Dress and racial conflict in World War II Los Angeles
SPOILER ALERT: While this post doesn’t given away any plot points, it’s best read after listening to Season 2, Episode 7: “Riot.”
OLLIE: Dear Bet: Over the weekend war broke out between servicemen and zoot suiters in downtown Los Angeles and Mexican neighborhoods to the east…
I first learned about the Zoot Suit riots when I was 24 and saw the 1978 world premiere of Luis Valdez’ play Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Zoot Suit was the first professionally produced Chicano play and starred a young Edward James Olmos as “El Pachuco.” Seeing it with a predominantly — and hugely enthusiastic — Chicano audience in L.A. was a powerful experience that I remember well to this day. While I was a native Angeleno, my knowledge of the city’s Mexican heritage up to that point didn’t get much beyond Olvera Street, the touristy pedestrian street in the city’s historic center. ZOOT SUIT opened my eyes not just to the city’s Chicano population and its rich culture, but to the history of the discrimination against it.
The seeds of the 1943 riots were laid a year before in 1942. (The following is largely taken from Wikipedia.) The rapid influx of laborers from Mexico into Los Angeles after Pearl Harbor heightened racial tensions in the city. At the same time, the zoot suit was not only a large trend for Mexican-American “pachuco” youth, but was associated by white citizens with juvenile delinquency. Fueled by sensationalist headlines about an increase in crimes by Mexican-American youth in the Los Angeles Times, Examiner and Herald-Express, opinions against these youth created a prejudicial environment when the Sleepy Lagoon murder case made national news.
Sleepy Lagoon was a reservoir beside the Los Angeles River. Popular among Mexican-Americans in the early 1940s, it got its nickname from the popular song “Sleepy Lagoon” recorded by big band leader Harry James. After a party confrontation with “pachucos” from the 38th Street neighborhood, a man named José Díaz was found with injuries from which he soon died. While the cause of the death was never clearly identified, and there was little evidence linking them, the LAPD quickly arrested and charged seventeen men from the “38th Street gang.” Denied due process in a kangaroo trial — in which an “expert witness” from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department testified that Mexicans as a community had a ‘blood-thirst’ and a ‘biological predisposition’ to crime and killing — the seventeen were convicted of either murder or assault, three of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. The convictions were ultimately overturned, but the case generated much animosity within the city and the country toward Mexican-Americans. The police and press characterized all Mexican youths as “pachuco hoodlums and baby gangsters.”
Meanwhile, American soldiers, sailors, and Marines from across the country travelled to Los Angeles in large numbers as part of the war effort, most coming from parts of the country with little experience or knowledge of Mexican-American culture. Servicemen and zoot suiters in Los Angeles were immediately identifiable by their dress. Government officials, meanwhile, cast the wearing of zoot suits in moral terms and associated it with the commission of petty crime, violence and the snubbing of national wartime rules. Servicemen grew increasingly resentful of young Latinos wearing zoot suits in defiance of wartime clothing restrictions. Although Mexican-Americans were overrepresented in the armed forces, they were not common or respected enough to defuse these tensions. Repeated clashes between servicemen and zoot suiters in April and May of 1943 led to servicemen — especially sailors undergoing training at the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center near Chavez Ravine — taking to the streets from June 3 to June 8 to hunt down “zoot suiters,” beat them and strip them of their suits.
The predisposition against Mexican-Americans was such that this vigilante activity was largely applauded. This was especially true of the city’s major newspapers, which, in their coverage of the violence, hardly disguised whose side they were on. The article below from the Los Angeles Times — an excerpt of which Ollie “reads” in Episode 7 — is a good example:
“Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights…”
(Note: All the newspaper “articles” in Season 2 that deal with the riots — or events leading up to them — are the actual ones published.)
When I first got the idea for the story of ON THE TINSEL FRONT, I knew that at one point I wanted to have Ollie witness this dark chapter in the city’s World War II history. I struggled to figure out how to do that until the character of Julie — the young Mexican-American woman working as an animator at Leon Schlesinger Productions — came into focus, and with her the scenes of Ollie accompanying her through the gauntlet of downtown Los Angeles on the riot’s climactic evening.
I was most fortunate in casting actor Michael Uribes, who, in addition to Lt. Murray, plays the roles of the Bleeding Boy and Julie’s brother Miguel. Michael played “El Pachuco” in a production of Zoot Suit staged by Luis Valdez’s theatre company “El Teatro Campesino” in San Juan Baptista, California, a production directed by Valdez himself. Consequently having a deep understanding of the Riots and the pachuco culture of the era, Michael shared it with me, prompting some critical rewriting. Much thanks to him. (See Michael’s bio on the websites Cast page.)
***
Leave a Reply