Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A.

By Eduardo Obregón Pagán

The notorious 1942 "Sleepy Lagoon" murder trial in Los Angeles concluded with the conviction of seventeen young Mexican American men for the alleged gang slaying of fellow youth Jose Diaz. Just five months later, the so-called Zoot Suit Riot erupted, as white soldiers in the city attacked minority youths and burned their distinctive zoot suits. Eduardo Obregon Pagan here provides the first comprehensive social history of both the trial and the riot and argues that they resulted from a volatile mix of racial and social tensions that had long been simmering.

In reconstructing the lives of the murder victim and those accused of the crime, Pagan contends that neither the convictions (which were based on little hard evidence) nor the ensuing riot arose simply from anti-Mexican sentiment. He demonstrates instead that a variety of pre-existing stresses, including demographic pressures, anxiety about nascent youth culture, and the war effort all contributed to the social tension and the eruption of violence. Moreover, he recovers a multidimensional picture of Los Angeles during World War II that incorporates the complex intersections of music, fashion, violence, race relations, and neighborhood activism.

Drawing upon overlooked evidence, Pagan concludes by reconstructing the murder scene and proposes a compelling theory about what really happened the night of the murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jul 21, 2004
• ISBN: 9780807862094

Eduardo Obregón Pagán

Eduardo Obregon Pagan is associate professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at Arizona State University West.

Book preview

MURDER AT THE SLEEPY LAGOON

MURDER AT THE SLEEPY LAGOON

Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A.

Eduardo Obregón Pagán

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2003

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charter, Eagle, and Meta types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pagán, Eduardo Obregón, 1960–

Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon : Zoot suits,

race, and riot in wartime L.A. /

by Eduardo Obregón Pagán.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2826-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8078-5494-8 (paper : alk. paper)

1. Mexican Americans—California—Los Angeles—Social conditions—20th century. 2. Mexican Americans—Legal status, laws, etc.—California—Los Angeles—History— 20th century. 3. Sleepy Lagoon Trial, Los Angeles, 1942–1943. 4. Zoot Suit Riots, Los Angeles, Calif., 1943. 5. Discrimination in criminal justice administration— California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. 6. Violence—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. 7. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Race relations. 8. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Social conditions—20th century. 9. World War, 1939–1945—California—Los Angeles. 10. World War, 1939–1945—Social aspects. I. Title.

F869.L89M566 2003

979.4′94052—dc21 2003048891

A portion of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, as Los Angeles GeoPolitics and the Zoot-Suit Riot, 1943, Journal of Social Science History 24:1 (Spring 2000): 223–56, and is reprinted here with permission.

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paper 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

FOR JORDAN, LARA, STEPHEN, AND DANIEL

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: The Sleepy Lagoon Mystery

PART I : MAKE NOISE BROKEN WINDOWS

1: Introduction

2: Genealogy of a Crisis

3: The Life and Times of José Díaz

PART II : LA VIDA DURA

4: The People v. Zammora et al.

5: Dangerous Fashion

6: The Significance of the Pachuco as a General Category and Conception

PART III : SHOUTING CURSES ON THE STREET

7: Wars of Resistance

8: Days of Riot

PART IV : THE VIOLENT POETRY OF THE TIMES

9: Uneasy Truce

Epilogue: Who Killed José Díaz?

Appendix: A Note on Terminology and Methodology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Manuel Ruíz Jr. and the Coordinating Council for Latin American Youth 35

Young women from 38th Street after the police dragnet 76

Dora Barrios, Frances Silva, and Lorena Encinas 78

Arraignment of young men from 38th Street 79

Eleanor Delgadillo Coronado 83

Delia Parra 90

Young men with duck tail hair and drapes 103

La Dora, El Paul, La Lupe, El Chubby 105

Variation of the drape shape 111

Drape worn by jazz aficionados 112

The drape style popular among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles 113

Rioting military men and civilians looking for zoot suiters 174

Black and Mexican American youths from Watts jailed during the riot 178

Mayor Bowron meeting with military and police leaders 181

Young men beaten during the riot 186

Tables and Maps

TABLES

1. Population of Los Angeles, 1900–1940 21

2. Foreign-Born White Residents of Los Angeles by Country of Origin, 1900–1940 22

3. Demographic Profiles of Chavez Ravine, Alpine Street, and Temple Street Neighborhoods, 1940 149

4. Foreign-Born Residents of Chavez Ravine, Alpine Street, and Temple Street Neighborhoods by Country of Origin, 1940 150

MAPS

1. The Williams Ranch and the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir 60

2. The bunkhouse compound at the Williams Ranch 67

3. The neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine, Alpine Street, and Temple Street in downtown Los Angeles, 1943 148

4. The progress of rioting 175

Acknowledgments

This work could not have reached completion without the financial assistance and support of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Princeton University Department of History, Dean Eugene Lowe and the Princeton University Office of the Dean of Students, Dean David Redman and the Princeton University Graduate College, the Princeton Society of Fellows of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni, the Minority Academic Careers Program of the New Jersey Department of Higher Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars FB 35241–98, the Dean of the Faculty at Williams College, the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University, and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

I thank the many librarians who have generously offered their knowledge and assistance: Emily Belcher, Anne Caiger, Richard Chabran, Sarah Cooper, Pam Dunn, Linda Long, Dan Luckenbill, Donna McLish, Octavio Olvera, Dace Taube, Roberto G. Trujillo, Mary Tyler, and Yolanda Retter Vargas. I have been fortunate to work with students and others who have shared an excitement about the topic and period and provided valuable support and research assistance: Judith Burchard, Yolanda Davila, Felipe Pérez, and Christopher Wells. Desiree García, Mylene Moreno, Joseph Tovares, and the rest of the Zoot Suit Riot project for the PBS series The American Experience were especially helpful in collaborating with me and in sharing their research. I am particularly indebted to the historical actors and their families whose stories I attempt to tell, who welcomed me into their homes, took the time to be interviewed, read and commented on drafts of this manuscript, provided assistance, or allowed access to personal papers and documents: Socorro Díaz Blanchard, Lino Díaz, Ted Encinas, Lupe Leyvas, Rudy Leyvas, Alice McGrath, Theresa D. Torres, Henry Ynostroza, and Mary Jane Zamora.

I am grateful to the many colleagues who have generously offered their time, insights, suggestions, and criticism on various drafts or portions of this work: Jane Aiken, Peter Andreas, Elaine M. Beretz, Albert Camarillo, Leonard Dinnerstein, John Dwyer, Edward Escobar, Elizabeth Escobedo, Desiree García, Ignacio García, Mario García, Karen H. Gardner, Susan Green, Michael Hall, Gary Hewitt, Meredith Hindley, Walter Johnson, Karen Eileen Kampwirth, Steven Kantrowitz, Ben Labaree, Daniel Liljenquist, Ruth Liljenquist, Jan Logan, Kenneth Maffitt, Lisa Magaña, Mauricio Mazón, Karen Merrill, Joseph Neville, Margarita Obregón Pagán, Nell Irvin Painter, Keith Pezzoli, Jerry Podair, Catherine Ramírez, Daniel Rodgers, Renee Romano, Ricardo Romo, Joel Schwartz, Howard Shorr, Donald Stokes, Julia J. Thompson, Joseph Tovares, Elizabeth Traube, Richard Ulman, Ulrik Vangstrup, Eric Van Young, Gareth Williams, K. Scott Wong, Russell Wyland, and Henry Yu. Lew Bateman, Chuck Grench, Ruth Homrighaus, and Amanda McMillan were encouraging throughout the manuscript review, and Matt García, David Montejano, and the anonymous readers for the University of North Carolina Press provided invaluable comments and criticisms. Finally, I can never express enough gratitude to Margarita Obregón Pagán, Ruth Liljenquist, and Nell Painter for their rigorous but unfailing support throughout this project. Con safos.

The views expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Endowment for the Humanities or of the author’s colleagues at the Endowment, and endorsement by the federal government should not be assumed.

MURDER AT THE SLEEPY LAGOON

Prologue: The Sleepy Lagoon Mystery

Dies irae, dies illa calamitatis et miseriae; dies magna et amara valde.

Day of wrath, this day of calamity and misery; a great and bitter day.

The blows cracked hard against his head and body, bruising him like someone had picked up a two-by-four and flailed against him mercilessly.¹ Twenty-two-year-old José Díaz tried to duck under his lean arms to shield himself from the punishing beating, but he could feel his strength slipping away. He struggled to defend himself, punching into the dark night at the men who surrounded him, but his aim was bad. Fear surging through his mind caused him to swing wildly, and he was almost too drunk to keep his balance. He hit someone, though, three or four times, hard enough to skin his knuckles and break his finger.

What did they want? Why had he ever come to this party? He had told his mother earlier that evening that he had a strange feeling about going. His neighbors, Amelio and Angela Delgadillo, had spent weeks preparing their small shack for the birthday of their twenty-year-old daughter, Eleanor Delgadillo Coronado.² The Delgadillo and Díaz families were friends and lived about a hundred yards away from each other in bunkhouses clustered around a small pond, where Italian, Chinese, and Mexican farm workers made their homes on the Williams Ranch in rural Los Angeles County.³ Several weeks earlier friends and neighbors had helped the Delgadillos pour a slab of cement on the patio, and they were eager to put it to good use dancing and eating good food on Saturday night, 1 August 1942.

José was one of the invited guests, and although he was not normally one to attend parties, this was his last weekend at home, and this party would be the last time he would see his friends and neighbors. Because he was born in Mexico, he was not subject to the draft, but he felt it was his duty to fight on behalf of his adopted country, and he was to report to the army recruitment center for his induction the following Monday. After confiding his uneasiness about attending the party to his mother, he walked down the footpath along the pond that led to the Delgadillos’ home.⁴

José rarely drank, but on this night he accepted the free-flowing beer offered from friends and co-workers at the party.⁵ By one o’clock in the morning the dance orchestra had packed up and left the celebration. So, too, had most of the guests, including José in the company of a couple of men. The Delgadillo girls wanted to continue dancing, so they moved their Victrola radio onto the patio and tuned in to a music program.⁶ Victoria Delgadillo began dancing with Dominic Manfredi, and Josephine Delgadillo Reyes, nicknamed Lola, danced with her husband, Cruz.⁷ The parents turned their attention to cleaning up the house, and a small cluster of young men gathered outside the fence, smoking cigarettes.

José began to weave his way home, drunk and feeling a bit ill. But when he was far enough away from the Delgadillos’ single porch light to be hidden in the shadows of the tall trees and shrubbery, he was viciously attacked. José withstood several blows to his face with fists and to his arms and head with a club. He finally collapsed face forward onto the road when someone stabbed him twice in the stomach with an ice pick.⁸

José was found about thirty minutes later. His swollen eyes were half open, and blood gurgled in his throat as he breathed. He was bleeding profusely from his left ear and through his shirt around his upper abdomen. His pockets had been turned inside out. A neighbor ran to arouse José’s younger brother Lino from bed, who awakened and rushed to find his mortally wounded brother surrounded by the Delgadillos, Coronados, and others.⁹ In the distance someone ran off to call an ambulance.

An hour and a half after José Díaz entered Los Angeles General Hospital, he quietly died, without regaining consciousness.¹⁰

The following Monday morning, the city of Los Angeles learned of Díaz’s death through an unassuming report about weekend violence printed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. This was not the first time that tales of violence from the Eastside found their way into the Los Angeles newspapers, and both the positioning and the tenor of the report reflected the attitudes that many Angelenos held toward Mexicans in the United States. The story of José’s death made front-page news, but only as part of a larger story about an unusually heavy weekend of street brawls in East Los Angeles. The tone of reporting revealed concern over growing violence in Los Angeles but did not suggest any particular alarm at one more Mexican casualty.

The public at large in Los Angeles had a history of holding a complicated set of views toward Mexico and its citizens. Southern Californians in general tended to value facets of Mexican culture that were good for ambience and for tourism and the hard work that they could command for paying Mexican wages to racialized nonwhite laborers. But at the time of Díaz’s death, the echo had barely quieted from the previous decade, when white Californians called for the mass deportations of Mexican refugees and their American-born spouses and children in order to save the state from having to provide relief to unemployed immigrants during the Great Depression.¹¹ This reactionary refrain of the 1930s, of course, followed on the earlier cant of Americanization in the 1920s, when armies of social workers, educators, and philanthropists in Los Angeles fought against the imagined danger of cultural diversity that Mexican expatriates threatened in failing to embrace American values and lifestyles quickly enough.

In late 1942, the governor’s office sent a memo to the law enforcement agencies of Los Angeles County ordering them to crack down on street violence and youth gangs. As a result, what ordinarily would have been a routine police investigation of the death of José Díaz skyrocketed in political significance for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The Los Angeles Police Department launched a much publicized war on juvenile delinquency and turned the investigation into a major media event. In the months that followed, Californians would again revive the discourse on the Mexican problem and debate whether Mexican citizens and their American-born children were culturally, politically, intellectually, and biologically capable of living within a white, civilized, democratic society.

The outcry in editorials and letters to the editor that followed the growing press coverage of the investigation was as swift as it was angry over the problem of juvenile delinquency in Los Angeles. But the cries for justice came not so much because Díaz or his peers personally meant something to those who called for a strong police showing against juvenile gangs. Had he survived his wounds, José would have remained, in all likelihood, virtually invisible to the public. Instead, his death represented a horrible truth that the white reading public would rather not recognize: the sometimes violent and often unforgiving City of Angels.

In the weeks that followed the death of José Díaz, the LAPD conducted mass dragnets throughout the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, targeting those areas heavily populated by Mexican Americans and African Americans. More than six hundred young men and women were taken into custody as a result, and the Los Angeles press hailed the police as heroes. Shortly thereafter, through their often brutal interrogations of adolescent youths, the police proudly announced that they had found those responsible for José’s death—the young people of 38th Street.

But were they?

Part I

Make Noise Broken Windows

1: Introduction

For many Americans, World War II was the good war, both at the time of the conflict and in popular memory today.¹ Although the war may have seemed good for some, it was not for all. The nation celebrated a kind of patriotism that was layered with troubling assumptions about power, race, and culture.² Indeed, those who looked too foreign or who failed to conform to the celebrated American ideal often paid the price. Cultural difference was confused with political dissent, and Japanese Americans, for example, were interned not for crimes committed but for criminality suspected.³ Race riots, furthermore, raged from Los Angeles to New York, ultimately serving to reinforce the racial barriers of a segregated nation.⁴ Of these home front tensions that revealed the social cleavages of American society, none attracted more national and international attention during the war than two events in Los Angeles: the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial of 1942 and the Zoot Suit Riot of 1943.

The riot followed the trial during a climate of growing public concern that the children of refugees from the Mexican Revolution, who were increasingly called Pachucos, were becoming juvenile delinquents in their failure to conform to American social standards. Open confrontation along racial fault lines for this generation began as early as 1940, when mostly Mexican American youths aggressively challenged the intrusion of white military men into their social spaces as they passed through Los Angeles by the thousands. What educators, policy makers, social workers, law enforcement authorities—even members of their own community—were unable to see in viewing these children through the lens of social propriety was that part of their failure to conform came from a direct refusal to accept the racialized norms of segregated America. But in refusing to concede to the privileges of whiteness they were not resisting American culture in its entirety, as contemporary observers believed and some still contend. Rather, they embraced the uniquely American cultural invention of jazz as a means of negotiating their sense of place on terms of their own choosing. Their assertions of self found multiple expressions, from the music to which they danced, the slang they spoke, and the clothing they wore to refusing to defer to the privileges of whiteness and physically assaulting whites in order to maintain the integrity of their social spaces.⁵

The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riot are familiar to students of the American home front during World War II. Among Chicanos, the zoot-suited Pachuco captured the imagination of a generation of poets, artists, dramatists, and writers, who envisioned the social crises of the murder trial and riot as a kind of Pachuco passion play that transformed the children of Mexican refugees into the forerunners of the politicized Chicano. As a consequence, what Carlos Jiménez characterized as the zoot suit years has enjoyed the attention of numerous scholarly articles, books, works of art, poetry, fiction, movies—and even a Broadway musical—since the time that noted Hollywood screenwriter Guy Endore wrote The Sleepy Lagoon Mystery in 1944.⁶

The most detailed discussions to date about the Sleepy Lagoon murder and the Zoot Suit Riot come from the work of Mauricio Mazón and Edward Escobar.⁷ Mazón’s extraordinarily nuanced work The Zoot-Suit Riots (1984) has shaped current understanding of the events by utilizing psychoanalytic theory to explain mob behavior. Escobar’s excellent study Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity (1999) places the Zoot Suit Riot within the larger historical context of Mexican American tensions with the Los Angeles Police Department since the turn of the century. The dominant explanation for why the trial and riot occurred draws from the basic premise argued by Carey McWilliams and Guy Endore in the 1940s, that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst intentionally used his Los Angeles newspapers, the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express and the Los Angeles Examiner, to promote anti-Mexican hysteria.⁸ As a causal explanation for the Zoot Suit Riot, anti-Mexican hysteria was a favored theory of the Left in Los Angeles during World War II and afterward. Progressive activists of the period such as Endore and McWilliams viewed the trial and riot through the lens of conspiracy and corruption, discovering in the sequence of events the machinations of wealth and power unfettered. The appeal of this interpretation was that it simplified the complicated social dynamics and contradictory alliances of wartime Los Angeles by locating the origins of the social conflicts solely within white irrationality stirred by Hearst’s pro-fascist designs. Although the notion of riot as irrationality certainly holds merit from a historical and psychoanalytic perspective, it obscures more than it illuminates in relegating the actors in this social crisis to the roles of hapless victims of inflammatory rhetoric. Both white military men and Mexican Americans exist in this interpretation only as pawns of manipulating industrialists. Such casting worked well for the purposes of the leftist polemic of the day because it provided a kind of bloody shirt—or bloodied zoot suit, as it were—that they could wave in condemnation of concentrated wealth and power.

The anti-Mexican hysteria thesis proved supple enough for Chicano historians to continue utilizing it as an explanation for the conflicts as they began to write their own histories thirty years later. But rather than locate the origins of hysteria in the manipulations of corporate interests, Chicano scholars saw anti-Mexican hysteria deriving from the pathology of American society. The appeal of this interpretation was that it moved away from Guy Endore’s Hollywood view of sinister men controlling the puppet strings of society and highlighted the pervasiveness of racism and the propensity toward violence in American society. Yet this interpretation rests on a circular line of reasoning, that anti-Mexican hysteria caused news reporters to write unfavorable stories about Mexicans, which led to anti-Mexican hysteria. Furthermore, how racial animosity transformed into a murder trial and riot at that particular moment in that particular manner has yet to be adequately explained. In looking to the press as the instigator of racial violence, one must assume that riot is the natural and uncomplicated outcome of unfavorable news reports.

The anti-Mexican hysteria thesis, as the singular explanation for the social tensions, disregards critical aspects of the social dynamic before the outbreak of rioting.⁹ If widespread and long-standing anti-Mexican tensions led to the murder trial, why did the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office vigorously prosecute the death of a Mexican national when white authorities could have easily ignored brown-on-brown violence as their counterparts in the South did with black-on-black violence? Why did military men riot when they were only temporarily stationed in Los Angeles on their way overseas and had little prior interaction with Mexican Americans, instead of longtime white residents who would have been the most saturated with and invested in anti-Mexican animosity?¹⁰ The anti-Mexican hysteria thesis also obscures much by placing the actions and motivations of white Los Angeles within the realm of widespread madness and irrationality. I do not seek to dismiss the reality of racial animosity in California, and I have no quarrel with seeing violence as madness, particularly racial violence. My point is that the anti-Mexican hysteria thesis does not account for why rioting sailors targeted zoot-suited young men across the color line, and not all or even most Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. Nor does it account for why some Mexican Americans responded at least in tacit support of the sailors.

The field of Chicano studies has increasingly moved away from the paradigm of victimology to explore the ways in which Mexican Americans have exercised historical agency and fashioned their lives within the confines of their times, however unintended the consequences. My hope is to contribute to this trend in probing the articulations of key factions in Los Angeles that played critical roles leading up to the riot. I ask how popular culture both articulated and shaped the tensions that exploded into riot, how jazz facilitated the negotiation of place for working-class youths, and what their engagement with jazz meant to Mexican Americans and white Angelenos. Through my exploration of popular culture, I shift the origins of the trial and riot away from a monocausal explanation toward a multivalent theory that looks at competing social tensions deriving from demographic pressures, city planning, racism, segregation, and an incipient, street-level insurgency against what Tomás Almaguer called the master narrative of white supremacy.¹¹

A closer look at this specific moment in time reveals a complex social dialogue. Among the young men tried for murder in the Sleepy Lagoon case were white working-class youths, such as Victor Bobby Thompson and Hungarian American John Matuz, who socialized, dated, and sided with Mexican American peers through the cultural language of mostly black music, manner, and fashion.¹² At the same moment, Mexican American professionals such as Manuel Ruíz Jr. looked askance at these Pachucos, sided with the LAPD, and defended the actions of the rioting servicemen. White activists such as LaRue McCormick, Carey McWilliams, and Alice McGrath defied political allegiances to work tirelessly on behalf of the predominantly black and Mexican American communities targeted during this crisis. Accounting for the complicated cross loyalties during the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riot requires a rethinking of power and power relations during this period. Indeed, what does it mean for the Chicano historical memory when the young men and women directly involved in the quintessential Pachuco moment spoke English exclusively, never wore zoot suits, and did not identify as Pachuco?¹³

The trial and riot were two episodes in a larger struggle over the structures of power and privilege in America, played out through contests over culture and social propriety. The public spaces of Los Angeles served as the arena where the very definitions of who constituted the public, who could lay claim to those spaces, who could enforce social behavior in those spaces, and who could define the terms of propriety and delinquency all were hotly contested. One unintended consequence of segregation was that it produced a social, cultural, and political fluidity among families thrown together, and a significant outgrowth of that exchange was that young people across the color line, mostly of the working class, discovered and increasingly embraced what Michael Bakan termed the jazz lifeworld. The jazz music, language, clothing, and behavior that were elements of this black urban subculture expressed aesthetic tastes and sympathies clearly in opposition to the normative social values of mainstream America, as well as to the aspirations of racial uplift and socioeconomic mobility embraced by many parents of the wartime generation. Certainly jazz was not new to American culture in the 1940s; neither were tensions between parents and youths over popular culture. Although both developments played important roles in shaping social tensions in Los Angeles during the war years, they would likely not have led to riot by themselves. Robin D. G. Kelley argues that black zoot-suited hipsters who frequented jazz clubs in eastern cities openly criticized the white man’s war and prided themselves in evading the draft. It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that military men attacked zoot-suited civilian youths in Los Angeles because of their opposition to the war. Yet jazz never developed into a vehicle for defining, articulating, or communicating an opposition to the war, although some contemporary observers alleged as much. Indeed, as Burton Peretti shows, the successful appropriation of swing jazz and jazz musicians by the national war effort sufficiently divested jazz of its controversial origins as it became mainstream. Working-class youths in Los Angeles engaged swing jazz in qualitatively different ways than black youths in the East, refashioning the politics of black hipsters into a more complicated view of patriotism and civic disobedience as they refashioned the zoot suit into the more conservative drape. Rather than resisting the war, they were eager to do their part through working in defense industries or proving their valor on the battlefield, but they also found ways of undermining white privilege that underwrote home front social relations in the public sphere.¹⁴

A parallel development in Los Angeles, wholly unrelated to the growing popularity of swing jazz, created the context for the demonization of the drape as competition between young civilians and military men over social space escalated into open conflict. With the coming of war, city planners imposed a million-dollar training facility for white sailors in an area of town long occupied by working-class and immigrant families. Raúl Villa’s observation that the experience of being displaced in multiple ways from a perceived homeland has been an essential element of Chicanos’ social identity in this country could well describe the reaction that many young people had in the neighborhoods that were directly affected.¹⁵ Their responses to these changes provide another window into the ways in which they interacted with American society. A year before the outbreak of riot, young men living in the neighborhoods surrounding the naval facility, the majority of whom were Mexican or Mexican American, began a guerrilla campaign on the streets that consisted of harassment, intimidation, and resistance to the ideals of white privilege. Social workers, police, city officials, news reporters, and concerned citizens responded by characterizing this increasingly acrimonious contest as the work of misfits, malcontents, and delinquents who posed a threat to wartime stability, and they fixated on the flamboyant drape as the marker of delinquents. The confrontation that erupted into riot between these working-class youths of color, military men, and civilians across the color line was a spontaneous and violent exercise in power to reinscribe the contested boundaries of public space, public safety, and social propriety.

This study develops Neil Foley’s observation in White Scourge that perception and behavior played a role in the racialization of laborers in rural Texas. But unlike the tenant farmers in Foley’s study, whose whiteness derived from a fusion of manhood, politics, and land tenure, young urban laborers underwent a racialization process in an inverse relationship to their exercise of manhood, politics, and material possession. If whiteness can be defined as possessing maximum access to social, economic, and political privilege, then land ownership was less directly a factor in white status in Los Angeles of the 1940s because renting was a more common phenomenon among city dwellers. In the anonymity of the city, clothing, bearing, presentation, and behavior were more instantaneous markers of status and affiliation. For urban laborers, their racialization came in direct relationship to their displays of consumption because, as Stuart Cosgrove notes, the clothing they wore and the manner they presented challenged dominant expectations of decorum and deference.¹⁶ Clothing and behavior became political arenas for larger contests between cultural hegemony and self-expression, segregation and inclusion, racism and the rejection of white privilege.

The supremacy of whiteness, held together by a powerful mortar of belief systems, social customs, and laws, was under direct assault at multiple levels during World War II. Through their simple refusal to conform to the dominant expectations of what good, racialized minorities should be—not heard and often not seen by the white middle class—working-class African American and Mexican American youths openly challenged the assumptions of white privilege on the streets of Los Angeles. Through self-representations of their choosing, they also participated in larger and more subtle efforts by Mexican American professionals and white activists to undermine the imposed boundaries of racial identities and racial allegiances. Bobby Thompson, for example, although phenotypically white, chose to dress, talk, and act like his Mexican American friends of 38th Street. It is telling that he was treated as a Pachuco by the police, the press, and the public at large, who presumed deviance in the self-fashioned difference he shared with his peers. At the same time, Manuel Ruíz Jr., although phenotypically Latino, preferred to identify as an American of Mexican descent and dress, talk, act, and socialize like a middle-class professional.¹⁷ Equally telling, he was treated accordingly by the police, politicians, the press, and the public at large, who presumed respectability and leadership from his appearance and behavior.

Thompson’s and Ruíz’s stories allow for an exploration of some of the ways in which racial constructions of identity interact with social standing and political power during particular moments in time. In addition to Foley’s study of the historical process of racialization for Mexican Americans, Tomás Almaguer and David Gutiérrez have explored the relationship between racial constructions and social standing.¹⁸ In my own efforts to think through the complicated dynamics of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and Zoot Suit Riot, it is clear that in this moment of social crisis race was more of a situational construction of social position than what has been acknowledged thus far in scholarly study. Rodolfo Acuña’s observation—that in contemporary California Mexican acceptability in Los Angeles varies according to the Mexican’s appearance and socioeconomic status—could well describe the phenomena of racial and social positioning in the 1940s.¹⁹ Racial categories have not always been defined by an empirical reality but at times by a perceived reality. In other words, the racialization of an individual or group did not always correspond with skin pigmentation but drew from dominant ideas about behavior, clothing, music, culture, and symbols. Because behavior and cultural expression could be altered and manipulated, there were moments when race categories became elastic and unstable because of the time, place, and context of the particular social dialogue between peoples.

This study explores how some Mexican Americans found themselves in a historical context that allowed them to renegotiate the terms of their social dialogue. Manuel Ruíz Jr. and his company of middle-class professionals redefined themselves as Latin Americans, not to pass for white, or to assimilate American culture, as some have criticized, but to gain political leverage denied them as Mexicans. At the same time, working-class Mexican American youths also chose to redefine themselves. They crafted an identity that was neither Mexican in the manner that their parents’ generation would have them nor American in the manner that the dominant society would have them. Mexican poet Octavio Paz interpreted this as a cultural ambivalence deriving from spiritual vacuity, and Cosgrove similarly viewed it as the mark of a disinherited generation whose members were stripped of their customs, beliefs, and language.²⁰ I argue, instead, that this generation of Mexican Americans actively sought to renegotiate their social positioning in ways of their own design and choosing, in dialogue with their peers, their heritage, their times, and their social surroundings.

I use the term power in this study to refer to the ability to exercise control over one’s life and livelihood through full and equal access to political participation, economic opportunities, and social standing. Privilege differs from power in that it is the selective conferring of power as a particular benefit or advantage attached to political and social affiliation. Thus, although members of the Mexican American middle class were denied full and equal access to power because of their racial status, they enjoyed certain privileges based on their behavior, comportment, social connections, political views, and willingness to work with the powers that be. This elite status for racialized minorities, although connected to color and class, was at the same time not entirely absolute and fixed depending on these criteria but relative and malleable enough to incorporate those whose talents, interests, or political and social affiliations supported those with full access to power.

This is not to say that power in society was fully open to or held equally by elite members of the various racialized communities of Los Angeles. Quite to the contrary, whites who constituted the racial and economic elite of Los Angeles, as well as most of the United States, jealously guarded power and employed a variety of means to separate themselves physically, economically, and politically from large portions of the populace—segregation being the most common. Segregation writ large, which includes economic segregation, was wider ranging in its impact than simply dictating who lived where. The written and unwritten codes of segregation sought to define how, when, and why disfranchised peoples, including working-class whites, interacted with the enfranchised in almost all facets of everyday life. At the same time, elites depended on the cooperation of leaders among the disfranchised to maintain order, and these appointed leaders enjoyed greater privileges than others because of their status as reasonable or respectable members of the community.

Manuel Ruíz and his cohort of professionals during this period depended on and used the construction of proper Mexican to gain access to power and that of improper Mexican to distance themselves from and explain Pachucos.²¹ Indeed, one of the ways in which power networks tied community elites together despite color differences was through a code of cultural behavior and social propriety. The relationship between power and behavior rested, in part, on a larger set of assumptions about social respectability and cultural propriety—as well as disrespectability and impropriety, which were heavily racialized. For many Americans at midcentury, being white had to do with more than just phenotype—it also meant acting white, which was a particular mode of behavior deemed mannered, decorous, and deferential to white authority and power. Conversely, social behavior in the opposite manner reflected qualities and characteristics especially reserved for racial stereotypes, as several studies since the pioneering work of John Herbert Nelson and Sterling Brown have shown.²² Social conditions during the Sleepy Lagoon trial and the Zoot Suit Riot polarized around the proper behavior of youths, which allowed various Mexican Americans to become whitened and others to become blackened. Indeed, much of the public discourse drew on dominant assumptions about blackness and Orientalism to frame how it conceptualized the Pachuco problem.

Previous scholarship on the period has received criticism for being too focused on the experiences of men, to the exclusion of Pachucas and women activists. This work weaves throughout the narrative the significant roles that women played in the incident at the Sleepy Lagoon, the murder trial, the appeal effort, and the discourse of juvenile delinquency, rather than bracketing their experiences in a separate chapter. At the same time, it is clear that the law enforcement agencies, social agencies, newspapers, reformers, activists, and the public at large overwhelmingly focused on juvenile delinquency as an especially male problem.²³ All the young men of 38th Street who were in the vicinity where José Díaz was found mortally wounded were tried for conspiring to commit murder, but the young women who were also present were charged with the lesser crime of rioting. Although some young women in Los Angeles wore drapes and prompted a handful of exposés of Pachuca life, the fashion appears to have been most widely popular among young men, and the published denunciations of the Pachuco were voluminous. Moreover, during the Zoot Suit Riot, military men targeted only young civilian males.

Why this was so, and why these events developed in these ways, deserve continued scholarly attention. Escobar argues that the arrest rates for Mexican Americans during the war years rose primarily among males because of the selective and concentrated enforcement in the barrios of Los Angeles of changes in statutes regarding immigration, the draft, and curfews.²⁴ The implication of his argument, by extension, is that the LAPD played a direct role in framing the perception that the so-called crime wave was a particularly male phenomenon. I argue that commonly shared constructions of masculinity—what