Zoot Suit Riots - Origins

Origins

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 the 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 "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. In the summer of 1942 the Sleepy Lagoon case made national news when teenage members of the 38th Street Gang were falsly accused of murdering a man named José Díaz 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 City 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.