level wages.^[9][10] The Los Angeles newspapers described Mexicans by using racially inflammatory propaganda.^[11][12][13] These factors caused much racial tension between Latinos and whites.^[14]

It was during the late 1930s that young Latinos in California, for whom the media usually used the then-derogatory term Chicanos, which some Mexican-Americans today still use to refer to themselves, created a youth culture.^[15][16] Lalo Guerrero became known as the father of Chicano music, as they adopted their own music, language and dress. For the men, the style was to wear a zoot suit—a flamboyant long coat with baggy pegged pants, a pork pie hat, a long key chain, and shoes with thick soles. They called themselves "pachucos." In the early 1940s, many arrests and negative stories in the Los Angeles Times fueled a negative perception of these pachuco gangs in the broader community.^[17] In the summer of 1942 the Sleepy Lagoon murder case made national news when teenage members of the 38th Street Gang were accused of murdering a man named José Díaz in an abandoned quarry pit. This created much anti-Mexican sentiment and the nine men were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. As one author puts it, "Many Angelenos saw the death of José Díaz as a tragedy that resulted from a larger pattern of lawlessness and rebellion among Mexican American youths, discerned through their self-conscious fashioning of difference, and increasingly called for stronger measures to crack down on juvenile delinquency."^[18] Although ultimately the convictions of the nine young men were overturned, the case caused much animosity toward Mexican Americans, much of which had to do with the police and press characterizing all Mexican youths as "pachuco hoodlums and baby gangsters."^[19][20]

The Zoot Suit Riots sharply revealed a polarization between two youth groups within wartime society: the gangs of predominantly black and Mexican youths who were at the forefront of the zoot suit subculture, and the predominantly Anglo American servicemen stationed along the Pacific coast. The riots primarily had racial and social resonances, although some argue that the primary issue may have been patriotism and attitudes to the war.

With the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941 following the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the nation had to come to terms with the restrictions of rationing and the prospects of conscription. In March 1942, the War Production Board's first rationing act had a direct effect on the manufacture of suits and all clothing containing wool. In an attempt to institute a 26% cut-back in the use of fabrics, the War Production Board drew up regulations for the wartime manufacture of what Esquire magazine called, "streamlined suits by Uncle Sam."^[21] The regulations effectively forbade the manufacture of zoot suits, and most legitimate tailoring companies ceased to manufacture or advertise any suits that fell outside the War Production Board's guidelines. However, the demand for zoot suits did not decline and a network of bootleg tailors based in Los Angeles and New York City continued to manufacture the garments. Thus, the polarization between servicemen and pachucos was immediately visible: the chino shirt and battledress were evidently uniforms of patriotism, whereas wearing a zoot suit was a deliberate and public way of flouting the regulations of rationing. The zoot suit was a moral and social scandal in the eyes of the authorities, not simply because it was associated with petty crime and violence, but because it openly snubbed the laws of rationing.^[17]

Following the Sleepy Lagoon case, a series of violent incidents erupted between Mexicans wearing zoot suits and U.S. service personnel in San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Delano, Los Angeles, and cities and towns of California. The most serious of these broke out in Los Angeles.

Two conflicts between Mexicans and white military personnel had a great effect on the start of the riots. The first occurred on May 30, 1943, four days before the start of the riots. The altercation involved a dozen sailors and soldiers including Seaman Second Class Joe Dacy Coleman. The group was walking down Main Street when they spotted a group of young Mexican women on the opposite side of the street. With the exception of Coleman and another soldier, the group crossed the street to approach and harass the women. Coleman continued on, walking past a small group of young men in zoot suits. As he walked by, Coleman saw one of the young men raise his arm in an allegedly threatening manner, so he turned around and grabbed it. It was then that something or someone struck the sailor in the back of the head, at which point he fell unconscious to the ground, allegedly breaking his jaw in two places. On the opposite side of the street, young men attacked the servicemen for harassing the women. In the midst of this battle, the service men managed to fight their way to Coleman and drag him to safety.^[22]

The second incident took place four days later on the night of June 3, 1943. About eleven sailors got off a bus and started walking along Main Street in Downtown Los Angeles. At some point they ran into a group of young Mexicans dressed in zoot suits and got in a verbal argument. The sailors stated that they were jumped and beaten by this gang of zoot suiters. The Los Angeles Police Department responded to the incident, many of them off-duty officers calling themselves the Vengeance Squad, who went to the scene "seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as the loathsome influence of pachuco gangs." The next day, 200 members of the U.S. Navy got a convoy of about 20 taxicabs and headed for East Los Angeles. When the sailors spotted their first victims, most of them 12- to 13-year-old boys, they clubbed the boys and any adults who tried to stop them. They also stripped the boys of their zoot suits and burned the tattered clothes in a pile. They were determined to attack and strip all minorities that they came across wearing zoot suits. It was with this attack that the Zoot Suit Riots started.^[23]

As the violence escalated over the ensuing days, thousands of white servicemen joined the attacks, marching abreast down streets, entering bars and movie houses and assaulting any young Latino males they encountered. In one incident, sailors dragged two zoot suiters on-stage as a film was being screened, stripped them in front of the audience, and then urinated on their suits.^[17] Although police accompanied the rioting servicemen, they had orders not to arrest any of them. After several days, more than 150 people had been injured and police had arrested more than 500 Latinos on charges ranging from "rioting" to "vagrancy".^[5]

A witness to the attacks, journalist Carey McWilliams wrote,

"Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot suiter they could find. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ran up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked from their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy."^[24]

The local press lauded the attacks by the servicemen, describing the assaults as having a "cleansing effect" that were ridding Los Angeles of "miscreants" and "hoodlums".^[25] As the riots progressed the media reported the arrest of Amelia Venegas, a female zoot suiter charged with carrying a brass knuckleduster. While the revelation of female pachucos' (pachucas) involvement in the riots led to frequent coverage of the activities of female pachuco gangs, the media suppressed any mention of the Anglo-American pachuco gangs that were also involved.^[17]

The Los Angeles City Council approved a resolution criminalizing the wearing of "zoot suits with reat [sic] pleats within the city limits of LA" after Councilman Norris Nelson stated "The zoot suit has become a badge of hoodlumism". No ordinance was ever approved by the City Council or signed into law by the Mayor, although the council did encourage the War Production Board to take steps "to curb illegal production of men's clothing in violation of WPB limitation orders." White sailors and Marines had initially targeted only pachucos, African-Americans in zoot suits were also attacked in the Central Avenue corridor area. This escalation compelled the Navy and Marine Corps command staffs to intervene on June 7, confining sailors and Marines to barracks and declaring Los Angeles off limits to all military personnel with enforcement by U.S. Navy Shore Patrol personnel. Their official position remained that their men were acting in self defense.^[5]

By the middle of June, the riots in Los Angeles were dying out but the riots spread throughout California and to cities in Texas and Arizona while incidents broke out in northern cities such as Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia, where two members of Gene Krupa's dance band were beaten up for wearing the band's zoot suit stage costumes. A zoot suit riot at Cooley High School in Detroit, Michigan was initially dismissed as an "adolescent imitation" of the Los Angeles riots; however, within weeks, Detroit was in the midst of the worst race riot in its history.^[17]

As the riots subsided, nation-wide public condemnation of the military and civil officials followed. The most urgent concern of officials, however, was relations with Mexico, as the economy of Southern California relied on the importation of Mexican labor to assist in the harvesting of California crops. After the Mexican Embassy lodged a formal protest with the State Department, Governor Earl Warren of California ordered the creation of the McGucken committee to investigate and determine the cause of the riots.^[17] In 1943, the committee issued its report; it determined racism to be a central cause of the riots, further stating that it was "an aggravating practice (of the media) to link the phrase zoot suit with the report of a crime." The governor appointed the Peace Officers Committee on Civil Disturbances, chaired by Robert W. Kenny, president of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations to the police.^[26] Human relations committees were appointed and police departments were required to train their officers to treat all citizens equally.^[27] At the same time, Mayor Fletcher Bowron came to his own conclusion. The riots, he said, were caused by Mexican juvenile delinquents and by white Southerners, a group arising out of a region in which both overt legal and socially sanctioned white racial discrimination held sway until the 1960s. Racial prejudice, according to Mayor Bowron, was not a factor.^[27]

A week later, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the riots, which the local press had largely attributed to criminal actions by Mexican Americans, in her newspaper column. "The question goes deeper than just suits. It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should." – June 16, 1943^[27]

This led to an outraged response from the Los Angeles Times which printed an editorial the following day, in which it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having communist leanings and stirring "race discord".^[28]

On June 21, 1943, the State Un-American Activities Committee under State Senator Jack Tenney arrived in Los Angeles with orders to "determine whether the present Zoot Suit Riots were sponsored by Nazi agencies attempting to spread disunity between the United States and Latin-American countries." Although Tenney claimed he had evidence the riots were "[A]xis-sponsored", the evidence was never presented, although the claims were supported in the minds of the public by Japanese propaganda broadcasts accusing the United States' government of ignoring the brutality of U.S. Marines toward Mexicans. In late 1944, ignoring the findings of the McGucken committee and the unanimous reversal of the convictions in the Sleepy Lagoon case on October 4, the Tenney Committee announced that the National Lawyers Guild was an "effective communist front."^[17][26]

Many post-war activists such as Luis Valdez, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright have claimed that they were inspired by the Zoot Suit Riots. Cesar Chávez was a zoot suiter when he first became interested in politics and zoot suiter Malcolm X took part in the Harlem zoot suit riots.^[17]

• The Zoot Suit Riots form the backdrop for the events in the play Zoot Suit and the film based on the play.

• The Cherry Poppin' Daddies released a 1997 compilation album entitled Zoot Suit Riot: The Swingin' Hits of the Cherry Poppin' Daddies.

• The movie 1941 included a riot between servicemen and youths sporting zoot suits (another of this film's anachronisms was a re-enactment of The Great Los Angeles Air Raid).

• The riots feature in the prologue of the James Ellroy novel The Black Dahlia and a flashback scene in The Black Dahlia film takes place during the Zoot Suit Riots.

• The film American Me opened with a depiction of the riots, in which the main character Santana's mother is raped by sailors.

• The novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon features a small segment about zoot suits and the Zoot Suit Riots.

• The riots are mentioned in The Big Bang Theory episode The Psychic Vortex by Sheldon Cooper to Raj Koothrappali due to Raj wanting to "put on his best zoot suit" and go to " a salute to Swing music in the center court near Macy’s. 5pm to 9pm".

• Battle of Brisbane, Australia, 1942
• Battle of Manners Street in Wellington, New Zealand, 1943
• History of the Mexican Americans in Los Angeles

• Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (University of California Press, 2008)
• del Castillo, Richard Griswold (2000). "The Los Angeles 'Zoot Suit Riots' Revisited: Mexican and Latin American Perspectives". Mexican Studies. 16 (2): 367–91. doi:10.1525/msem.2000.16.2.03a00080. JSTOR 1052202.
• Mazon, Maurizio. The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. 2002 ISBN 0-292-79803-2 ISBN 9780292798038
• Pagan, Eduardo Obregon (2000). "Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943". Social Science History. 24: 223–56. doi:10.1215/01455532-24-1-223.
• Pagán, Eduardo Obregón. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race & Riots in Wartime L.A. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. ISBN 0-8078-5494-8 ISBN 9780807854945
• Zoot Suit Riots. American Experience series, produced by Joseph Tovares. WGBH Boston, 2001. 60 mins. PBS Video.

• Zoot Suit Riots. American Experience.
• A list of newspaper articles written about the Zoot Suit Riots.
• Images and primary source documents about the Zoot Suit Riots, from the University of California
• Cosgrove, Stuart (1984). "The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare". History Workshop Journal. 18: 77–91. doi:10.1093/hwj/18.1.77.