Reinventing the Pachuco: The Radical Transformation from the Criminalized to the Heroic in Luis Valdez's Play Zoot Suit

On 12 January 1943, at the highly publicized Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, a court wrongly convicted seventeen young men from the 38th Street neighborhood for murder and assault associated with the death of a young Mexican American named José Díaz.¹ The Zoot Suit Riots occurred later that spring when members of the U.S. Navy and Marines attacked Mexican American youths, beat them, and stripped them naked in the streets of Los Angeles.² In 1978, Luis Valdez's landmark play Zoot Suit opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and in doing so became the first professionally produced Chicana/o play.³

All three events reflect the performance of terror in Mexican American communities and the processes of racial othering that create that terror. In his book Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History, Anthony Kubiak describes the fundamental links between the performance of terror in life to the performance of terror in theater and the media.⁴ He sees acts of terror as necessarily taking place in view of a specific audience, those being terrorized. Acts committed with the intention of inspiring terror in others possess a theatrical or performative quality; they put on a show to elicit the specific emotional response of terror. This article examines the ways in which the play Zoot Suit reshapes performances of terror from the 1940s media, making the zoot suiter a symbol for resilience, creativity, and community pride rather than a threat to the safety of others.

The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots were both incited in large part by extremely negative media representations of Mexican American youth in the early 1940s. Historian Edward J. Escobar argues that the terrorizing acts committed against Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in 1943 caused the community to organize politically and to articulate their identity as Mexican Americans for the first time.⁵ This shift in community identity and political consciousness set the stage for the Chicano movement that would mobilize Mexican Americans more than two decades later.

In theatrical expressions of identity politics, Luis Valdez and his theater company, El Teatro Campesino, used political performances to gain support for the United Farm Workers and the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Zoot Suit builds on the political work done by activists and artists during the Chicano movement by refashioning the once criminalized zoot suiter as a symbol for Chicano power. The play attacks the 1940s media's condemnation of young Mexican Americans and their culture, while also portraying the events that terrorized Mexican Americans literally and symbolically during the trial and the riots.

The performance of Zoot Suit situates the judgmental media images of the early 1940s in light of a sociopolitical ideology from the Chicano movement that counters the hegemonic discourses that criminalize Chicana/o youth. In using the same images that stigmatize Chicana/os to promote a positive image of their ethnic identity, Valdez uses the tools of media terrorism, including language and visual imagery, to dismantle the ideology that stigmatized Mexican Americans in the mainstream media of the 1940s and to promote a positive conception of Chicana/o identity in the 1970s through the reworking of previously negative media images. In effect, he revises the historical memory of the zoot-suited Mexican Americans of the 1940s, transforming these youths from symbols of criminality into heroic icons of radical resistance against cultural oppression.

Criminally Fashionable: The Symbolic Resonances of the Pachuco

The early 1940s media representations of Mexican American youth as dangerous criminals in stylized clothing set up Mexican Americans as ethnic others outside of U.S. hegemonic culture. This discourse is located in mainstream conceptions of the Mexican American zoot suiter, otherwise known as the pachuco.⁶ In an essay entitled "In Search of the Authentic Pachuco," Arturo Madrid asserts, "From his beginnings the Pachuco has been a character endowed with mythic dimensions, a construct of fact and fiction, viewed with both hostility and curiosity, revulsion and fascination."⁷ Historian Luis Alvarez...