Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots
By Margarita Engle and Rudy Gutierrez
()
About this ebook
From the Young People’s Poet Laureate Margarita Engle comes a searing novel in verse about the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943.
Thousands of young Navy sailors are pouring into Los Angeles on their way to the front lines of World War II. They are teenagers, scared, longing to feel alive before they have to face the horrors of battle. Hot jazz music spiced with cool salsa rhythms beckons them to dance with the local Mexican American girls, who jitterbug all night before working all day in the canneries. Proud to do their part for the war effort, these Jazz Owl girls are happy to dance with the sailors—until the blazing summer night when racial violence leads to murder.
Suddenly the young white sailors are attacking the girls’ brothers and boyfriends. The cool, loose zoot suits they wear are supposedly the reason for the violence—when in reality the boys are viciously beaten and arrested simply because of the color of their skin.
In soaring images and searing poems, this is the breathtaking story of what became known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
Margarita Engle
Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of many verse novels, memoirs, and picture books, including The Surrender Tree, All the Way to Havana, Bravo!, Drum Dream Girl, and Dancing Hands. Awards include a Newbery Honor, Pura Belpré Medals, Golden Kite Award, Walter Honor, Jane Addams Award, PEN U.S.A., and NSK Neustadt Prize, among others. Margarita served as the national 2017-2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate. Recent young adult verse novels include Wings in the Wild and Wild Dreamers. Recent picture books include Water Day and The Sculptors of Light. Margarita was born in Los Angeles, but developed a deep attachment to her mother’s homeland during childhood summers with relatives on the island. She studied agronomy and botany along with creative writing, and now lives in central California. www.margaritaengle.com Facebook: Margarita Engle Twitter: @margaritapoet Instagram: @engle.margarita
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Book preview
Jazz Owls - Margarita Engle
CONTENTS
Epigraph
The River of Music
Swimming Season
Barefoot
Peeled
Ghostly?
Victory Familia
Americanos All!
Author’s Note
References
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Para Sandra Ríos Balderrama, héroe de las bibliotecas
and for dancers, dreamers, and heroes of peace, in honor of all the nonviolent Chicano protesters of later decades, whose courage triumphed despite vicious attacks against their communities in the 1940s.
Pero una nueva pulsación, un nuevo latido
arroja al río de la calle nuevos sedientes seres.
Se cruzan, se entrecruzan y suben.
Vuelan a ras de tierra.
But a new pulse, a new throb
hurls thirsty new beings into the river of the street.
They cross, crisscross, and rise.
They fly close to earth.
—Xavier Villaurrutia,
from Nocturno de Los Angeles
(Los Angeles Nocturne)
Manolito from Cuba
Age 16
We flow into the city of ángeles
following a flood of young sailors—
thousands at first, then millions
from all over the U.S., scared teens
who long to dance, need to leap,
craving that feeling of being so alive
as they pass through L.A.
on their swift way
to the horrors
of war.
I’m just one of hundreds of musicians
who arrive from New York, Memphis, Chicago,
Kansas City, Saint Louis, and from the steamy islands
of música too, Cuba and Puerto Rico, drummers,
trumpeters, and saxophonists, wizards of rhythm,
wearing our loose suits, the zoot shape
that drapes us to keep dance leaps smooth
and COOL in this HOT summer river
of JAZZ!
Jazz Craze!
Marisela
Age 16
The musicians call us owls
because we’re patriotic girls
who stay up LATE after working all day,
so we can DANCE with young sailors
who are on their way
to triumph
or death
on distant
ocean waves.
I love feeling jazz-winged,
so this owl life is easy for me,
until early morning, when my shift
at the cannery begins, right after a LONG journey
of clanging streetcar bells and SLEEPY smiles, all
those memories of dancing the jitterbug, Lindy Hop,
and jump blues, while adding my own swaying bit
of Latin-style swing rhythm!
¡RITMO!
Sweaty
Lorena
Age 14
Everyone says I’m still the calm, sensible one,
even though I quit school two years ago,
right after a teacher washed my mouth out
with foamy
foul-tasting
soap.
My crime? Speaking words the teacher
called dog language—español,
my family’s natural música,
the songlike rhythm and melody
of lovely syllables from Mazatlán in México,
where Mami and Papá once danced
beside warm, sparkling, tropical
ocean waves.
I don’t like staying up all night with Marisela,
because our day shift at the cannery means sleep
is needed, to keep fingers alert so they don’t
get crushed by machinery
or sliced
by knives.
High heels, wide skirt, jitterbug
and all that jazz, the sailors call us owls
because we obey the U.S. government’s wish
for a sizzling, sweaty summer of pre-death
entertainment, to cheer navy recruits while they wait
for their warships, our battles, this shared war
of worldwide violence.
Chaperoned by our brother—that’s the only way
any mexicana mother will allow her daughters
to dance, joining las señoritas de la USO
—la Organización de Service United—
a club where navy boys swing and hop before gliding
out toward the oceanic unknown.
Our older brother, Nicolás, is already over there
somewhere in Europe, Asia, or maybe the South Pacific.
We’re not even allowed to know the name of the land
where he’s fighting against fascism and racial hatred.
So Marisela and I have to depend on little Ray
to escort us safely from our exhausting cannery jobs
to an evening of dutiful, patriotic dancing.
Everyone says I’m sensible, but secretly I feel
really angry.
¡Mira!
Ray
Age 12
Swing dance, swing shift, swing a bat,
swings at the park, swing from a tree—
isn’t it funny how many meanings
one little five-letra word can hold?
That’s why I wear my clothes BIG.
HUGE suit, ZOOT suit, baggy pants
for a leaping dance, COOL hat, WIDE shoulders,
watcha—mira—LOOK at me, not old enough
to DIE in