SYMHC Classics: Zoot Suit Riots

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Today is the eightieth anniversary of the start of a multi day outbreak of violence in Los Angeles that came to be known as the zoot Suit Riots. Our episode on the zoot Suit Riots came out on August thirteenth, twenty eighteen, even though I had been planning for months to do it in connection to the seventy fifth anniversary, which took place that year. I had my act together this time around, though, And this is Today's Saturday Classic Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. For the last I don't even know how many months I've had this note on my podcast shortlist that had in all capital letters the word June followed by Zootsuit Riots. You may notice it is not June right now. It's a little after June. It's fine, yeah, I mean, unless you're listening to podcasts much later than they come out, and in somehow June of twenty nineteen, So we're recording this in July. It'll be August before it comes out. I one hundred percent dropped that ball on this thing that I had a note to myself to do for months and months. But because the zoot Suit riots happened seventy five years ago this past June, and because we got a bunch of listener requests for it, and because I answered a lot of those requests by saying that I was doing it in June of twenty eighteen, I'm going to do it now, a couple of months late. As is often the case when we talk about riots on the show, the name of this one is really a misnomer. It didn't have a lot of the traits that people think of when you say riot. There was not really much property damage. It was more about attacking people. And it also wasn't really about the zoot suits, although zoot suits had come to symbolize a lot in Los Angeles and in other parts of the United States when this happened. So today we're going to talk about some context of the Mexican community in Los Angeles and the nineteen forties, as well as a murder that became a major precursor to this mass violence, and then we will talk about the violence itself. Okay, So to start it off, we're going to talk about Spain actively colonizing what's now California starting in the late seventeenth century, and the region was under Spanish control until the end of the Mexican War of Independence in eighteen twenty one, at which point it became a part of Mexico. After the Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight, Mexico seeded a huge swath of land in the southwest to the United States, including what would become California. California became the thirty first state on September ninth, eighteen fifty We talk more about the history of immigration between Mexico and the United States in our twenty sixteen episode on the Brazil Programs, so we're not going to walk through all of that again today, but the border between these two nations wasn't particularly regulated until the nineteen teens. There were several waves of immigration from Mexico to the United States, including refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution, which started in nineteen ten. So by the nineteen forties, when the Zootsuit Riots took place, the Mexican community in the southwestern United States included immigrants as well as people of Mexican ancestry whose families had been there since way before the state of California even existed. In Los Angeles and other cities, the Mexican population overwhelmingly lived in tight knit communities known as barrios, from the Spanish word for neighborhood, and these neighborhoods evolved through a range of social and economic conditions, as well as discriminatory housing policies and employment and lending practices. Basically the same policies that enforced segregation of black residents in other parts of the country enforced segregation of Mexican and other Hispanic and Latino residents in the American Southwest. The barrios in Los Angeles included really densely populated urban neighborhoods, as well as Chavez Ravine, which had been home to a predominantly Mexican population going back into the middle of the eighteen hundreds. Because of its steep terrain, parts of the Chavez Ravine were almost rural. Poverty was widespread in these neighborhoods. The housing was frequently substandard and overcrowded, and often managed by predatory landlords. While the Anglo community tended to view the barrios as slums or eyes sores. The people who were actually living there had extremely tight knit relationships with one another. There was a simultaneous mix of intense neighborhood and cultural pride and social and economic isolation from the rest of the city. That wasn't necessarily the case for the young people living in the barrios, though. In the nineteen forties, young people in the barrios were dominantly the children of Mexican immigrants who had been born in the United States and were citizens, and many of them felt like outsiders both within and outside of their neighborhoods. They were being educated in English speaking American schools, and a lot of them wanted to experience life outside the barrio, or even leave the barrio. This really put them at odds with their parents, who tended to be traditional and conservative. These second generation Mexican Americans were also subject to huge pressure to assimilate with Anglo life from outside the barrio, and huge pressure to maintain a strong sense of Mexican cultural identity from within it and outside of their neighborhoods. They faced discrimination because of their ethnicity and sometimes outright exclusion from the types of activities that would otherwise be completely typical for a teenager. Economic hardship, social isolation, exclusion from recreation and social activities, and a sense of being an outsider are all factors that are cited as reasons why young people join gangs, and this happened in California in the nineteen thirties and forties as well. Although we should make it really clear that a lot of the gangs in question were more like tight knit neighborhood clicks than criminal organizations. Rivalries between young people from different barrios could become really intense, though. I mean, there was definitely crime, and there definitely were criminal organizations, but overwhelmingly crimes were being committed by adults, not by adolescents. And the panic that we're about to talk about was about this nefarious specter of violent criminal teens and that that was really not what was going on. As Tracy just alluded to. In the media, these Mexican American youth were portrayed as violent and incorrigible delinquents. This became even more true in August of nineteen forty two, following a murder at a reservoir known as Sleepy Lagoon. Mexican youth used Sleepy Lagoon as a swimtle because they weren't allowed to use the public swimming pools, and on August first, nineteen forty two, a fight broke out after a party near the reservoir and twenty two year old Jose Diaz was beaten and left for dead. Diaz had recently enlisted in the US Army and it was his last weekend before he was scheduled to leave. He died not long after reaching the hospital. In response to this murder, law enforcement rounded up roughly six hundred people in a citywide dragnet. Most of them were Mexican American and most of them were teenagers. Ultimately, twenty two teens and young men from the thirty eighth Street neighborhood were arrested on murder charges, and seventeen of them were indicted. They were between the ages of fourteen and twenty two, and they were tried in the largest mass trial in California history. This trial was a huge miscarriage of justice. The judge, Charles Williams Fricky, was known as sam Quentin Fricky because of how often he sentenced people to prison there and during the trial he consistently sided with the prosecution. The prosecution was making the case that the defendants were a violent street gang, and to that end, the judge refused to allow them to get clean clothes or have their hair cut because their clothing, their hair, and their disheveled appearance was evidence of their gang status. We're going to get more into clothing in a bit, but just know they basically kept them in a state that would keep the public mindset completely confirmed that they were everything horrible. These people were saying, yeah, even if when they originally were arrested they had been wearing neatly attired clothing, they were in these same clothes for the length of these proceedings, so they just became more and more disheveled. The defense also had seventeen different defendants to deal with, and the judge continually ruled that their attempts to confer with their clients were disruptive. The defense fendants were ultimately seated in two rows facing the jury, physically separated from their attorneys. Some of the defendants also really did not take this trial seriously. Some of them had never even met the victim and seemed to just assume that they were definitely going to be acquitted because clearly they were not involved. That meant that an all white jury was constantly face to face with a bunch of teenagers, some of whom were chatting with each other and rolling their eyes and generally acting like teenagers who weren't really being supervised in the courtroom. The trial lasted until January of nineteen forty three. In the end, five of the defendants were acquitted. The rest were found guilty of a number of crimes and sentenced to between six months and life in prison, depending on the charge. During these proceedings, girls and young women from the thirty eighth Street neighborhood had also been called to testify and to participate in the investigation, but they refused to cooperate. Afterward, they were taken from their parents' custody, made wards the state, and placed in a reform school called Ventura School for Girls, and they remained there until they were legally adults. This trial and the news reporting that surrounded it, continued to inflame tensions between the Mexican and Anglo communities in Los Angeles. News reports described the kids from the thirty eighth Street gang as a violent gang, and the whole incident was used as evidence that Mexican youth were inherently criminal and dangerous. Mexican youth gangs were blamed for all kinds of crime and social ills. The idea of a dangerous Mexican criminal element spread among the Anglo population. Rather than doing anything about the social and economic conditions and the barrios, lawmakers and media instead used these young people as evidence of a nefarious criminal element that needed to be dealt with, and Mexican American youth, who already felt like outsiders, felt even more targeted by an obviously unfair legal and law enforcement system. After two years of advocacy by the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, these convictions were overturned on appeal in nineteen forty four. Although the charges were never formally cleared. The appellate court found a number of problems with that original trial, from inadmissible evidence being admitted, to inadequate defense representation to the judge's treatment of the most vocal of the defense attorneys. Today, the murder of Jose Dias is still officially unsolved. Most of the young men who had been convicted of his murder were still in prison when the zoot Suit riots happened. Were going to get into the riots, and before that into the zoot suits after a sponsor break. The Zootsuit Riots were named for a style of clothing that was popular among the Mexican American youth in Los Angeles in the nineteen thirties and forties. The etymology of zoot suit is a little unclear. You'll see a lot of different places of like this is the where the term zootsuit comes from, and they all kind of contradict each other. It's also unclear exactly who made the first one. But these suits grew out of jazz culture in African American communities. In other parts of the United States, they were really popular among swing dancers because the cut and the volume of the fabric really accentuated the dancing. Zootsuits became popular among minority communities all across the United States. Whichever minority community was living in a particular place was probably also wearing zoot suits. Even though we are talking about Mexican Americans in this episode, these suits were culturally very important in these other communities. They are part of a lot of literature and essays from the nineteen thirties and forties, especially by Hispanic and Black writers. Among Mexican Americans, zoot suits were one part of a counterculture movement known as Pachuco. Patuco incorporated zootsuits along with music and dance and an inventive slang called calo, which combined Spanish, English, and jazz inspired words, as well as words from other influences. Zootsuits were the most recognizable hallmark of the Pachuco man. These are suits with high waisted pants, suspenders, and very wide legs that then are pegged at the ankle. The corresponding coats are very long and have exaggerated broad shoulders. Men usually wore them with a coordinating pork pie hat and a distinctive watch chain. Some Pachucas are women in this culture, wore full zootsuits with the pants. Others paired them with short skirts, big hair, and bright makeup, regardless of which she was doing, though, women who dressed this way were really pushing gender norms. Wearing the pants was thought of as too masculine, but the short skirts and the loud makeup were regarded as too aggressively feminine and to two sexual to both Anglos and the Mexican parents of these youths. Pachuco wasn't a culture. It was just another word for punk or thug. Mexican parents worried that their children were going to quote become Pachuco's, and among Anglos, part of the response to this culture might be summed up as how dare you zoot? Suits were expensive, and news reporting about the style tended to hype up the cost. Pachucos took great care in their appearance. They walked with a swagger, and they took pride in being able to dance and going out and having a good time. So from Anglos there was this whole element of how dare you spend so much on a suit when you should be living in poverty? How dare you walk with that swagger when you live in a slum. Caesar Shavez, who co founded the National farm Workers' Association with the lur Shuerta, described it this way. Quote we were a minority group of a minority group, so in a way we were challenging cops by being with two or three friends and dressing sharp. But in those days, I was prepared for any sacrifice to be able to dress the way I wanted to dress. I thought it looked sharp and neat and it was the style. And to circle back around to the Sleepy Lagoon murder case, the defendants were part of a culture that valued dressing well and taking care of their clothing in appearance. But again, if you recall, they were forced to wear the same increasingly shabby clothes for the duration of their trial. So for Patucco's this one outfit, the zoot suit had a whole lot of adolescent rebelliousness and community pride and Mexican American culture all rolled up into it, and in the nineteen forties, wearing one became an overtly political act. In another way as well, during World War Two, fabric was tightly rationed, and zoot suits used a lot of fabric. The Wartime Productions Board limited the use of wool in March of nineteen forty two, and it banned a number of extra flourishes on clothing that required more fabric, including cuffs, plats, pocket flaps, and vests. Zoot Suits were pretty much all extra fabric. Having made one, I will wholly endorse this fact. They take up a lot of yardage and at first tailor's got around this by making zoot suits out of other fabrics besides wool, but in October of nineteen forty two, the WPB specifically banned those as well. It wasn't illegal to wear a zoot suit, but it was illegal to make them, although bootleg tailors continued to do it anyway. The City of Los Angeles also debated banning the wearing of zoot suits that year, but ultimately did not. By nineteen forty three, zoot suits were very closely associated with crime and with juvenile delinquency. We talked before the break about the widespread media coverage of Mexican youth portraying them as incorrigible criminals. Tied to that stereotype was the clothing that they were wearing. Under present Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, which was meant to improve American relationships with Latin America, news outlets in some cities stopped using the word Mexican and crime reporting. Instead, they were writing things like zoot suited thugs, which everyone read as basically a Mexican gangster in a zoot suit. This use of language didn't really do anything to shield Mexicans from the perception that they were criminals, and it did reinforce the connection between zoot suits and crime. On June second, nineteen forty three, an article in the La Times called the zoot suit quote a uniform of delinquency. Calls to police were common just because someone in a zoot suit was inherently suspicious. Simultaneously, in the early nineteen forties, there were a lot of service members from the US military in Los Angeles. At any given time. Some of them were passing through, some were preparing to deploy, some were on shore leave, and some were training at the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center in Chavezravine, also known as the Naval Reserve Armory. This facility opened in a predominantly Mexican part of the city in nineteen forty. Especially on weekends, the number of military personnel in Los Angeles could swell to about fifty thousand. A lot of these servicemen felt like the zoot suitors were deliberately antagonizing them. They were wearing unpatriotic clothing that flew in the face of wartime rationing. And on top of that was the perception that the zoot suitors were also draft dodgers. And while that may have been the case for some, a lot of the Mexican youth who were part of the Pachuco culture were too young to enlist. There were also stories of men wearing their zoot suits when they reported in and being turned down for military service because of the perception that they would be troublemakers. And of course, there were plenty of Mexican Americans serving in the armed forces, although numbers were not clear because their numbers were not separated out from the white population. At the same time, there was also a lot of overall anti immigrant sentiment going on, even though most of the young people being targeted here were American citizens of Mexican descent. What we're talking about today was happening in parallel with the signing of Executive Order ninety sixty six and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West coast of the United States. Almost two thirds of the people who were incarcerated under that executive order were also American citizens. Fights between service members and Mexican civilian use became increasingly common in late nineteen forty two. In December, they were reported at a rate of about one per week. By the spring of nineteen forty three, that had increased to between two and three fights per day. Each fight became justification for the next one, and sometimes they erupted into mass violence. It's not totally clear what caused these ongoing clashes between service members and civilians of Mexican descent to escalate into mass violence. According to a number of sources, it was a fight between eleven sailors and a group of zoot suitors on May thirtieth, nineteen forty three, which left one sailor with a broken jaw. These riots started on June third and were at least in theory in retaliation for that earlier fight. And we're going to get into the details of the zootsuit riots after we first pause for a break where we hear from one of the sponsors that keeps his show going. On June third, nineteen forty three, a group of about fifty sailors left the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center in Schabzravine. They were armed with makeshift weapons, and they made their way through the neighborhoods near the armory looking for a fight. They specifically looked for and attacked anyone wearing a zoot suit. This was the first night of the zoot suit riots. June fourth was a Friday, and that evening, sailors began hiring cabs to take them into the barrios. They treated this like a seek and destroy mission, seeking out and beating Mexican youth, especially the ones in zootsuits, but they also attacked people who were not in zoot suits. Five victims were hospitalized. Most of the sailors had returned to base by the time shore patrol and the police arrived, and there were only a few arrests, and those were mainly Mexican victims. On June fifth, the scene was much the same, with the riots spreading further into East Los Angeles. The attacks targeted men, especially the ones who quote looked like Pachuco's. This included a group of musicians who were leaving Aztec Recording Company. On June seventh, news reports spread that zoot suitors were planning a coordinated effort to kill police. Based on what evidence, we have no idea. It was kind of just a rumor as far as we know. Yeah, we don't know why that was being reported as though it was a real thing. That's the question of a lot of the reporting that happened with this, and in response, thousands of servicemen came to downtown Los Angeles, some of them from as far away as San Diego. Cab drivers offered the servicemen free rides, and they attacked people not only in Mexican neighborhoods, but also in the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts. June seventh was really the peak of the zootsuit riots, and throughout this sort of war, servicemen attacked and beat up young men in zoot suits. They were often armed with things like clubs and tire irons. In some cases, they stripped their victims down to their underwear in the streets and then sometimes set fire to their zoot suits in front of them. Sometimes the soldiers cut off their target's hair. They also invaded people's homes, and they stormed movie theaters to drag Mexican and other minority patrons out into the street and attack them. While there were definitely cases of Mexicans and other minorities fighting back or like taunting the sailors, like being generally aggressive, this was not a case of two factions coming together and fighting. The servicemen were definitely the instigators here, and law enforcement did little to intervene In all of this, officers often arrived on the scene after the violence was over and then arrested the victims instead of the perpetrators, purportedly for their own protection. Servicemen who were picked up by law enforcement were typically taken back to base or just taken a few blocks away from the violence and dropped off and otherwise faced no consequences. There were also reports of young Mexican American men turning themselves into police stations and asking to be taken into custody rather than face being the victims of violence in their own neighborhoods. Throughout all of this, news reports generally praised the servicemen as carrying out a much needed vigilante war against uncontrollable Mexican delinquents. The Los Angeles Times read headlines like zo suitors learn lesson in fight with servicemen. Here's how The New York Times kicked off its reporting on June seventh, quote subdued and no longer ready to do battle. Twenty eight zoot suitors stripped of their gears, clothing, and with County jail barbers hopefully eyeing their flowing ductail haircuts, languished behind bars today after a second night of battle with flears and servicemen, and the next paragraph the article acknowledges that this was quote a war declared by servicemen. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about the riots in her mind Day column, saying, quote, 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 along way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should. After this appeared, the La Times accused her of sowing racial discord. On June eighth, the violence largely stopped because the servicemen were barred from leaving base, and downtown Los Angeles was made out of bounds for soldiers and sailors. At the same time, the official Navy position was that all of the actions by sailors were in self defense. That was patently false. They were picking the fights themselves. The Shore Patrol was also given orders to arrest any member of the military whose behavior was disorderly. On the ninth, the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution banning the public wearing of zoot suits, with fifty days in jail as punishment. Although there had been hundreds of injuries, some of them severe, There were no deaths during the zoot Suit riots, but the racial aspect of the violences off obvious by the numbers. In terms of hospitalizations, about one hundred Mexican Americans suffered serious injuries compared to roughly sixteen servicemen. There also would have been lots and lots of people who were hurt but didn't seek medical care. There were also arrests of close to one hundred Mexican Americans compared to about twenty servicemen and about thirty non Hispanic civilians. After this was over, two committees were formed to investigate and find out the cause of the riots. One was a Citizens Committee ordered by California Governor Earl Warren. The other was an Anti American Activities investigation presided over by State Senator Jack B. Tenney, which looked for fascist and Nazi instigators. No evidence was ever found or published to back up the whole fascist slash Nazi angle, but the Citizens Committee report was clear quote in undertaking to deal with the cause of these outbreaks, the existence of race prejudice can not be ignored In response, to this. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Boren, on the other hand, maintained that race was not a factor and continued to blame the riots on the zoot seaters and on juvenile delinquents. The Citizens Committee report outlined some of the social conditions that had led to all of this quote there are approximately two hundred and fifty thousand persons of Mexican descent in Los Angeles County. Living conditions among the majority of these people are far below the general level of the community. Housing is inadequate, Sanitation is bad and is made worse by congestion. Recreational facilities for children are very poor, and there is insufficient supervision of the playgrounds, swimming pools, and other youth centers. Such conditions are breeding places for juvenile delinquency. The report also addressed the basically ubiquitous idea that there was an epidemic of juvenile delinquency, specifically among Mexican youths. All juvenile delinquency has increased recently in Los Angeles. This includes crimes committed by youths of Mexican origin. But the fact is that the increase of delinquency in the case of youths of Mexican families has been less than in the case of other national or racial groups, and less than the average increase for the community. The committee also made a number of recommendations to try to address the root causes of delinquency and gang formation, better training for police officers who were working in multi racial communities, better and more widely available youth and recreation facilities in Mexican neighborhoods, an end to discrimination and segregation at public facilities. What the committee really did not investigate, though, was the actions of the Anglo servicemen and any Anglo civilians who had participated in these riots. It didn't touch on the fact that large numbers of servicemen were leaving their bases during an actual war, that being World War Two, to go and attack civilians. So even though the report included an acknowledgment of racism as a factor in all of this, and even though it included a lot of common sense recommendations that could help the Mexican community in Los Angeles, it really did not touch on anything that could have addressed the servicemen's decision to stage a vigilante attack on Los Angeles's Mexican community. There was a whole lot of this is what we should do to prevent delinquency among Mexican youth, but virtually no, this is what we should do to prevent servicemen from forming a racist vigilante mob. This whole incident was really formative in both the Hispanic and the Anglo communities. It was a national news story, and for a lot of people who didn't live in the Southwest, it was the first time that they really heard about a significant Mexican minority living in the United States, which makes it particular ularly unfortunate that much of the news reporting was handled in such a racist way with the Hispanic and Latino community. The Sleepy Hollow murder case and the zoot Suit riots were both precursors to the Ticano movement, also called the Mexican American Civil rights movement. We've talked about some of the other events that were also part of the development of this movement, including Mendes versus Westminster, which was a school segregation case, and the case of Macario Garcia, who was the first Mexican national to be awarded the Medal of Honor, who was arrested after being denied service at a restaurant after returning home. There were also similar incidents in other cities after the zoot Suit riots, although not as massive or as widely reported as what took place in Los Angeles, and it could have become an international incident since most of the people targeted were not Mexican nationals, and because this happened during World War II, Mexico's diplomatic response was somewhat muted. There was also a lot of other just mass racist violence that happened that wasn't necessarily similar to the Zootsuit Riots, but did follow in the immediate months and years after this. It's also a whole other topic, but worth mentioning. Chavez Ravine was emptied through a series of evictions starting in nineteen forty nine, so just a few years after this, with the city originally saying that it was going to be redeveloped and that the evicted residents would get the first choice of the newly built homes instead. It's now the site of Dodger Stadium. There is also a Broadway play called zoot Suit, directed by Louis Miguel Valdez that debuted in nineteen seventy nine, and it was the first play with a Chicano director on Broadway that has also been made into a film. And there's also that song by the Cherry Pop and Daddy's which we're only mentioning so that everyone will know that, yes, we do know that it exists, and yeah, makes it sound like a whole lot of fun when it was not. It was not fun at all. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old hell Stuffworks email address no longer works. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.