The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II (review)

Luis Alvarez has written a lively account of the zoot suit, its multiple meanings for minority youth, and the social context for the so-called "zoot suit riots" in Los Angeles in June, 1943. While much of this ground will be familiar to readers, Alvarez's attention to gender, his creative use of oral history, and his insistence on youth as actors present a fresh approach to the zoot suit and the formation of youth culture during World War II. Alvarez argues that others have focused on "zoot suiters" as the objects of reform or as the victims of white repression, while he sees them using their hip threads to stake a claim to dignity in the face of dehumanization and discrimination. By usurping space, such as dance halls, movie theaters, and street corners for public display and sharing a cultural outlook that transcended racial lines, they "challenged the segregated sensibilities of 1940s America" (p. 5).

While the zoot suit was a symbol of resistance, Alvarez notes that it had contradictory meanings for its wearers. Some, like Malcolm X, used the zoot to defy white military authority, while many of the Mexican Americans that Alvarez interviewed saw no contradiction between wearing a zoot suit on weekends while working in war-related industries or volunteering for the military. Zoot suiters also replicated power hierarchies, especially those of gender, in their sexual demands and attitudes toward women. And while zoot suiters valued leisure and celebrated pleasure, the clothing and its frequently expensive accoutrements tethered them to a wartime economy and commercialized forms of entertainment. Although Alvarez does not refer to Raymond Williams's well-known distinction between alternative and oppositional cultures, he sees zoot suiters as creating alternative spaces for themselves in wartime America.

The color line in American cities and the wartime hysteria over juvenile delinquency set the stage for wartime riots. Alvarez sees the battles between white servicemen and mostly Mexican American zoot suiters in Los Angeles as the preliminary round in a national racial conflict that engulfed work sites in the South, Detroit's Belle Isle, and New York's Harlem in the summer of 1943. He notes that while whites were largely the aggressors in the early conflicts, by the time of the Harlem riot in August, African Americans took charge of the streets and attacked white-owned establishments as well as the police. A common struggle over identity and place in American society linked the participants in these racial battles, which scholars, Alvarez argues in a bit of exaggeration, have previously analyzed as separate incidents.

Alvarez also examines class and generational differences among African Americans and Mexican Americans that were particularly obvious in the responses to violence. Middle-class organizations and the press stressed the need to reform delinquents and saw participation in rioting, especially in New York City, as the expression of youthful hoodlums. Minority youth thus lived in a racial, class, and generational social space marked symbolically by the zoot and participation in zoot culture. This is part of Alvarez's more general argument that is most clearly explicated in his conclusion that a politicized youth culture is a vehicle for social change.

Alvarez also is to be commended for his attention to women. Frequently overlooked in discussions of the zoot suit, young women found new freedoms outside of home and the workplace in the zoot social scene, and by participating in commercialized social space, young women directly challenged traditional notions of patriarchy.

For all its virtues there are several flaws in Alvarez's book. While he pays lip service to white zoot suit wearers, at least mentioning their existence, the focus of his argument about multiracial youth culture is on African Americans and Mexican Americans. This serves his argument well but ignores the limits of shared cultural expression represented by the zoot suit. For example, in New York City, white gang members wore zoot suits...