Transcription
NARRATOR: The Zoot Suit Riots. In June of 1943, the city of Los Angeles experienced one of the most significant episodes of racial violence in the 20th century, known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
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Racial tensions had been rising in the city, and were made only worse by the biased reporting of the Los Angeles media. When a group of American sailors attacked a group of mostly Mexican-Americans in East LA, the city exploded. In hindsight, this seemed inevitable.
With many young men overseas as a result of World War II, labor in the United States was in short supply. So in 1942, the US government reached a deal with Mexico named the Bracero Program, which allowed some Mexican citizens to move to the US as temporary workers. Los Angeles already had a large Mexican-American population, but this new influx of workers provoked greater racial animosity.
Much of the white population, whose views were echoed in the mass media, blamed Mexican-American teenagers and young adults for various issues in the city, especially crime. Even the way Mexican-Americans dressed angered the city's more conservative population. Many young Mexican-Americans started donning the "Zoot Suit," a style that incorporated an oversized coat, pork pie hat, long chain, thick-soled shoes, and baggy pants. This fashion evolved out of Harlem nightclubs, and was popularized by cultural icons like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.
The suits themselves weren't inherently offensive, but in the context of World War II, they were. You see, during the war, wool had been rationed in order to make uniforms for the troops. The very manufacturing of zoot suits, with their excessive use of fabric, was banned. But a black market developed, and so those zoot suit-wearing Mexican Americans, known as "pachucos," were seen as unpatriotic.
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On the night of August 1, 1942, pachucos were involved in a brawl in a home near Los Angeles' Sleepy Lagoon. The next morning, the body of Jose Diaz was discovered nearby. The media and police quickly blamed the zoot suit-wearing 38th Street Gang. Hundreds of pachucos were rounded up, regardless of affiliation. 22 were eventually found guilty for the Sleepy Lagoon Murder, in what was later considered a great miscarriage of justice.
To some, the verdict was grossly unfair. To others, it confirmed what they already believed, that the zoot suit wearers were inherently violent. This all helped to create a powder cake bound to explode. A few months later, a group of 16 American sailors stationed in Los Angeles claimed they were verbally taunted by a group of pachuco zoot suiters. Seeking retaliation, the servicemen took cabs over to the Mexican neighborhoods in East LA, and started attacking those wearing zoot suits with makeshift weapons. The pachucos were thrown into the street, their zoot suits torn off and burned on the spot.
The ensuing riot continued to snowball over the following days. Violence spread to include both pachucos and young African-American men. But instead of arresting the attackers, police arrested the victims, supposedly for their own protection. By June 8, the rioting had become so severe that all military personnel were banned from Los Angeles. And military police were brought in to subdue the attackers. Miraculously, no one was killed. But the impact of the Zoot Suit Riots would reach far beyond the number of casualties.
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Once the dust had settled, Governor Earl Warren commissioned a report that was meant to paint Californians in a more positive light. Instead, the Independent Citizen's Commission found the chief cause of the riots was racism, blaming the city's newspapers for encouraging the riots, and the city government and US military for allowing those riots to continue.
Historians view the Zoot Suit Riots as a culmination of Anti-Mexican racism that had been building for years in Los Angeles, exacerbated by the stresses of World War II. The riots forced the country to face these problems head on, and confront the systemic oppression faced by Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles and throughout the country.