Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture

TWO: From Military-Industrial Complex to Urban- Industrial Complex: Promoting and Protesting the Supercity

From Military-Industrial Complex to UrbanIndustrial Complex T W O Promoting and Protesting the Supercity The power of place—the power of ordinary urban landscapes to nurture citizens’ public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared territory—remains untapped for most working people’s neighborhoods in most American cities, and for most ethnic history and most women’s history. The sense of civic identity that shared history can convey is missing. And even bitter experiences and fights communities have lost need to be remembered —so as not to diminish their importance. —dolores hayden, The Power of Place When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. I’m going to keep right on building. You do the best you can to stop it. —robert moses B AT T L E O N T H E H O M E F R O N T Moral Panic and Cultural Conflict during World War II Describing the ideological context for the rising anti-Mexican sentiments of the early 1940s, Rodolfo Acuña noted that ‘‘the war-like propaganda conducted during the repatriation [campaigns of the 1930s] reinforced in the minds of many Anglos the stereotype that Mexican Americans were aliens. The events of 1942 proved the extent of Anglo racism’’ (1988:254). The principal occurrence he goes on to recount is the mainstream media’s demonization of Chicano youth in conjunction with the 1942 ‘‘Sleepy Lagoon’’ murder trial of twenty-two members of the 38th Street Club. This major instance of the ruling law and media effects was followed by the more generalized vili- fication of and violent aggression against Chicano youth (along with some Black and Filipino youth) perpetrated by police and military personnelduring the infamous (and misnamed) ‘‘Zoot-Suit Riots’’ in 1943 (see Fig. 16). Both events, and the corollary public hysteria about ‘‘gang wars’’ and ‘‘pachuco crime waves’’ that they spawned, have been much commented on, then and now, as shameful episodes of blatant institutional and individual racist assault upon Chicanos (Acuña 1988:253–259; McWilliams 1948:227–243; Tuck 1946:212–217). What I want to distill from the ample historical record are the spatialized discourses and spatializing practices directed against and contested by the Chicano community. I will thus be arguing that the events of 1942 and 1943 were signal moments in the continuing dialectic of oppressive barrioization and contestative barriology. From Military-Industrial to Urban-Industrial Complex 6 7 F I G U R E 1 6 . Zoot-Suit riots in downtown Los Angeles, June 1943. Courtesy of Photograph Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Key tenets of the discursive-cum-spatial effect exercised against Chicanos in the war years are revealed in the ‘‘scholarly’’ testimony of E. Duran Ayers, head of the curiously named Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department, during the Sleepy Lagoon trial. Rodolfo Acuña conjectures that Ayers may not, in fact, have been the author of the report he read from and entered into testimony during the trial. Based on other published newspaper reports by Ayers, in which he appears to have shown some sympathy for the difficult social pressures that affected Eastside residents, Acuña wonders if he might have simply been the designated public spokesperson for policies and social interpretations of Eastside criminality drafted by higherranking officials (1984:17). Regardless of its precise authorship, Ayers’ pseudoscholarly testimony was terribly derogatory toward the greater Mexican population. It identified a racially ‘‘innate desire to use a knife and let blood’’ (Acuña 1988:255)—as opposed to the more sedate violence of fisticuffs practiced by Anglo-Saxons—which supposedly originated in the sacrificial practices of their Aztec ancestors. The initial guilty verdicts rendered against the majority of the defendants seemed to give police officers official sanction to use exceptional means to curb these ‘‘innate’’ propensities of Chicanos. In this respect, Acuña concludes that the ‘‘Ayers report, which represented official law enforcement views, goes a long way in explaining the events around Sleepy Lagoon’’ (ibid.). Bolstered by such official attitudes, specific preventive strategies—roadblocks , unwarranted searches, mass arrests, and the padding ofstatistical‘‘gang files’’ with names of youth—entered the day-to-day repertoire of police and sheriff’s officers’ interactions with the residents of the Chicano barrios (Acuña 1988:255–256; McWilliams 1948...