Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Zoot Suit Riot

WYTS:  Los Angeles Chargers. Original post here.

I learned today's story from a very reliable primary source, the Cherry Poppin' Daddies. This is the 1943 Zoot Suit Riot. It is what happens when your smoke is too tough, swag is too different, your bitch is too bad.

Mexicans had been living in California for as long as there had been a California, because this was Mexico before we conquered it. The question of what exactly "Latin" meant in terms of the American racial caste system was difficult one. In many parts of the Jim Crow South, the locals were not really sure what to do with Mexican Americans. Which water fountain should they drink out of? In some places they were accepted as white, with backing from the Mexican Government asking the US to define its people as such. (Mexico’s own racial politics are a whole can of worms that I’m going to avoid right now.) In New Orleans, Mexicans were treated as an "in-between" racial element, a role also played by Chinese Louisianians or even Italians in certain eras.

In 1940s, California, they were decidedly the out-group. To quote one of my favorite podcasts, "the social is predicated by its exclusions", and whatever "White" meant in Los Angeles, it meant "non-Mexican".

Los Angeles was a lot like Detroit in the early 20th century, booming and ever so full of racial tensions. The city had new aqueducts to bring water to the desert. It was importing vast populations thanks to an exciting new industry: oil. (And also Hollywood, I guess. And tourism. And farming. A lot was going on here right now.) But these diverse populations came with the same racial bullshit that defined everywhere else in the US, maybe even more so here on the wild frontier. Black Angelinos would have a very interesting history here, to say the least. But Mexicans were just as feared by the whites in power. Southern California was a hardcore bastion of reactionary politics until at least Reagan.

Thanks for that, btw.

A lot had happened in the 20th century between the US and Mexico. There was the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, which on the whole, was largely a good thing. I’m anti-Porfiriato. But it had disrupted the lives of millions of Mexicans who fled north. Guys like Pancho Villa had also terrified the Southwest in an invasion that was really more of a stunt, and our counter-invasion into Chihuahua and Vera Cruz was much more real. The border was not really a solid thing yet, nor did people really want it to be, so many Mexicans migrated back and forth easily, legally or otherwise. In the 1930s, the US government kicked out something between 1-2 million Mexicans, many US citizens, with the support of their southern neighbor's government. The issue of “illegals” would not really be a thing until the 1950s, and even then, not many cared until Fox News decided it was the issue of the century in about 2005. You can just manufacture a grievance all at once out of thin air if you're hateful enough, I remember seeing it happen in real time.

In 1940, California housed most of the US Pacific Fleet’s battleship squadron, this area was a major defense industry bastion. Then those ships sailed off to Pearl Harbor. Most of them were destroyed by torpedo bombers, as Japan suddenly and deliberately attacked Josh Harnett and Ben Affleck's love triangle. WWII was now here, and the West Coast was terrified. There was a good chance you personally knew a sailor who had seen combat already. In February 1942 a single Japanese sub bombarded the coast of Santa Barbara, the high point of Imperial Japan's extremely unsuccessful submarine warfare ambition, the US would do much much worse in return with our own unrestricted submarine operations (but that's off-topic). That one sub did minimal damage and would never be back, but that was enough to set the panic going. Soon enough, California needed an enemy and found whoever they could. Japanese internment would begin right around this time, not a particularly glorious chapter in our history.

The terror was so intense that sometimes LA would just freak out at nothing, such as the Battle of Los Angeles on February 24th-25th, where the air raid defenses fired at empty skies. (Or maybe it was aliens: OOoooOOOooooOoOo.)

Finally let's discuss the Pachucos and Pachucas, or as American newspapers called them "the Zoot Suiters". These were the Mexican American youth, dressing in flashy colorful clothes with big baggy pants and wide shoulders. (Picture Jim Carry as The Mask or Tom the Cat in a giant suit.) It was a look that was instantly iconic and these fits still slap today. At the time they were immensely popular in both Mexican and Black Jazz scenes. A young Malcolm X wore a Zoot Suit. These teenagers were deeply annoying, because teenagers are eternally annoying. The more they bothered their parents and the white neighbors, it only encouraged them to be more flashy, a classic dynamic of counter-cultures. But they became all the more annoying once the entire country was at war and so partying to Benny Goodman was a little tone-deaf. There was a female variety of Zoot Suits, with short skirts or even shockingly wearing pants, which very much also bothered white LA.

The local newspapers railed against these kids constantly, fixating on mostly imagined gang violence. (You know, the more I study these events, the more I notice that newspapers are inciting these racial tensions. Is the daily spew of anti-Muslim hatred on the cover of The New York Post or the NYT obsession with trans athletes some new degradation of the fourth estate, or is it that daily journalism just is fundamentally a force for evil?)

The papers needed the right event to get the bigotry ball rolling. There was a lot of corruption in LA's government in the '40s. Big surprise, I know, there's only been an entire genre of LA Noir about this topic from Roger Rabbit on up. The police and City Hall were all too happy to join in the act and get eyes focused anywhere aside from water and land schemes you’d remember from the movie Chinatown.

On August 2nd, 1942, a 22-year-old farmworker named José Gallardo Díaz, was enjoying one of his last nights before his enlistment in the US Army began. During the party, some altercation happened, the details are unclear, and would be made impossible to verify thanks to what happened next. Maybe it was gang violence, maybe the poor kid just got robbed, or it was even a car accident. We'll never know. Whatever happened, in the morning Díaz was found nearly dead by the Sleepy Lagoon Reservoir, and he passed away shortly afterwards.

The fact this case is so flimsy tells me there was no “Mexican crime wave”, as imagined by the papers. Some West Side Story rumbles, sure, but that seems to be it. This mysterious maybe-murder is the best you could find? You’d have a better chance solving the Black Dahlia case than this one.

The LAPD, in iconic fashion, just rounded up as many Mexican Pachuco youths as they could find. They beat the crap out of the "baby gangsters" until they got whatever confessions they needed. The newspapers were hysterical about the Sleepy Lagoon Murder. Seventeen kids were put on trial with next to no evidence, twelve convicted of second-degree murder. It was one of the largest trials in California history, and was complete nonsense at its face. In 1944 all the convictions were overturned with the help of several celebrities, including Orson Wells.

Things were very inflamed, especially since more Mexican laborers were traveling north to pick up the holes in agriculture the war was creating. Another migration pattern was the massive influxes of sailors and marines from around the country. You have these guys getting off the bus or train, seeing Pachuca girls, some making a remark. And then boom, a fight breaks out. The tensions between uniforms and Zoot Suits grew until June '43.

On June 3rd, 1943, 11 sailors got off a bus in LA and got into an argument with a Pachuco youth. We should note that by this point, the Zoot Suiters were children, 13-16 maybe. Everybody older would going to war or busy on the farms. Against them were really kids too, but still 18-year-old adults, freshly trained to spend years fighting the Japanese from the Solomons to Okinawa. One Pachuco got very mouthy and flashed a Nazi salute, a brawl started, and a seaman ended up with a broken jaw. On June 4th, 200 sailors drove out to East LA, found every boy they could wearing a color other than gray, striped them to their underwear, and burnt their Zoot Suits as a prize of battle.

At this point the whole thing was chaos. A week passed with servicemen attacking random Mexican kids, burning their clothes, or even pissing on them to punctuate their distaste for anything non-Anglo. Remember, this is an era where most white Americans would drop dead on the spot from a half teaspoon of cumin powder. The LAPD did very little to stop any of this, instead arresting 500 Pachucos "for their safety". Mostly they did not want the bad imagery of doing some un-patriotic riot breaking of the Greatest Generation. The media pretended the whole thing was a Mexican race riot. It was unimaginable the US military would ever cause a riot anywhere. This could never happen again anywhere else in WWII... certainly not in say, Lancashire or Bristol or Brisbane or Sydney or Wellington… Okay, this would happen a lot, actually.

What quelled the riots was just that the story became very bad press. The navy was embarrassed to have their men involved with street brawls. The local bases just cancelled all leave and confined the sailors and marines to their barracks. That worked surprisingly well, and by June 8th the riots were over. There were hundreds of injuries and many hundreds more arrests, only of Mexican youths. But there are actually no reported deaths. LA did not burn down or anything.

The Zoot Suit Riot is a very famous event. As a kid, I remember seeing coverage of it on the History Channel, and they wouldn't touch something like Pittsburgh's labor riots with a 50 foot pole. But as riots go in the US, this is mild. I’m grading on a curve, of course.

It was, however, a major flashpoint for Latin American/Chicano Civil Rights movements, who would only grow in importance throughout the century. This was a big moment to develop an identity as Mexican Americans, part of the proud mythology that defined a new culture. Even at the time, Eleanor Roosevelt condemned the city's response as clear Anti-Mexican racism - for which she was called a dirty Communist. Luis Valdez wrote a play called Zoot Suit about these events, which was made into a movie in 1988. You could have just watched that instead of reading this. (Let me know how it is.)

The LAPD and city government insisted there was no racial bias in their actions here, and we can certainly trust them. LA police brutality would never be an issue for them ever again… unless there's another football team in this city, and we have another story to tell... That sounds like ominous foreshadowing...