Two Deaths at Whittier State School: The Meanings of Youth Suicide, 1939–1940

The stories told about the deaths of two Mexican American juvenile delinquents at California’s Whittier State School in 1939 and 1940 illustrate the contested nature of youth suicide at mid-century, particularly when the victims were young people marginalized by class and race identities and stigmatized by association with a penal institution. The struggle to control the memory of Benny Moreno and Edward Leiva, recorded in four official investigations and extensive news coverage, pitted professional, psychiatric expertise (that viewed both suicide and delinquency as evidence of psychopathology) against a populist understanding of family and community that framed self-inflicted deaths as evidence disempowerment (rational, if tragic, responses to experiences in the reformatory). Each group of suicide “survivors” constructed an explanation of delinquent suicide grounded in competing views of the function of the institution and the age and race of the victims. The story highlights the need to incorporate perceptions of place and identity when examining the history of self-inflicted deaths.