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*The Zoot Suit riots are the subject of the swing song "Hey Pachuco" by the [[Royal Crown Revue]] which was used in ''[[The Mask]]''.
*The Zoot Suit riots are the subject of the swing song "Hey Pachuco" by the [[Royal Crown Revue]] which was used in ''[[The Mask]]''.
*The 1992 film [[American Me]] begins with the Zoot Suit Riots, in which the mother of the protoganist Montoya Santana (based on [[Rodolfo Cadena]]) is raped by white sailors. It later becomes a crucial plot point as the film recounts Santana's life and the rise of the [[Mexican Mafia]].
*The 1992 film [[American Me]] begins with the Zoot Suit Riots, in which the mother of the protoganist Montoya Santana (based on [[Rodolfo Cadena]]) is raped by white sailors. It later becomes a crucial plot point as the film recounts Santana's life and the rise of the [[Mexican Mafia]].
*In the 2011 Video game L.A Noire, a character Stefan Bekowsky mentions that he got a commendation for bravery during "The Zoot Suit Riots. Further more, there is a optional side mission called "Zoot Suit Riot" although this refers to the suits themselves not the actual riots.


==See also==
==See also==

Revision as of 09:37, 3 January 2012

"Zoot Suit Riot" redirects here. For the album by the Cherry Poppin' Daddies, see Zoot Suit Riot (album). For that album's title song, see Zoot Suit Riot (song).

The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of riots in 1943 during World War II that erupted in Los Angeles, California between white sailors and Marines stationed throughout the city and Latino youths, who were recognizable by the zoot suits they favored. While Mexican Americans and military servicemen were the main parties in the riots, African American and Filipino/Filipino American youth were also involved.[1] The Zoot Suit Riots were in part the effect of the infamous Sleepy Lagoon murder which involved 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, Detroit, Evansville, Philadelphia, and New York.[2]

History

The riots began in Los Angeles, amidst a period of rising tensions between white male American servicemen stationed in southern California and Los Angeles' Mexican-American community. Although Mexican-American men were, for their numbers, disproportionately overrepresented in the military, many white servicemen resented seeing so many Latinos socializing in clothing many considered unpatriotic and extravagant in wartime.[3][4]

Origins

Zoot suits. 1942

During the 20th century, in addition to those whose families had already been in the American Southwest before 1848, many Mexicans emigrated from Mexico to places such as Texas, Arizona and California.[5] In the early 1930s in Los Angeles County, more than 12,000 people of Mexican descent — including many American citizens —[6] were deported to Mexico (see Mexican Repatriation). Despite some 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.[7] The Latinos were segregated into an area of the city with the oldest, most run-down housing.[7] In addition to this, job discrimination in Los Angeles forced many Mexicans to work for below-poverty level wages.[8][9] The Los Angeles newspapers described Mexicans by using racially inflammatory propaganda.[10][11][12] These factors caused much racial tension between Latinos and whites.[13]

It was during the late 1930s that young Latinos in California, for whom the media usually used the then derogatory term Chicanos, created a youth culture.[14][15] 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 among the broader community[citation needed]. In the summer of 1942 the Sleepy Lagoon case made national news when teenage members of the 38th Street Gang were accused of murdering a man named Jose Diaz in an abandoned quarry pit. This case 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[citation needed].” Although ultimately the convictions of the nine young men were overturned, the case caused much animosity toward Mexican Americans. Much of this animosity had to do with the police and press characterizing all Mexican youth as "pachuco hoodlums and baby gangsters."[16][17]

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 white 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, 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."[18] 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 guide lines. However, the demand for zoot-suits did not decline and a network of bootleg tailors based in Los Angeles and New York 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. [19]

Immediate runup to the riots

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 other places. The most serious of these acts of violence broke out in Los Angeles.

Two conflicts between Mexicans and 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 women on the opposite side of the street. With the exception of Coleman and another soldier, the group crossed the street to approach 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 a “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 to the ground unconscious, breaking his jaw in two places. On the opposite side of the street, young men attacked the servicemen out of nowhere. In the midst of this battle, the service men managed to fight their way to Coleman and drag him to safety. [20]

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. It was then that the sailors claimed that they were jumped and beaten by this gang of zoot suiters. When the LAPD responded to the incident, many of them off duty officers, they called themselves the Vengeance Squad and 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 taxi cabs and headed for East Los Angeles. When the sailors spotted their first victims, most of them 12-13 year old boys, they clubbed the boys and adults that were trying 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 who were wearing zoot suits. It was with this attack that the Zoot Suit Riots started.[21]

The riots themselves

"Authorities meet to discuss the Zoot Suit Riots" (photo: Los Angeles Daily News)

As the violence escalated over the ensuing days, thousands of servicemen joined the attacks, marching abreast down streets, entering bars and movie houses and assaulting any young Latino males they encountered. 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 from "rioting" to "vagrancy".[4]

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."[22]

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".[23] The Los Angeles City Council approved a resolution banning the wearing of "zoot suits" after Councilman Norris Nelson stated "The zoot suit has become a badge of hoodlumism". But no ordinance was ever approved by the City Council or signed into law by the Mayor. White sailors and Marines had initially targeted only pachucos, but 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.[4]

Reactions

As the riots subsided, nationwide public condemnation of the military and civil officials followed with the governor ordering the creation of the McGucken committee to investigate and determine the cause of the riots. 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 a "Peace Officers Committee on Civil Disturbances" chaired by Robert W. Kenny, president of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations to the police.[24] Human relations committees were appointed and police departments were required to train their officers to treat all citizens equally.[25] 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. Racial prejudice was not a factor.[25]

A week later First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the riots in her newspaper column, which the local press had largely attributed to criminal actions by the Mexican-American community.

"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 Eleanor Roosevelt[25]

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".[26]

On June 21, 1943 the State Un-American Activities Committee under State Senator Jack Tenney arrived in Los Angeles to determine if Communists had deliberately fostered the zoot suit riots. 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."[24]

See also

References

  1. ^ With Style: Filipino Americans and the Making of American Urban Culture
  2. ^ "Everything you need to know about Latino history" By Himilce Novas, pg. 98 - Google Books
  3. ^ Osgerby, Bill (2008). "Understanding the 'Jackpot Market': Media, Marketing, and the Rise of the American Teenager". In Patrick L. Jamieson & Daniel Romer, eds (ed.). The Changing Portrayal of Adolescents in the Media Since 1950. Nfvvzcew York: Oxford University Press US. pp. 31–32. ISBN 0-19-534295-X. {{cite encyclopedia}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
  4. ^ a b c Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots Los Angeles Almanac
  5. ^ U.S. Bureau of Census (1960). "C". Historical statistics of the United States: colonial times to 1957. Vol. 62. Washington, DC: Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Govt. Print Off., 1960. pp. 57–58. Retrieved 2010-09-11.
  6. ^ Johnson, Kevin (Fall 2005). "The Forgotten "Repatriation" of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons for the "War on Terror"". Davis, California: Pace Law Review.
  7. ^ a b Obregón Pagán, Eduardo (June 3, 2009). "2". Murder at The Sleepy Lagoon. ReadHowYouWant.com. pp. 23–28. ISBN 1442995017. Retrieved 2010-09-11.
  8. ^ Reisler, Mark (1976). By the sweat of their brow: Mexican immigrant labor in the United States, 1900-1940. Greenwood Press. pp. 95–97. ISBN 0837188946. Retrieved 2010-09-12. Mexican workers helped fulfill the unskilled labor needs of American industry as well as agriculture. Noting their availability at a time of declining European immigration and their willingness to accept low wages, nonagricultural employers began to rely upon Mexican workers as early as World War I.
  9. ^ Ryan, James Gilbert; Schlup, Leonard C. (2006). Historical dictionary of the 1940s. M.E. Sharpe. pp. 250–251. ISBN 076560440X. Retrieved 2010-09-12. The establishment of the Fair Employment Office and Coordinating Committee on Latin American Affairs and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs dealt specifically with Mexican American concerns. The prevailing racial violence ensured that federal efforts would continue, but discrimination lived on. By 1945, however, reforms were no longer deemed necessary [by the government]; protective innovations ceased, yet migration continued
  10. ^ Carey, McWilliams; Stewart, Dean; Gendar, Jeannine (2001). Fool's paradise: a Carey McWilliams reader. Heyday Books. pp. 180–183. ISBN 1890771414. Retrieved 2010-09-12. To appreciate the social significance of the Sleepy Lagoon case, it is necessary to have a picture of the concurrent events. The anti-Mexican press campaign which had been whipped up through the spring and early summer of 1942 finally brought recognition, from the officials, of the existence of an 'awful' situation in reference to 'Mexican juvenille delinquency.'
  11. ^ Obregón Pagán, Eduardo (June 3, 2009). Murder at The Sleepy Lagoon. ReadHowYouWant.com. pp. 130–132. Retrieved 2010-09-12. In the early stages of the grand jury investigation, many of the larger newspapers devoted no more than a few brief lines to [the Sleepy Lagoon trial]. Yet from the beginning, the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express latched on to the term 'Sleepy Lagoon' and immediately turned it on the accused youths. 'Goons of Sleepy Lagoon' was a favorite moniker that skewed the brief and otherwise bland reporting of the grand jury investigation and subsequent trial.
  12. ^ Rule, James B (1989). Theories of Civil Violence. Vol. 1. University of California Press. pp. 102–108. Retrieved 2010-09-12. The authors surveyed references to Mexicans in the Los Angeles Times during the period leading up to that city's anti-Mexican riots of 1943; these events were called 'zoot suit riots' at the time. Turner found that, as the riots approached, newspaper references to 'zoot suiters' rose whereas other references to Mexicans bearing less emotional and negative connotations declined. The zoot suit had become a symbol or code expression fo the 'bad' Mexican, even though it appeared that few of the Mexican youths involved in the ritos actually wore the notorious outfit.
  13. ^ Solomon, Larry. Roots of Justice Stories of Organizing in Communities of Color. New York: Chardon, 1998. Pg 22.
  14. ^ Vicki L. Ruiz & Virginia Sanchez Korrol, editors. Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. Indiana University Press, 2006.
    Long a disparaging term in Mexico, the term Chicano gradually transformed from a class-based term of derision to one of ethnic pride and general usage within Mexican-American communities beginning with the rise of the Chicano movement in the 1960s.
  15. ^ Maria Herrera-Sobek. Chicano folklore; a handbook. Greenwood Press 2006.
  16. ^ Richard. "The Los Angeles "Zoot Suit Riots" Revisited: Mexican and Latin American Perspectives." University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (2000): 367-91. JSTOR. Pg. 4.
  17. ^ Pagan, Eduardo O. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A., New York: The University of North Carolina, 2006. Pg. 159.
  18. ^ OE Schoeffler and W Gale Esquire's Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Men's Fashion New York 1973 p 24
  19. ^ http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u7sf/u7materials/cosgrove.html
  20. ^ Pagán, Eduardo O. (2000). "Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943". Social Science History. 24 (1): 223–256 [pp. 242–243]. doi:10.1215/01455532-24-1-223.
  21. ^ Alvarez, Luis A. (2001). The Power of the Zoot: Race, Community, and Resistance in American Youth Culture, 1940-1945. Austin: University of Texas. p. 204.
  22. ^ Carey McWilliams. North From Mexico. Quoted in Richard Griswold del Castillo. The Los Angeles "Zoot Suit Riots" Revisited: Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 367-391.
  23. ^ Carey McWilliams. "Blood on the Pavements." In: Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader. Heyday Books, 2001. ISBN 9781890771416
  24. ^ a b My first forty years in california politics, 1922-1962 oral history transcript Robert W. Kenny
  25. ^ a b c "Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots". Los Angeles Almanac. Retrieved July 27, 2010.
  26. ^ Eduardo Obregón Pagán. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004.

Further reading

  • Del Castillo, Richard Griswold “The Los Angeles “Zoot Suit Riots” revisited: Mexican and Latin American Perspectives”. Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 367–391
  • Mazon, Maurizio. The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. 2002 ISBN 0292798032 ISBN 9780292798038
  • Pagan, Eduardo O. “Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943” Social Science History, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), 223-256
  • 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 0807854948 ISBN 9780807854945
  • Zoot Suit Riots. Produced by Joseph Tovares. WGBH Boston, 2001. 60 mins. PBS Video.
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