Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N I n June 1943, in the midst of World War II, the city of Los Angeles erupted in violence. White sailors and soldiers, egged on by Anglo civilians, stopped streetcars and invaded movie theaters in search of young Mexican American men—known as pachucos—beating them, tearing their jackets, and stripping them of their trousers. With newspapers and radio adding fuel to the fire, the mayhem continued for more than a week. As some Mexican American youths fought back, the navy finally put the city off limits for shore leave, and the police appeared in force—arresting these young people as troublemakers, delinquents, and rioters. No one was killed, but more than a hundred individuals landed in the hospital with serious injuries. When the riot ended, investigators and journalists spun out numerous explanations for what had occurred. Many Anglos asserted that Hispanic youth were inherently violent and criminal, while liberal voices and the African American press charged racial discrimination, magnified by wartime tensions over inadequate housing, the lack of jobs, and segregated recreational facilities. Some saw the influence of Communism guiding the riot, and others perceived the frightening presence of a fascist Fifth Column. In the weeks and months after the Los Angeles riot, racial conflict and urban conflagration swept across the American home front, in such places as Beaumont, Texas, New York City, and Detroit, leaving death, destruction, and heightened enmity in their wake. Only in Los Angeles, however, did a style of dress become the focal point of unrest or figure prominently in the response. Most participants and observers did not 2 Introduction refer to it as a race riot, and even fewer saw it as servicemen’s vigilantism. Rather, the unrest became enshrined as the ‘‘zoot suit riot,’’ perhaps the only time in American history that fashion was believed to be the cause of widespread civil unrest. ‘‘Zoot,’’ says Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary, means something done or worn in an exaggerated style: the long killer-diller coat with a drape shape and wide shoulders; pants with reet-pleats, billowing out at the knees, tightly tapered and pegged at the ankles; a porkpie or widebrimmed hat; pointed or thick-soled shoes; and a long, dangling keychain . This was a striking urban look of the 1940s—a street style created by African Americans that extended conventional menswear to the point of caricature. The zoot suit was associated with racial and ethnic minorities and working-class youth, celebrated in the world of jitterbug, jive, and swing, and condemned by government authorities seeking to conserve precious textiles for the war effort. It was a style that sparked the imagination, whether as an object of fear or admiration. Where had it come from? What did it mean? Why did it evoke such visceral reactions? In the wake of the riot, journalists, social workers, psychiatrists, and police officers scrambled to comprehend the phenomenon, trying to fix its meaning within recognizable frameworks of social science, psychology , and common sense. Despite these efforts, the zoot suit, and the circumstances in which it was worn, had a bewildering strangeness that no one could quite explain. Frank Walton, who directed the government’s wartime effort to conserve textiles and clothing, simply shook his head: ‘‘Many attempts have been made to analyze the idea and to see just what caused it and what was behind it but so far there is no good answer.’’ Months before the Los Angeles riot, Ralph Ellison pointed to the zoot suit as one of many ‘‘myths and symbols which abound among the Negro masses’’ and offered clues to the state of black America, a puzzle the political class needed to decipher. Living in Los Angeles during the war, writer Octavio Paz pondered the style of Mexican American youth in the United States, whose ‘‘whole being is sheer negative impulse, a tangle of contradictions, Introduction 3 an enigma. Even his very name is enigmatic: pachuco, a word of uncertain derivation, saying nothing and saying everything.’’1 Over the years, the extreme style of the zoot suit has continued to resonate. It inspired the ‘‘swing youth’’ in 1940s Europe, attracted to the unusual dress, jazz music, and jitterbug dancing associated with American popular culture; French zazous wore elements of the style in defiance of the German Occupation. After the war, the zoot suit became a...