Zoot Suit Riots: A Study of Hate and Hats

There are a few moments in American history that can sum up an entire movement. The Zoot-Suit Riots exposed the ironic racism during World War II, showed how the war effort back on American soil could be the cause of dismay and corruption, and encompassed the groundwork for a social revolution dealing with racial prejudices. The city of Los Angeles provides the prefect scenery for this event, a city of many, many races and cultures, crammed into an industrial machine of white-washed society. The Zoot-Suit Riots provide for a part of American history that often gets overshadowed by the war: the embedded racism at home, while ironically trying to fight racism abroad.

Los Angeles, 1943, was a tough town to be in. Conflicted and stretched because of the way, citizens witnessed the containment of Asian Americans and the estrangement of African Americans. However, for ten days in June, Los Angeles would feel the pinch of a new racial movement, spurred by the ten days of abuse towards Mexican Americans. Already, there was tension between Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans, mainly centered on labor disputes. The tension added by the war, the draft, and United States policy on racial prejudice only sped up this time bomb of racial and societal tension. On June 3, “[m]arching 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”. 1 These were not only Mexican Americans, but also African Americans and Filipinos.

What was soon called the Zoot-Suit Riots was sparked by the Sleepy Lagoon affair, which took place in December of the previous year. Very simply, the affair centered on the murder of a Mexican-American who was part of this zoot-suit generation. The murder brought into public life the image of the Mexican, zoot-suit wearing gangster, prone to violence and chaos. David E. Hayes-Bautista comments that, “The Sleepy Lagoon trial and the subsequent ‘Zoot-Suit’ Riots in Los Angeles seemed to prove that Richard Henry Dana was right about those lazy, fatalistic, present-oriented Latinos”. 2 Even local government officials sponsored this outrageous notion of stereotyping. For example:

The Los Angeles County sheriff, Captain E. Duran Ayers, testified that the murder was, no doubt, a result of the uniquely Latino racial character traits of the defendants: “The Mexican element… desire[s] to kill, or at least let blood… When there is added to this inborn characteristic that has come through the ages, the use of liquor, then we certainly have crimes of violence”. 3

This image of the Mexican American stuck in the minds of the American people during the riots the following June. Those zoot-suiters that were convicted were all Mexican Americans and were treated quite unfairly during their imprisonment and also their trial. This only added to the image of the Mexican gangster.

The riots themselves were caused by a rumor that a group of zoot-suiters attacked a group of servicemen, who were stationed in Los Angeles, because they were flirting with some Mexican American women. Whether or not this was true, the rumor itself inspired hundred of servicemen, mainly sailors with the Navy, to roam the streets of Los Angeles, expressing their anger at the group. Hayes-Bautista describes the event stating, a number of servicemen descended on downtown and East Los Angeles and attacked zoot-suited Latinos, stripping them of their symbolically offensive clothing and beating them”.4 However, these victims were not defended and many were blamed for the riots themselves, being further abused and arrested by law enforcement. The Los Angeles Police Department turned what they considered a patriotic blind eye to the crimes of the servicemen, seeing the riots as a way of cleaning up the streets of the city. In can be said that “the victims of mob violence were portrayed as deviants whose dress seemed to demand rebuke”. 5 Hundreds of Mexican Americans were arrested during and after the ten day raid and many were convicted of weapons and public indecency, although no servicemen were convicted and only a handful arrested. Providing the press coverage that saw these zoot-suiters as victims, Time Magazine criticized the Los Angeles Police Department reporting that:

Scores of Mexican youths had been stripped of their pants (some of them on the stages of movie houses), beaten and then arrested by the Los Angeles police for "vagrancy" and "rioting." (The police practice was to accompany the caravans in police cars, watch the beatings and then jail the victims. Their orders apparently were to let the Shore Patrol and the Military Police handle the rioting sailors. The service police were futile.).6

However, most of the press saw these zoot-suiters as delinquents and mobsters rather than victims.

The press coverage of the riots did not help the Mexican American cause. Most of the press covered the story much like the following:

Subdued and no longer ready to do battle, twenty-eight zoot-suiters, stripped of their garish clothing and with county jail barbers hopefully eyeing their flowing duck-tail haircuts, languished behind bars today after a second night of battle with of fleers and service men. The arrests came after a "war" declared by service men, mostly sailors, on zoos-suit gangs which have been preying on the East Side as well as molesting civilians. 7

With words such as “battle”, “garish”, “preying”, and “molesting”, it is very hard to look beyond the negative stereotype being enforced onto the deeper meanings of the riots themselves. In fact, “The press treated the affair as a joke rather than as a jeremiad, and nothing in the coverage was likely to provoke readers to think about the racial implications of the riots”. 8 This neglect for what was going on slowed the process for revealing the true nature of the riots.

But why were these zoot-suiters targeted in the first place? In the conventional history there seem to be two camps. The first is that zoot-suiters were seen as unpatriotic and anti-military. The second is supportive of the idea of deep-rooted racial hate. Both of these seem to be correct in their own way; however the combination of the two camps seems to be a better study that has not been explored in extent.

In regards to the first camp, many saw the zoot-suiters as unpatriotic because of their lifestyles. Many even saw the zoot-suits themselves as anti-American. Hayes-Bautista comments that:

The press reported public worries about the unpatriotic appearance and behavior of Latinos wearing zoot suits—long-waisted, wide-lapelled coats paired with baggy, chest-high pants with narrow cuffs. Newspapers editorialized about menacing crowds of these outlandishly dressed young men who were described as unpatriotic. 9

There were many reasons for this assumption. These youths were seen as wasting their time and not helping with the war effort. Portrayed as un-American draft dodgers, this lifestyle caused a rift between zoot-suiters and servicemen. The zoot-suits themselves were seen as showy and overly extravagant, things that people felt were not appropriate for wartime. The bright-colored suits drew attention to these young men (and some women) when people felt all focus should be on defeating the country’s enemies. Also, the lavish wardrobe suggested wealth, even though zoot-suits were worn mainly by the middle class youth. Considered a waste of much needed money and resources, the zoot-suiters, also known as pachucos, were generally looked at with disdain. This situation is well-described by Cosgrove:

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. 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.10

This view of a disregard for the restrictions imposed on a wartime society, coupled with the spreading stereotype of the young Mexican Americans, caused tension to run high concerning these individuals.

This tension was also aided by the growing paranoia about Mexico joining the Axis powers. Mexican immigration and labor was very important not only for the West, but also for the war effort. The Brachero Program, a very successful system for allowing Mexican laborers to temporarily live in the United States as long as they are working to manufacture war supplies, was considered “Mexico’s single most important contribution to the war effort”.11 In fact, the grip on Mexico was so tight, it inspired the Good Neighbor Policy of censoring materials published about Latinos. The United States government was very aware of Mexico’s threat to the war. So much so that the government did not interfere with the rioting servicemen until the Mexican Ambassador mentioned the crimes of hate that were occurring. Many historians believe that:

It was the fear of an international incident that could only have an adverse effect on California's economy, rather than any real concern for the social conditions of the Mexican American community, that motivated Governor Warren of California to order a public investigation into the causes of the riots. 12

The paranoia of Mexican alliances was so great that when investigating the Zoot-Suit Riots “[t]he un-American activities investigation was ordered 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’”.13 This paranoia was also assisted by the ingrained racism in American society.

Racism in America was nothing new at this point, and neither was racism towards Mexicans. Seen as a huge potential for cheap labor, Mexicans in the southwestern region of the country witnessed much racial hate and abuse from their employers, as well as neighboring Americans. Mexicans were considered ‘job-stealers’, taking low-end jobs for cheaper than the white man would. Due to these views, the negative image of Mexicans as lazy and corrupt spread throughout much of America. This, coupled with the fact that many of the servicemen stationed in Los Angeles at the time of the riots were not from the southwest and had never been personally exposed the Mexican Americans before, only knowing of the hate and stereotyping revealed by white audiences, leads to believe that the riots also had a lot of racial prejudice as backing. Ironically, these servicemen with such racist views were fighting a war against the oppression of a group based on their race, such as the Nazis were oppressing the Jews.

Many contemporary histories cover these previous statements of this study, usually leaning one way or another, but few address the reason why a Mexican American would wear a zoot-suit. These outfits came out of the jazz age and were coupled with a search for identity in a divided society. These youthful Mexican Americans did not see themselves as Mexican, like their parents, or as Americans, like the servicemen beating them. Therefore, they created their own culture, their own definition of who they were. Cosgrove, one of the only historians that address the wearing of the zoot-suit, comments that the zoot-suit was “an emblem of ethnicity and a way of negotiating an identity. The zoot-suit was a refusal: a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners of subservience”. 14 He goes on further to say the zoot-suit allowed these youths to “[flaunt] their difference rather than disguise their alienation”.15 The wearing of the zoot-suit, with the background of the racial and patriotic prejudices associated with them, would make for a great microhistory.

Studying this as a microhistory would provide a new look at the struggle of Mexican Americans during their migration and integration into American culture. It would also be beneficial when studying the idea of “the war at home” during World War II. This study would also be useful for the broader study of the effect of fashion on history. This topic is narrowly tailored and on a small scale that Ginsburg and Levi discussed, giving a viewpoint of history from ‘the bottom-up’. The Zoot-Suit Riots are an important part of history that often does not get studied, but encompasses many issues that are still relevant in our history today.