Mapping Black and Brown L.A.: Zoot Suit Riots as Spatial Subtext in If He Hollers Let Him Go

The violent clashes that took place on the streets of Los Angeles from June 3-10, 1943—collectively referred to as the "Zoot Suit Riots"—were enabled by the city's unique history of metro-regional development. As previous scholars have suggested, though many view L.A. as a quintessentially urban region—a reputation perpetuated by its history of urban-style riots—Los Angeles' fragmented and sprawling pattern might more aptly be described as the geographic inevitability of a suburban-style investment in the ideologies of privatization and racial segregation.¹ From imperial conquest to contemporary development, race has framed the vision of what Los Angeles should be and for whom it would be a "promised land." Margaret Marsh writes that "the white, middle-class, midwestern Protestants who wrested Los Angeles from its original settlers had the opportunity to create the kind of city that they believed represented the hopes and dreams of people like themselves. Their world view, which in the words of one historian 'everywhere dominated the layout of greater Los Angeles,' was suburban" (165). Beginning in the 1920s, this tide of white, middle-class migrants transformed Los Angeles into "one of the most 'Anglo' of all American metropolises—overwhelmingly 'white' and native-born" (Abu-Lughod 134).

But in the 1930s and 1940s, the displacement of working-class families by the Dust Bowl and an influx of African American migrants, primarily though not exclusively from the south, mitigated this middle class "Anglo-cizing" of Los Angeles. Describing the effect of World War II on the city's population, historian Josh Sides notes, "Between 1940 and 1946, more than 70,000 African Americans moved to Los Angeles, causing a 109-percent increase in the city's black population" (252). The creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 were perhaps the two most significant factors inspiring migration to Los Angeles. The FEPC was created on June 25, 1941 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802. The order "barred discrimination in war industries and became the impetus for many African Americans to migrate to war production centers." Undoubtedly, the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 had the more far-reaching effect. The ensuing "military conscription . . . created a desperate labor shortage" (ibid.) and unprecedented opportunities for African Americans seeking work in the defense industries. Certainly, some industries resisted the policies of the FEPC, engaged in discriminatory practices, and restricted African Americans to the most menial jobs, but the promise of change and opportunity drastically altered the population of Los Angeles. "By 1950," according to Eric Avila, the black population "reached 171,209, giving Los Angeles the West's largest concentration of African Americans" (30). As a result of the sudden changes to L.A.'s demographics, "racial lines began to harden and a formidable array of forces had the practical effect of herding African-Americans into designated areas of the city. The factor of intense, forced residential segregation contributed more than anything else to the deterioration of the quality of black life in Los Angeles" (Anderson 342).

Though segregation persisted as a deeply embedded aspect of Los Angeles' wartime geography, those who could not afford the economic exclusivity of racially segregated suburbs encountered a terrain of fluid boundaries in which border transgressions occurred on sidewalks and streetcars as part of the rhythm of day-to-day living.² This fluidity is the essential spatial characteristic for the fighting that took place in 1943 between white servicemen, Mexican Americans, and African Americans, violence made possible by the uneasy borders between racially, ethnically, and economically segregated neighborhoods. Comparing Los Angeles to the metro-regions of New York and Chicago, Janet Abu Lughod writes that the city's "pattern of development, which, instead of spreading gradually outward from a single center, was fragmented almost from the start into a crazy quilt stitched out of literally dozens of small towns and independently formed subdivisions, nestling in clusters that were not necessarily contiguous" (134). This "crazy quilt" laid the groundwork...