“Zoot Suit Warfare: Los Angeles Front 
     is Near Anarchy Official Says.”   
 

(September 11, 1997 0600 PDT) 

By Isaac H. Cubillos 

Fifth in a series about “Zoot Suit” the play.  

SAN DIEGO, CA — When theater or movie goers see “Zoot Suit,” they    either believe it is a fictional piece or one based on a long-forgotten and insignificant event in the backwaters of history. 
   
But the 1943 headline above comes from the front pages of the San Francisco Chronicle showing the impact the race riots had on Home Front U.S.A. 

Though the play is loosely based on an actual murder and the events proceeding it, it is a stylized depiction of Mexican Americans coming to grip with overt racism, discrimination and how they fit into the predomi- nantly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society. 

“Zoot Suit” gives Mexican Americans context on the stage of history. The play links modern Latinos to the zoot suiters of the 1940s, to the Chicano Movement of the 1970s when the play was conceived, to today’s post Propositions 187 and 209 era. 

It forces Latinos to reexamine themselves, individually and collectively, in light of today’s xenophobic nationalism and overt racism. 

It also provides Latinos [with a reason] to put in perspective how the media has fashioned the Latino image for the consumption of the American public. 

In the mid-1940s news coverage of zoot suiters began after Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps and there was no more a “Japanese enemy.” A new scapegoat was needed to foster the nationalistic fervor the war effort required and the zoot suiter became the target. 

The press — in its role as organizer of the national cultural experience — was a major factor in whipping up anti-Mexican hysteria during the war. 

William Randolph Hearst owner of a media empire which included the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, controlled nearly 60 percent of the country’s information sources. And both men held deep hatred toward Mexicans. 

President Cardenas expropriated Hearst’s 6.5 million acres of land in Baja California and Chandler had been indicted in 1915 for conspiracy to overthrow the Mexican government in order to hold on to his holdings in Baja. 

Chandler’s paper would call Mexicans “ignorant peons” while Hearst would characterize Mexicans in this country as either Communist or fascist fifth columnists whose orders were to incite insurrection in the United States. 

When members of the 38th Street Gang were arrested in connection with the Sleepy Lagoon murder, the news organizations didn’t lose time to begin a strategy of Mexican bashing. 
 
Carey McWilliams, head of the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee detailed the newspapers’ practice in 1943. He wrote: 

“The press has headlined every case in which a Mexican has been arrested, feature photographs of  Mexicans dressed in zoot suits and constantly needles the police to make more arrests . . . Their pictures had the effect of convincing the public that all Mexicans were zoot suiters, and all zoot suiters were criminals; ergo all Mexicans are criminals.” 

The play depicts, the racial animosity between the dominant culture and minorities. Racism, was very much a factor in the conviction of the 38th Street Gang members as well as causing the race riots which flared across the country a year later. 

The hostility against zoot suiters expressed by the government and the press would engulf thousands of people of color who were not zoot suiters. 

Luis Valdez summed up the zoot suit situation: 
 
The race riots began in Los Angeles between June 3-7, 1943. 

On the evening of June 3, 1943 a group of Mexican American kids met to discuss how to deal with 
gang violence in the barrio. On their way home they were attacked by a group of white gang members. 

The same evening a group of sailors were also attacked. Their story was that they had been attacked by Mexicans. 

The police could never locate the fleet of taxis but did find the beaten zoot suiters and immediately charged them with “suspicion of various offenses.” 

The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst, ran a front page head- line, “Zoot Suit Warfare: Los Angeles Front is Near Anarchy Official Says.” 

On June 5 and 6, the sailors stepped up their attacks with home inva- sions and dragging teenagers onto the streets before thousands of onlookers who had turned out to witness the beatings. 

By this time, blacks, Filipinos and young Mexicans, none wearing the zoot suit fashion, were targeted. These attacks demonstrate riots were not about clothing, but about racism in its rawest and ugliest fashion. 

The Los Angeles Times, in an effort to create its own media event, reported that there would be trouble on Main Street on the night of June 7, 1943. This was 24 hours before the event and the notice predictably drew crowds on schedule in anticipation of that night’s riot. 

On June 7, 2,000 sailors and civilians stormed into movie theaters, and East L.A. homes looking for zoot suiters. 

In the first car jacking ever recorded, white sailors forcibly dragged Mexican teen-agers out of private cars, beat them, then left them naked in the street. The sailors would then take the cars and push them into the surrounding canyons. 

As the Los Angeles riots subsided, the race riots spread across the county to Phoenix, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit and lasting throughout the summer of 1943. 

In Phoenix, police officers had their own fashion of sentencing zoot suiters. 

To rob the Mexican youth of their “bravado” officers shaved the young men’s hair. One officer quoted in the Pasadena Star News said, “Nothing takes a would-be gangster down so much as losing his long hair, and we have a perfect right to trim ‘em under a sanitary ordinance.” 

In nearly every city, Mexicans, blacks, American Indians, Filipinos and to a lesser extent whites who “hung out” with pachucos, all became victims of the national racism gone amok. 

Mexican Americans experienced another bitter irony about their identity when the U.S. government mailed draft notices to pachucos who had been deported as Mexican citizens. 

Still, when the war came, thousands of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals lined up to join the military in order to prove their loyalty to America. 

Unfortunately, the majority of them were classified as unfit for military duty because institutional racism had caught up with them. In these instances, it was the school systems which had failed to teach the young men how to read and write. 

For others, poor incomes led to poor diets which led to poor health. One doctor commented that health care was “virtually nonexistent” in the Mexican American population. Thousands of young men were classified as 4-F, medically unfit for duty. 

“Zoot Suit’s” El Pachuco characterizes this group of young men. Unfit, uneducated, loyalty questioned and finally dumped in the gutter by the dominant society. 

In many cities during the 1940s these young men, wearing the drapes made them feel like a somebody, were considered as traitors to the war effort and easy targets for the press and the police. 

But, those Mexican Americans who were able to enlist, did so without resentment toward their treatment as civilians. These young men enlisted in record numbers from every region of the country to demonstrate their intense pride in America. 

War Department documents show that Mexican Americans were more apt to request frontline duty and dangerous missions. “All we wanted was a chance to prove how loyal and American we were,” wrote Raul Morin in his book “Among the Valiant.” 

Yet Mexican Americans throughout the war were portrayed in the press as un-American and subversive to the national cause. 

One zoot suiter wrote to a judge before his hearing, “My people work hard, fight hard in the army and navy of the United States. They’re good Americans and they should have justice.” . . . 

Zoot suiter Dan Acosta wrote a letter to the editor headlined “We Pachu- cos fight for a Free World” Acosta wrote: 

“We think it (Americanism) should fire us to heroic deeds, just as it did our ‘zoot suiter’ brothers, cousins, friends, who died gallantly at Bataan, Guadacanal, North Africa. 

“How will our chaotic, bewildered state of mind be straight- ened out for us when in the near future answering the call to arms we are asked to give our lives for demo cracy, when only last night we were the victims of merciless beatings, and our community invaded by soldiers? 

“. . . until these questions are answered, will we the Mexican people feel at ease from the fear of a possible internment at a concentration camp for feeling free to wear what we wish as long as were are decently clad?”

Ironically, one of the most decorated soldiers during World War II was Frank Padilla, a one-time leader of the Los Angeles 38th Street Gang, from which the Sleepy Lagoon defendants hailed. 

Mexican Americans returning from the war as heroes made the Latino community feel that now they too were finally true Americans. 

But the soldiers’ ties to their youthful days still tugged at them. 

In his book, Morin wrote of his war buddies, “We took pride in our appear- ance and the way we wore the uniform . . . a favorite trick to improve the GI garb was use rubber bands around the legs inside the trousers so the pants would hang low giving them the ‘pachuco’ look.” 
 
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