Zoot Suit Riots
Encyclopedia
The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of riot
s in 1943 during World War II
that erupted in Los Angeles
, California
between white sailors and Marines stationed throughout thehi c mlc city and Latino
youths, who were recognizable by the zoot suit
s 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. 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
.
There were several apparent causes for the riots. First there was racial tension between Mexicans and whites. 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. In the early 1930s in Los Angeles County, more than 12,000 people of Mexican descent — including many American citizens — 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. The Latinos were segregated into an area of the city with the oldest, most run-down housing. In addition to this, job discrimination in Los Angeles forced many Mexicans to work for below-poverty level wages. The Los Angeles newspapers described Mexicans by using racially inflammatory propaganda. These factors caused much racial tension between Latinos and whites.
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. 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 "Pachuco
s." 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. 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.” 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."
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." 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. In the fragile harmony of wartime society, the zoot-suiters were, according to Octavio Paz, "a symbol of love and joy or of horror and loathing, an embodiment of liberty, of disorder, of the forbidden."
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. It was as a result of this altercation, according to Eduardo Pagan, that the white servicemen believed that they were the only group capable of restoring order and white male dominance.
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 East 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.
A witness to the attacks, journalist Carey McWilliams wrote,
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". The Los Angeles City Council issued an ordinance banning the wearing of "zoot suits" after Councilman Norris Nelson stated "The zoot suit has become a badge of hoodlumism". 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.
, president of the National Lawyers Guild
to make recommendations to the police. Human relations committees were appointed and police departments were required to train their officers to treat all citizens equally. 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.
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
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".
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."
Riot
A riot is a form of civil disorder characterized often by what is thought of as disorganized groups lashing out in a sudden and intense rash of violence against authority, property or people. While individuals may attempt to lead or control a riot, riots are thought to be typically chaotic and...
s in 1943 during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
that erupted in Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
between white sailors and Marines stationed throughout thehi c mlc city and Latino
Latino
The demonyms Latino and Latina , are defined in English language dictionaries as:* "a person of Latin-American descent."* "A Latin American."* "A person of Hispanic, especially Latin-American, descent, often one living in the United States."...
youths, who were recognizable by the zoot suit
Zoot suit
A zoot suit is a suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing was popularized by African Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Italian Americans during the late 1930s and the 1940s...
s they favored. While Mexican Americans and military servicemen were the main parties in the riots, African American
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
and Filipino
Filipino people
The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines ....
/Filipino American
Filipino American
Filipino Americans are Americans of Filipino ancestry. Filipino Americans, often shortened to "Fil-Ams", or "Pinoy",Filipinos in what is now the United States were first documented in the 16th century, with small settlements beginning in the 18th century...
youth were also involved. The Zoot Suit Riots were in part the effect of the infamous Sleepy Lagoon murder
Sleepy Lagoon murder
Sleepy Lagoon murder was the name that newspapers and radio commentators used to describe the alleged murder of Jose Diaz, whose body was found on the Williams Ranch near a lagoon in southeast Los Angeles, California, on August 2, 1942...
which involved the death of a young Latino man in a barrio
Barrio
Barrio is a Spanish word meaning district or neighborhood.-Usage:In its formal usage in English, barrios are generally considered cohesive places, sharing, for example, a church and traditions such as feast days...
near Los Angeles.
The incident triggered similar attacks against Latinos in Beaumont
Beaumont Race Riot of 1943
The 1943 race riots in Beaumont, Texas, were a series of racially targeted violence during the summer months of 1943 in Beaumont, Texas. In 1942, a worsening of socioeconomic conditions nationally aggravated interracial tensions. Racial animosity and friction during the Jim Crow era were not...
, Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, San Diego, Detroit
Detroit Race Riot (1943)
The Detroit Race Riot broke out in Detroit, Michigan in June 1943 and lasted for three days before Federal troops restored order. The rioting between blacks and whites began on Belle Isle on 20 June 1943 and continued until 22 June, killing 34, wounding 433, and destroying property valued at $2...
, Evansville
Evansville, Indiana
Evansville is the third-largest city in the U.S. state of Indiana and the largest city in Southern Indiana. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 117,429. It is the county seat of Vanderburgh County and the regional hub for both Southwestern Indiana and the...
, Philadelphia, and New York
Harlem Riot of 1943
The Harlem Riot of 1943 took place in the borough of Harlem on August 1, after an African American soldier was shot and wounded by a white New York policeman.-Cause:...
.
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 over represented in the military, many white servicemen resented seeing so many Latinos socializing in clothing many considered unpatriotic and extravagant in wartime.Origins
Mexican Repatriation
The Mexican Repatriation refers to a mass migration that took place between 1929 and 1939, when as many as 500,000 people of Mexican descent were forced or pressured to leave the US. The event, carried out by American authorities, took place without due process. Some 35,000 were deported, amongst...
). 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. The Latinos were segregated into an area of the city with the oldest, most run-down housing. In addition to this, job discrimination in Los Angeles forced many Mexicans to work for below-poverty level wages. The Los Angeles newspapers described Mexicans by using racially inflammatory propaganda. These factors caused much racial tension between Latinos and whites.
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. They adopted their own music, language and dress. For the men, the style was to wear a zoot suit
Zoot suit
A zoot suit is a suit with high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers, and a long coat with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. This style of clothing was popularized by African Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Italian Americans during the late 1930s and the 1940s...
— a flamboyant long coat with baggy pegged pants, a pork pie hat, a long key chain and shoes with thick soles. They called themselves "Pachuco
Pachuco
Pachucos are Chicano youths who developed their own subculture during the 1930s and 1940s in the Southwestern United States. They wore distinctive clothing and spoke their own dialect of Mexican Spanish, called Caló or Pachuco...
s." In the early 1940s, many arrests and negative stories in the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
fueled a negative perception of these pachuco gangs among the broader community. 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
Anti-Mexican sentiment
Anti-Mexican sentiment is a fear, distrust, stereotype, hostility and aversion of people of Mexican descent, Mexican culture and/or the Spanish language...
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.” 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."
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." 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. In the fragile harmony of wartime society, the zoot-suiters were, according to Octavio Paz, "a symbol of love and joy or of horror and loathing, an embodiment of liberty, of disorder, of the forbidden."
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. It was as a result of this altercation, according to Eduardo Pagan, that the white servicemen believed that they were the only group capable of restoring order and white male dominance.
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 East 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.
The riots themselves
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".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."
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". The Los Angeles City Council issued an ordinance banning the wearing of "zoot suits" after Councilman Norris Nelson stated "The zoot suit has become a badge of hoodlumism". 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
Shore patrol
Shore patrol are service members that are provided to aid in security for the U.S. Navy, United States Coast Guard, United States Marine Corps, and the British Royal Navy while on shore...
personnel. Their official position remained that their men were acting in self defense.
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. KennyRobert W. Kenny
Robert Walker Kenny was the 21st Attorney General of California. Kenny, a Democrat, was an early advocate for civil rights in California. Kenny restructured the California Department of Justice to be similar to the United States Department of Justice...
, president of the National Lawyers Guild
National Lawyers Guild
The National Lawyers Guild is an advocacy group in the United States "dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system . ....
to make recommendations to the police. Human relations committees were appointed and police departments were required to train their officers to treat all citizens equally. 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.
A week later First Lady
First Lady
First Lady or First Gentlemanis the unofficial title used in some countries for the spouse of an elected head of state.It is not normally used to refer to the spouse or partner of a prime minister; the husband or wife of the British Prime Minister is usually informally referred to as prime...
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international...
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
This led to an outraged response from the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
which printed an editorial the following day, in which it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having communist leanings and stirring "race discord".
On June 21, 1943 the State Un-American Activities Committee under State Senator Jack Tenney
Jack Tenney
Jack B. Tenney was an American politician who was noted for leading anti-communist investigations in California in the 1940s and early 1950s. Tenney was also the composer of several well-known songs, most notably "Mexicali Rose"....
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
Sleepy Lagoon murder
Sleepy Lagoon murder was the name that newspapers and radio commentators used to describe the alleged murder of Jose Diaz, whose body was found on the Williams Ranch near a lagoon in southeast Los Angeles, California, on August 2, 1942...
on October 4, the Tenney Committee announced that the National Lawyers Guild
National Lawyers Guild
The National Lawyers Guild is an advocacy group in the United States "dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system . ....
was an "effective communist front."
In popular culture
- The riots were the inspiration for a play written by Luis ValdezLuis ValdezLuis Valdez is an American playwright, writer and film director.He is regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the United States.-Education:...
— Zoot SuitZoot Suit (play)Zoot Suit is a play written by Luis Valdez, featuring incidental music by Daniel Valdez and Lalo Guerrero, the "father of Chicano music." Zoot Suit is a fictionalized version of the real-life Sleepy Lagoon murder trial – when a group of Chicano youths were charged with a murder that they did...
, which itself inspired the 19811981 in film-Events:*January 19 - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquires beleaguered concurrent United Artists. UA was humiliated by the astronomical losses on the $40,000,000 movie Heaven's Gate, a major factor in the decision of owner Transamerica to sell it....
filmed versionZoot Suit (film)Zoot Suit is a 1981 filmed version of the Broadway play Zoot Suit. Both the play and film were written and directed by Luis Valdez. The film stars Daniel Valdez, Edward James Olmos — both reprising their roles from the stage production — and Tyne Daly. Many members of the cast of the...
. - A murder mystery novelNovelA novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, The Zoot Suit MurdersThe Zoot Suit MurdersThe Zoot Suit Murders by Thomas Sanchez is a murder mystery set in Los Angeles of the 1940s and employing the true historical events of the Zoot suit riots as a backdrop....
by Thomas SanchezThomas SanchezTomás Sánchez was a 16th century Spanish Jesuit and famous casuist.- Life :In 1567 he entered the Society of Jesus. He was at first refused admittance on account of an impediment in his speech; however, after imploring delivery from this impediment before a picture of Mary at Córdoba, Spain, his...
, employs the riots as a backdrop to the main mystery. - A swingSwing (genre)Swing music, also known as swing jazz or simply swing, is a form of jazz music that developed in the early 1930s and became a distinctive style by 1935 in the United States...
album called Zoot Suit RiotZoot Suit Riot (album)Zoot Suit Riot: The Swingin' Hits of the Cherry Poppin' Daddies is a compilation album by American ska-swing band the Cherry Poppin' Daddies, released on March 18, 1997 on Space Age Bachelor Pad Records....
, featuring a song of the same nameZoot Suit Riot (song)"Zoot Suit Riot" is a song by American ska-swing band the Cherry Poppin' Daddies. It was written and composed by Steve Perry as a bonus track for the band's all-swing compilation album of the same name, and thus follows a musical style similar to 1940s jump swing."Zoot Suit Riot" is often cited as...
, was released by the American band Cherry Poppin' DaddiesCherry Poppin' DaddiesThe Cherry Poppin' Daddies are an American band established in Eugene, Oregon, in 1989. Formed by Steve Perry and Dan Schmid , the band has experienced many membership changes over the years, with only Perry, Schmid and Dana Heitman currently remaining from the original line-up.The Daddies' music...
in 1997. - In The Black DahliaThe Black Dahlia (novel)The Black Dahlia is a neo-noir crime novel by American author James Ellroy, taking inspiration from the true story of the murder of Elizabeth Short. It is widely considered to be the book that elevated Ellroy out of typical genre fiction status, and with which he started to garner critical...
by James EllroyJames EllroyLee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a so-called "telegraphic" prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black...
, the main characters are policemen involved in the riot. The 2006 movie version of the novel The Black DahliaThe Black Dahlia (film)The Black Dahlia is a 2006 neo noir crime film directed by Brian De Palma. It is based on the novel of the same name by James Ellroy, writer of L.A. Confidential and starred Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart and Hilary Swank. The story is based on the murder of Elizabeth Short...
opens with a depiction of the riot. - FireworksFireworks (1947 film)Fireworks is a homoerotic experimental film by Kenneth Anger. Filmed in his parents' Beverly Hills, California, home over a long weekend while they were away, the film stars Anger and explicitly explores themes of homosexuality and sado-masochism...
, an underground film by Kenneth AngerKenneth AngerKenneth Anger is an American underground experimental filmmaker, occasional actor and author...
, depicts a dream inspired by the Zoot Suit Riots, as reported by the author as an audio commentary to the 2007 DVDDVDA DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
release. - The Zoot Suit riots are the subject of the swing song "Hey Pachuco" by the Royal Crown RevueRoyal Crown RevueThe Royal Crown Revue is a band formed in 1989 in Los Angeles, California. They are often credited with starting the Swing Revival movement. Live, RCR has been extremely successful: They participated in 1998's Vans Warped Tour, opened for the B-52s and The Pretenders and played at major US Jazz...
which was used in The MaskThe MaskThe Mask is a Dark Horse comic book series created by writer John Arcudi and artist Doug Mahnke, and based on a concept by publisher Mike Richardson. The series follows a magical mask which imbues the wearer with reality-bending powers and physical imperviousness, as well as bypassing the wearer's...
.
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.
External links
- Zoot Suit Riots. American ExperienceAmerican ExperienceAmerican Experience is a television program airing on the Public Broadcasting Service Public television stations in the United States. The program airs documentaries, many of which have won awards, about important or interesting events and people in American history...
. - 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
- Stuart Cosgrove, The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare, History Workshop Journal. Vol. 18 (Autumn 1984)