Dan Ruprecht
History 209S
Zoot Suit Masculinity
In
early June, 1943, as war ravaged Europe and rocked the Pacific, a cohort of
about 50 American sailors descended upon the Carmen Theater in Los Angeles,
armed with clubs and homemade bludgeons, out for blood. They brushed aside the
theater’s staff, flipped the lights on, and spotted their target: a small group
of young Mexican American boys. Tearing of the boys’ clothes, the servicemen
made a bonfire in the middle of the theater. They began to beat the boys
furiously, attacking any patron who tried to protect them.[1]
The next day, more than 200 soldiers joined in the offensive, assaulting the
Mexican American population all over Los Angeles as the police force watched.
The LAPD claimed they “lacked jurisdictional authority” to act against the
military, but in the coming weeks arrested and imprisoned hundreds of young
Mexican Americans.[2] In
the following months, the attacks were imitated in major cities across the
United States by servicemen in the army, navy, air force and local police
forces. In most cases, sailors or soldiers sought Mexican American boys between
16 and 18, stripped them naked, and burnt their clothes in front of their eyes—often
urinating on the flames to add to the humiliation—and beat the boys “with a
sadistic frenzy.”[3] Thus
began the Zoot Suit Riots.
The
name comes from the flamboyant outfit that most victims wore: ballooning high-waisted
pants tightly cuffed at the ankle, long jackets with broad, padded shoulders, a
conspicuously long watch chain dangling from the pocket, comically fat ties,
and wide-rimmed flat hats –a zoot suit. The “Zooters” stood in stark contrast
to the American sailors in their government issued naval uniforms, but of
course, understanding the causes of the attacks is much more complicated than
identifying who fought whom.
Los Angeles
mayor Fletcher Bowron maintained that the riots were caused by the Mexican
American “juvenile delinquents.”[4]
Many popular media sources concurred, portraying the “Zoot Suit War” as the
struggle of heroic American servicemen against a perceived “Mexican crime wave.”[5]
Neither interpretation holds water against even the slightest investigation, as
many at the time already knew. There is a case to be made that the Zoot Suits
themselves, those incredibly conspicuous, extravagant suits, set off the
servicemen; the soldiers were outraged by the Zooters’ affinity for flamboyance,
using rationed fabric and wearing expensive watch chains which seemed an
assault on patriotism as the government urged citizens to spend any money they
had on the war effort. But then, most of those boys worked in wartime factories
and planned on joining the military as soon as they could, as their older
siblings often had already done. And many young Americans who were attacked did
not wear the suit.
Gene Cabral was
one such boy, 15 and working in a factory as his four older brothers fought
abroad. He recognized that the attacks were never about the outfits. “Looking
back now,” he said in 2013, “I’m pretty sure that people were just racist.”[6]
Most every history written in the past half century agrees, and the riots are
currently understood to be a kind of one-sided racial war perpetrated originally
by white sailors against Mexican Americans, and then against any minority as
they spread. I believe, however, that there is still more going on. Servicemen
focused on public humiliation, burning and urinating on the zooter’s clothing
while the boys watched, naked and beaten. These kinds of attacks focus on
establishing the dominance of the servicemen, first by physically forcing the
boys into submission (beatings) and then shaming them (burning their clothes).
It is a style of attack which, I propose, was motivated in large part by clashing
ideas of what it meant to be a man in America. To the pachuco, as the Mexican Americans called themselves, “manliness” or
“manhood” had a completely different meaning than to the Marine.
The young pachucos were parts of families recently
migrated to America who felt doubly alienated; both their Mexican roots and
their American surroundings seemed foreign. They responded, as other
subcultures of ethnic minorities in the United States have when confronted with
rejection on all sides, by loud self-assertions of manhood and sexuality. This
meant conspicuous suits, a brazen attitude of non-compliance to the point of
arrogance, and the oft-repeated insult “cock-sucker!” hurled at each other and
at the servicemen. The sailors, in contrast, believed generally in a
white-American ideal, a submissive, serviceman hero whose identity was subsumed
by the nation’s cause. Because one of those definitions was empowered by the
state to employ violence upon the other, they did so to reassert their manhood.
The competing gender identities sharpened the servicemen’s racism and dictating
the method of violence inflicted on
pachuco bodies.
[1] This story is recounted in
the introduction (p 223 – 225) and conclusion (p 257) of Pagan, E.O. “Los
Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit
Riot, 1943.” Social Science History
Spring 2004, no 24.
[2] Ibid, 247.
[3] Ibid, p 249 & McWilliams,
Carey. North from Mexico: The
Spanish-speaking People of the United States. Praeger, 1990.
[4] “Zoot Suit Riots," Britannica
Academic, accessed January 26, 2016, http://academic.eb.com/EBchecked/topic/1317905/Zoot-Suit-Riots.
[5] Ibid
[6] Baeder, Ben, “Zoot Suit
Riots: Racism underlies week of violence in Los Angeles” San Gabriel Valley Tribune (California, June 1, 2013).
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