Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style

4 From Rags to Riot

4 From Rags to Riot O n the night of June 3, 1943, a band of fifty sailors armed themselves with makeshift weapons, left their naval base, and coursed into downtown Los Angeles in search of young Mexican Americans in zoot suits. For many weeks, name-calling and small-scale skirmishes between the uniformed men and the zoot suiters had escalated until the situation seemed intolerable. Now the servicemen were determined to strike. The posse prowled the streets, searched nightclubs, and invaded movie theaters, forcing the managers to turn on the lights so they could identify youths by their attire. When they found a zoot suiter, they beat him, stripped him of his pants, and tore his jacket. The next day, servicemen hired a convoy of taxicabs to go to East Los Angeles, where they accosted pachucos on the street and even pushed their way into private homes. Over the next few days, crowds of white civilians joined in the rampage, targeting mainly Mexican American youths but also some African Americans and Filipinos. Spurred by police bulletins, newspaper reporting , and radio broadcasts, 5,000 people jammed the downtown area on the night of June 7 as the melee continued. While many Mexican Americans retreated into their communities, some fought back, borrowing cars and traveling into the commercial district to confront the servicemen and their civilian allies. The city’s district attorney called it ‘‘a From Rags to Riot 107 state of near anarchy.’’ As the violence escalated and spread, the Los Angeles police finally raised a riot alarm and began arresting scores of Mexican American youths, seeing them as instigators and believing law enforcement could quell the conflict by taking them off the streets. On June 8, military authorities declared Los Angeles out of bounds for servicemen , and the city finally quieted down. Although no one had died in the conflict, at least ninety-four civilians and eighteen servicemen were treated for serious injuries. Of all the servicemen who had taken part in the violence, the police arrested only two. The earliest press reports described these events as the ‘‘zoot suit riot,’’ and the label stuck. Although not all the victims in the Los Angeles riot wore zoot suits—in fact, many did not—it was this style that focused the rage of the attackers and framed public debate over the riot.1 Many historians have examined the Los Angeles riot and together offer a full assessment of those days and the events leading up to the crisis. The riot climaxed years of growing apprehension in white Los Angeles over racial and ethnic minorities. Never known for racial tolerance and harmony, the City of Angels reached the breaking point during the war years. Southern California had become a hub of wartime production and a destination for thousands of workers, including large numbers of African Americans and whites from the South and Midwest. African Americans increasingly gained employment in armament factories and shipbuilding, and white hostility to their presence caused frequent conflicts in the workplace. Migration from Mexico also grew substantially when the government reversed its policy of repatriation, begun during the hard times of the Great Depression, to meet growing needs for agricultural and other manual workers. At the same time, Japanese and Japanese American residents, nearly 37,000 in Los Angeles County alone, were forcibly relocated from their homes to internment camps in 1942. The destabilizing effects of these migrations in and out of the city, reconfiguring the mix of racial and ethnic groups, cannot be overstated. Long-time and newly arrived Angelenos jostled for space, breaching traditional borders dividing racial-ethnic communities. After 108 Chapter 4 the Japanese internment, the growing African American population expanded into Little Tokyo. The Mexican community began to spread out from their long-time residency in the Plaza district and made inroads into the downtown commercial zone, where movie theaters, variety stores, and small shops all ‘‘began to ‘go Mexican,’’’ as the activist and writer Carey McWilliams put it. Adding to the flux were armed forces personnel on military bases in Long Beach and elsewhere. Training and preparing for embarkation to the Pacific, soldiers and sailors crowded into the city’s entertainment venues when on leave. ‘‘Los Angeles was just a beehive, twenty-four hours a day,’’ remembered one resident. ‘‘Any time would be Saturday night.’’2 As historians George J. Sánchez and Eduardo Pagán have...