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

Set in an urban America consumed with the pressures of World War II, The Power of the Zoot is a critically-nuanced analysis of youth culture and its deep intersections with race, gender, and questions of belonging. Using a comparative perspective, historian Luis Alvarez places readers in wartime Los Angeles and New York as he deepens our understanding of the myriad meanings contained within the fashion styles of Mexican American and African American youth. In these highly racialized spaces—where residential and occupational segregation, as well as capricious if not regular police brutality, combined to shape daily life for working-class communities of color—youth of color found power in their choice of clothing, tools they used "to carve out a style with which to evade authority figures, create spaces of cultural and social autonomy, and make life more enjoyable" (93-94).

In Alvarez's work, the power of the zoot suit lies in reframing it as a form of mobilization against the indignities youth of color faced in wartime urban America. While careful to acknowledge the limitations of such an analysis, Alvarez deftly probes the social context of urban youth of color in this time period, detailing the systemic and widespread ways daily life robbed them of a measure of humanity. In this light, the zoot suit is a response "to the denial of their dignity by reclaiming their physical bodies and urban public spaces, challenging the dehumanization thrust upon them, and charting novel social relationship on the home front" (73). These meanings emerge most clearly via the styles' own location in the broader world of jazz culture. In these clubs and parts of town where nightlife demanded "you look the part," youth forged multiracial social spaces as they simultaneously nurtured a generationally and racially imbued sense of self. Developing a particularly insightful discussion of the gendered and sexualized threat represented by the suit and its cultural realm, Alvarez explores the ways these integrated spaces "intensified the threat that zoot culture posed to dominant sexual mores and added to fears of miscegenation" (111).

Reflective of both the depth and strength of his research, Alvarez integrates "voice" in consistent and substantive ways throughout his text. Whether analyzing the discursive construction of youth of color delinquency or that generation's own experiences in zoot culture, much of the "power" in The Power of the Zoot emanates from the hopes and fears of the people involved. Oral interviews are a vital component of the diverse archival material he collects to tell this story, though they are most often subsumed to the voices retrieved from more accessible sources like newspapers and official records. Alvarez himself conducted a small set of interviews with the zoot suiters and adds these to other oral histories and interviews found in archives, documentaries, and various published sources.

The voices he retrieves illuminate his argument most dynamically in his discussion of the meaning of public spaces and the semiorganized violence against zoot suiters, rooting the narrative to these participants' own memories of what their style of dress meant to them, both during the war and in hindsight. While Alvarez's argument hinges on an analysis of the discourses relating to zoot suiters, and he aptly integrates a diverse set of voices as he explores those meanings, his attempt to "prioritize the identities and social relationships that emerged from, in, and around the world of the zoot" (237) would have been further enhanced by even more oral histories with participants. Certainly the passage of time makes such a project difficult, to say the least. However, his conclusion that these youth "staged their struggle on the terrain ... of culture, employing style, fashion, and their own bodies" (236) is rarely reckoned with the kinds of everyday choices youth of color made to dress or socialize in certain ways.

The Power of the Zoot is...