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  • The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II
  • Michael Bottoms
The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II. By Luis Alvarez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 318 pp.).

For a week in the early summer of 1943, white American servicemen roamed the streets of Los Angeles, stopping anyone they found dressed in the fashionable "zoot suit" style, beating them, and stripping them of their clothes. Because Mexican American men were the chief targets in the attacks, historians ever since have focused their attention on the rise in racial tensions between Chicanos and Anglos in Los Angeles, and the Zoot Suit Riots have occupied a central place in Chicano/a historiography. Over the last generation, scholars have mined the Zoot Suit Riots for clues to understanding such varied topics as the psychology of racial violence, Mexican American political development and resistance to racial oppression, and the rise of Anglo xenophobia in World War II-era southern California. In this provocative new book, Luis Alvarez builds upon this earlier scholarship and dramatically complicates it by shifting the focus from the riots to the zoot suiters themselves, and the vibrant youth culture they proudly embraced. In doing so, Alvarez expands the boundaries historians have traditionally drawn around the riots, and describes a complex multiracial, gendered, and national phenomenon.

According to Alvarez, zoot culture blossomed within the context of a national debate about American identity in which minority youths were consistently denied membership in the national polity. For racial minorities in cities across the United States, wartime mobilization was accompanied by distressingly mixed messages. On the one hand, calls for patriotic participation in the war effort encouraged enlistment in the military, and offered lucrative employment in vital wartime industries. On the other hand, minority youths who heeded the call more often than not found themselves frozen out of these new opportunities or at best consigned to segregated military units and menial, low-wage jobs. Civil and military authorities thus rendered minority support for the war effort invisible, and defined patriotism, and hence national belonging, in narrowly racial terms. In this context, zoot style was much more than an outrageous suit of clothes, music, and dance; it also offered a vehicle through which marginalized youth might assume identities that challenged traditional social categories, and engage with mainstream American society on their own terms. Within the social space occupied by zoot culture, young people stretched and remolded social boundaries in three key ways that ultimately provoked a violent response. First, Alvarez, one of a number of young scholars currently exploring southern California's multiracial context, carefully exposes the ways in which zoot youth culture appealed not just to Mexican Americans, but also to African Americans, Asian Americans, and whites. This appeal blurred racial divisions, and thus undermined the racial hierarchy and threatened the privileged status of the white-dominated national consensus. Second, zoot youth culture tended to subvert traditional gender categories. Young men self-consciously rejected the conformist vision of manhood embodied in the disciplined, regimented (white) soldier in favor of an aggressive and flamboyant masculinity that, in the eyes of white Americans, seemed to exalt self-indulgence in the face of national sacrifice. Zoot style also appealed to young women, and according to Alvarez fostered the development of an alternative femininity, characterized by independence and open sexuality, [End Page 599] that stood in direct opposition to a national consensus concerning genteel womanhood. Finally, as Alvarez conclusively demonstrates, zoot youth culture was in no way limited to Los Angeles. It was instead a national phenomenon that left its mark in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Mobile, and other cities across the U.S. Through zoot culture, young people across the United States challenged the wartime consensus about the proper boundaries of the national polity and proper behavior and sought membership in American society on their own terms.

Civil and military authorities viewed these social transgressions as a threat to wartime national unity. Shrill denunciations in the press were followed by harsh police repression, and ultimately by violent confrontations on the streets. Here, Alvarez parts with the standard narrative in two important ways. First, Alvarez...

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