Recent Histories of Mexican American Women and Men

Scholars of Mexican American history have been very productive in the past two decades expanding our historical knowledge of Mexican Americans in the United States. Elizabeth Escobedo and Jeffrey Garcilazo make two welcome contributions to this body of scholarship. Each in his/her own way offers a detailed interpretation of the Mexican American historical experience that enriches our understanding of the American past in an essential way.

Historians well know that World War II has been immensely popular among U.S. history buffs and the general public. Popular culture venues such as the History Channel, for example, regularly feature programming on various aspects of the Second World War, focusing primarily on military history and the men who fought and the weapons on each side of the war. Women have been less visible in both popular and academic historiography, and Mexican Americans as an ethnic group even less so. Indeed, Elizabeth Escobedo ends her book with the controversy around Ken Burns’ glaring omission of Latinas and Latinos in his epic PBS documentary The War. This seems a fitting place to begin a discussion of her book, which expands our view of which “Americans” were impacted by the war and how. From Coveralls to Zoot Suits makes an invaluable contribution to World War II history by elaborating on the experiences of Mexican American women during this era. The book is a beautifully written account of the changing roles that Mexican American women played during the war. Escobedo outlines both the opportunities and challenges women faced as they entered newly available defense employment, enjoyed higher wages, encountered increasingly liberalized gender mores and racial liberalism, but also persistent racial and gender discrimination.

The text captures the complexity of Mexican American women’s experiences by documenting how women capitalized on newfound freedoms and possibilities to improve their lives and seek pleasure and self-fulfillment at the same time that traditional gendered divisions of labor and racial hierarchies also made those opportunities temporary and finite. Women experimented with new fashions (including the “zoot suit” look of the 1940s), enjoyed greater freedoms for interracial and heterosexual social contacts, had disposable incomes to purchase consumer goods, and discovered within themselves skills and strengths that wartime employment and volunteerism helped reveal. At the same time, however, they also experienced the brutal pace and work conditions of the defense industry, encountered sexual harassment and resistance from male coworkers, and occasional friction and tensions with family members.

Escobedo begins with an overview of what she calls “the Pachuca panic”: the hysteria in the 1940s over Mexican female juvenile delinquency, especially as embodied by the “Pachuca” or young woman who donned the zoot-suit style. Most scholarship on zoot suits and Mexican American youth culture during this era has focused on young men. Escobedo adds to the work of Catherine Ramirez (The Woman in the Zoot Suit, 2009) with a focus on women. Pachucas, or young women who dressed in the ostentatious and risqué style popular among many Mexican American youth at the time, became increasingly visible in the media and associated with crime and juvenile delinquency. Escobedo reveals how some young women adopted the style of dress and associated social practices (heterosexual dating and socializing in public), much to the consternation of traditional immigrant parents and local authorities. Ironically, while immigrant parents lamented this as evidence of their daughters’ “Americanization” and adoption of more liberal gender and sexual norms, Anglo officials saw the adoption of “pachuquismo as a distinctly Mexican identity” (p. 33). While these young women were simply adopting the fashion of the age and distinguishing themselves from their parents’ generation, Anglos saw these practices as deviant and morally dangerous. Juvenile delinquency among all youth became...