It’s May of 1943, and the United States is in the middle of a war. It’s been two years since the Navy built a reserve armory in a Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles, nearly one year since Pearl Harbor was bombed, and several months since they swept the city, dragging American citizens of Japanese ancestry away to be shipped to internment camps, where they would be confined for the duration of the war.
The sailors and soldiers stationed in the area often walk back to the armory after a night of drinking, spitting insults and racist comments at the Mexican-American civilians they encounter. They are particularly offended, it seems, by teenaged boys in the neighborhood who spend their time, or so the sailors believe, wasting money on drinking, card games, and expensive suits.
Things have gotten tense ever since Frank Torres was shot in June of ‘42. Newspapers have run sensationalist stories of Mexican boy gangs and “zoot suit” lifestyles. Police and servicemen have harassed Chicano youths in increasingly frequent street confrontations.
The beating death of Jose Diaz in October brought even more trouble; more than 600 Chicanos were arrested in a dragnet following the beating. Of those 600, 22 boys were brought to trial, and a judge, notorious for the number of prison sentences he’d handed out, sent several girls to jail without any trial at all when they refused to testify.
In December, a “drunken Pachuco” is claimed to have shot a police officer. In the meantime, as winter turns to spring, confrontations and clashes between the sailors and the “zoot suiters” increases from occasionally to weekly to a couple of times a day.
And now the boiling point has been reached. In May of 1943, the sensationalist media/propaganda, the claims of the police officers, and frustration over convictions of several young men in the death of Jose Diaz comes to a head when 500 sailors and white civilians storm a dance attended by the “zoots,” claiming that a sailor was stabbed, and attack the Mexican-American dance attendees in a fight that lasts for hours. At 2 a.m., the Mexican-American boys (not the sailors) are arrested “for their protection.”
Riots break out on a regular basis around the city. They are often spearheaded or provoked by sailors, and often end with “pachucos” or anyone dressed like them badly beaten.
On June 3, sailors claim to have been robbed by pachucos. Over 200 sailors storm through East Los Angeles, stripping several boys out of their zoot suits and leaving them nearly naked. Sailors and servicemen come from all over the Los Angeles area and even San Diego to join in the fights.
The primary victims of the Zoot Suit riots were young chicanos and chicanas, but their victimization isn’t what was remarkable. What was remarkable was this: knowing that sailors were attacking men wearing zoot suits, many African-American young men and a handful of other men of color deliberately chose to also wear zoot suits in solidarity. They were attacked by sailors along with the “pachucos.” As an eyewitness described:
Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot suiter they could find. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ran up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked off their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy. [Source]
As the riots quickly turned violent, African-Americans also offered Chicano victims vehicles and weapons to help defend themselves against servicemen run amuck.
Because African-Americans were standing with the Chicanos, the riots spread into the primarily-black neighborhood of Watts by June 7, before the Armed Forces finally ended the violence by declaring Los Angeles off-limits to all service personnel.
And they were not the only ones who saw something wrong and, rather than standing back and shutting up, chose to do something about it.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote an unpopular and widely criticized column shortly after the riots, in which she called them “race riots,” blamed long-term discrimination rather than Mexican-American criminality for the violence, and said:
The question goes deeper than just suits. It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should. [Source]
That might not seem like much, especially as it didn’t help the hundreds of young Chicanos arrested during and after the rioting (the sailors were simply returned to their bases, free men). But political opponents of her husband, the president of the United States during a time of war, seized on it. They painted Mrs. Roosevelt as a radical and a communist.
While she was the most powerful person to speak out, though, many others saw the wrong and demanded that the servicemen and police officers be charged and the zoot suiters released. It had no effect.
In some cases, being an ally means putting yourself at risk to stand up for what is right or what you believe, whether that risk is physical, political, or simply a risk of discomfort or emotional tension. It means standing up even if you aren’t personally affected by something, or even if you have the luxury to keep quiet. Sometimes you take the risk, and nothing comes of it. But what’s important in the end isn’t whether your actions paid off, but that you took them in the first place.
Sources:
Historians and WWII. Zoot Suit Riots.
Los Angeles Almanac. Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots.
PBS American Experience. Timeline: Zoot Suit Riots.
Suavecito Apparel Co. Zoot Suit Riots.
University of South Florida Educational MOOs. World War Two and the Zoot Suit Riots.
Wikipedia. Zoot Suit Riots.
Wyatt, David. Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California. Oxford University Press, 1999.
