From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front by Elizabeth R. Escobedo (review)

In recent years, the study of Mexican Americans during the World War II era has become the subject of serious historical scholarship. Scholars have focused on the significance of the war to the advent of civil rights activism due to the acquisition of new freedoms outside of the traditional Mexican American communities. That is not to say that historians have thoroughly examined every aspect of the mexicano experience during the “Good War.” In fact, in 2007, Ken Burns’s highly anticipated fifteen-hour documentary on World War II, The War, generally ignored Latino/a contributions to the war effort. It took public pressure to influence Burns to include additional footage on the Mexican American experience. Yet, by the estimation of some Chicano/a scholars, the reedited version of the documentary still failed to properly depict the contributions of Hispanics. Instead it served as a narrow glimpse into the lives of a complex Mexican community.

Elizabeth R. Escobedo’s From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front provides a much-needed view into the lives of Mexican American women during the war. Escobedo examines how women of Mexican descent negotiated their place, from the factories to the dance floors, on the American home front. The author underscores how Mexican American women, living amidst the federal government’s efforts to create a unified home front to support the war, pushed the envelope of what was supposed to be their proper place in American society by challenging the status quo of gender and racial ideologies.

Escobedo highlights how some Mexican American women adopted the “pachuca” image by donning “zoot suits” and rejecting the social mores of the era. Accordingly, the pachucas served to promote Mexican American women’s challenge to traditional roles of both Anglo and Mexican society. This is critical, considering that Hispanic women still played vital roles in the wartime nation-state by serving as factory workers and volunteers. Thus, women defense workers during the Second World War were able to successfully challenge old notions of labor inequity by using new agencies like the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to gain a stronger foothold in the larger fabric of American society. That is not to say that Hispanic women simply embraced the “whiteness” of Anglo American society. Rather, after hours, Mexican American women still struggled with identity and sexuality. On the one hand, they demonstrated rebellion by wearing zoot suits in dance halls. And, on the other hand, they also created organizations such as Señoritas USO, a Mexican American version of the USO that emphasized their Mexican heritage. Ultimately, in the postwar years, Mexican American women chipped away at the traditional ideological beliefs that continued to dominate during the Cold War era.

From Coveralls to Zoot Suits is well written with an impressive use of firsthand accounts, including oral histories and interviews. Escobedo recognizes the potential pitfalls of nostalgia on historical memory and thus brings additional primary evidence to bear. She uses court records, Southern Californian English- and Spanish-language newspapers, and numerous documents from wartime agencies, like the FEPC and other groups, to add a more textured study of Mexican American women during the World War II era. Escobedo does a wonderful job sifting through the evidence to bring to light a previously neglected subject. Scholars of twentieth-century American history, Mexican American history, World War II, and American race and gender will find this book valuable for its examination of how Latinas were able to maneuver through previously held biases and stereotypes in order to improve the world around them.