Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1947, 1944, 1943, 1942, 1940s
[p. 96] Chapter 4 1943 Zoot Suit
[p. 96, 1943] "By 1943 the United States was at war with itself as well as with the Axis powers. The mobilization of American society for war was bringing into close contact disparate groups of Americans who feared, distrusted, even hated each other. Nowhere was this more true than in California. The war itself, after all, was for much of white California a racially motivated conflict with Japan: a conflict already a half century in duration before it broke into actual hostility. By the end of 1942 California had imprisoned most persons of Japanese ancestry and was serving as the central training and staging zone for the fierce war-a fierce racial war-against Japan in the Pacific. In the final phases of that war alone, more than seventy-five thousand Americans and an estimated one million Japanese would lose their lives in terrible, no-holds-barred, hand-to-hand island battles lasting to the bitter end . . .
[p. 96, 1943] " . . . in 1943, Americans were recognizing . . . [p. 97] that they were in for a long and very dangerous war in which one major enemy was perceived in racially hostile terms. So much hostility could not help but destabilize the home front. Whipping themselves into a racially focused frenzy against the Japanese, Americans could not help but intensify and destabilize racial antagonisms in their own society. In 1943 such tensions erupted into riot.
"It began in Los Angeles. By 1943 there were three million people of Mexican descent living in the United States, most of them in the Southwest or in Southern California, with some two hundred thousand in Los Angeles County. The Mexican-American colonia was divided into a number of barrios: Dogtown, Alpine, the Flats, Happy Valley in East Los Angeles, and other unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. Only five thousand Mexican-Americans had found jobs in the war industries of greater Los Angeles by early 1943, [according to] the Congress of Industrial Organizations. . . . For most of the twentieth century, the Mexicans of greater Los Angeles, Mexican nationals and Mexican-American citizens alike, had been living on the margins of white Los Angeles, the forgotten founders of the city.
[p. 97, 1943] "While white California, Southern California especially, was willing to sentimentalize old California, as in the Ramona myth, neither they nor the Mexican population of the Southland (with the exception of a few surviving Old California families) saw any continuity between the Spanish and Mexican founders of California and the present population of the state. Even the Roman Catholic Church, to which most Mexicans adhered, had become an English-speaking entity, hence psychologically part of the Anglo-California that existed on the other side of a great cultural and ethnic divide. . . . Southern California lacked an integrative industrial system and so remained an assemblage of ethnic enclaves, each of them self-contained, each of them excluding and being excluded up and down the social scale. The Mexicans of Los Angeles, along with the blacks and Asians, were restricted to certain districts by custom and real estate covenants; were assigned to a separate second-tier, even third-tier school system . . .were excluded from public swimming pools on all but one day a week . . .; were turned away at the door of numerous theaters and dance halls and saw the sign Se Sirve Solamente a Raza Blanca in numerous restaurants . . .
[p. 97, 1943] Los Angeles, in short, was a Jim Crow town in which numerous nobodies-failures, drifters, downwardly mobile Folks, those expelled from their previous communities-had one thing and only one thing going for them, either con-[p. 97, 1943]sciously or subconsciously; they were white. As racial hatred against the Japanese surfaced into respectability-indeed, became a vehement proof of patriotism-such Los Angelenos began to identify their whiteness with America itself, and with the war effort.
[p. 98, 1943] With the Japanese removed into camps, Mexicans provided the next obvious target for racial hatred . . . Among the many charges leveled by whites against Mexicans was their alleged proclivity for violence. Captain Edward Duran Ayres, chief of the Foreign Relations Bureau in the office of the sheriff of Los Angeles County, spoke for many white Southern Californians in a 1942 report to the county grand jury: Mexicans were descended from Indians, Orientals, with Mongolian tendencies to violence. . . . resorting to knives or lethal weapons rather than the fists of Anglo-Saxon youths . . .
[p. 98. 1943] Once again, the racism of California caused international embarrassment, since Mexico was an ally of the U.S, against the Axis . . . American liberals . . . drew obvious comparisons to the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.
[p. 98, 1942] On the other hand . . . A significant percentage of the officers of the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff's Department agreed with Ayres. For many years, in fact, the LAPD and the sheriff's department had been making war on young men of Mexican descent in the belief that such young men were by definition criminal in fact and intent. . . young Mexican men found themselves hauled into jail for seventy-two hours on mere suspicion, then released. Beatings were frequent, as were frameups . . An [p. 99, 1943] impressive number of young Mexican men were shot dead in the streets by trigger-happy officers. No white police or sheriff's deputies in the Deep South of the period kept the local population under a more intense level of intimidation through violence.
[p. 99, 1943] Central to this perception of the young Mexican-American as violent gang member were the pachuco and pachuca and the zoot suiter. Not every pachuco was a zoot suiter (pachucas had their own stylized attire), and not every zoot suiter was a pachuco. Evolving in the barrios of Los Angeles, pachuquismo represented a more fundamental condition than the mere wearing of a zoot suit. . . . The pachuco was a young male Mexican-American caught between two worlds and belonging to neither . . . the pachuco was in a condition of generalized revolt born of alienation. . . . the pachuco retreated into a stance of defiant isolation broken only by loyalties to other pachuco in associations invariably seen by the police as criminal gangs. Interestingly enough, given the deracination of the pachuco in American society, the pachuca was reaching back into Spanish tradition for the creation of his argot: an idiosyncratic blend of Calo (the perennial language of the underground and underworld, having its origins in medieval Spain), gypsy, Ladino (Iberian-Hebrew), Mexican tough-guy talk, jive, Anglicized Spanish and Hispanic - cised English, together with numerous linguistic terms of strictly Los Angeles coinage. Pachuquismo also brought to Los Angeles its own ballad tradition, the ballads being mainly about the Los Angeles Police Department beating pachuco heads. Pachucos were given to tatoos-crosses, mainly, surmounted by initials-which the Los Angeles press invested with near-cabalistic significance.
[p. 99, 1943] Pachuquismo represented a defiant response on the part of many young men who belonged to neither Mexico nor the United States . . . From the perspective of white Los Angeles, the pachuco was its worst nightmare come true: The avenging Mexican-dark, fierce-eyed, Indian, bent on violence and revenge.
The pachuca expressed more style than revolt. She was, in fact, little more than a Mexican-American version of the Anglo-American V-girls who had emerged by 1943 as a social type in the American city. Like the V-girl, the pachuca featured a stylized version of popular dress: saddle shoes, bobby socks, skirts at or above, the knee, sheer blouses, cardigan sweaters, heavy lipstick, drawn square above the lip . . .
[p. 101] . . . In 1942, the Los Angeles Police, the Los Angeles Courts, the Los Angeles Ruling Oligarchy, the Los Angeles newspapers committed, "the most egregious persecution of Mexican-Americans in the history of American criminal courts-the mass arrest, trial and conviction of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants" . . .
The Sleepy Lagoon Incident (Aug. 1, 1942). . .
[p. 103, 1942] University of Southern California historian and psychoanalyst, Mauricio Mazon: "Only a community in a form of trance could have sustained such mass indictments on such non-existent evidence and the phantasmagoric trial that followed."
[p. 103, 1942] The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was chaired by the California Housing and Immigration Commissioner Carey McWilliams, "a brilliant voice and prolific pen on the left (and the single finest non-fiction writer on California-ever)", included Orson Welles and Hollywood screenwriter Guy Endore . . .
[p. 104, 1943] "Thus tension built in Los Angeles on multiple levels into mid-1943 as the oligarchy, the police, the district attorney, the courts, and the Hearst newspapers continued to depict the Mexican-American young male as a subversive and criminal element . . .
[p. 104, 1943] By now, mid-1943, many Mexican-American young men, pachucos and non-pachucos alike, were wearing the zoot suit. Even more than pachuquismo, which it overlapped, the wearing of the zoot suit held multiple layers of identity, pro and con, for the Mexican-Americans and their enemies. Whereas pachuquismo had one important level of meaning, the defiant alienation of young men caught up in a cultural and psychological borderland, the zoot suit had many possible interpretations; for it was not confined exclusively to the Mexican-American community, and it eventually made its way, with modifications, into mainstream fashion. The zoot suit consisted of a long frock jacket, with wide lapels and pronounced shoulder pads, and pleated trousers, high-waisted and pegged at the cuff. Triple-soled shoes, an overlong watch or key chain, and a wide-brimmed hat completed the outfit. Zoot suiters did not wear ties. In any event, shirt collars were oversized. A heavily pomaded ducktail haircut, with waves swept to a meeting point at the back of the head, was also de rigueur.
[p. 104, 1943] "Never has one fashion meant so many different things to so many different people, at either the gut or most rarified levels. Most basically, the zoot suit had arisen out of the jitterbug cult. The suit itself had evolved so as to make the athletic movements of jitterbug dancing easier. From this perspective, the zoot suit was an icon of youth perceived as a sub-group or cult, organized around jitterbugging. Only young people, after all, could perform the jitterbug properly, just as only young people could truly Charleston in the 1920s. Worn by a young Mexican-American in Los Angeles, the zoot suit declared style, independence, and a level of personal [p. 105] control that foreshadowed the coolness of the hipster, the detachment of the beat . . . Rejected by an alien environment, the Mexican-American in his zoot-suit (his drapes, as he called his attire) reasserted his individualism, paradoxically through a uniform. . . . the zoot suit served as an existentialist icon: a way of stabilizing an uncertain identity via one of the most extreme male fashions to emerge in the First World in the twentieth century."
" . . .
[p. 105, 1943] "For the young sailors, soldiers and Marines stationed in and around Los Angeles in 1943 or coming into the city on weekend leave, the zoot suit had a similarly provocative effect. Here these young men were, in uniforms, regimented, their heads shaved, deprived of prior identities; and there were the zoot suiters, glorious in their plumage, out of the military, free to stand on street corners and flirt with [girls] . . . Just three weeks prior to the outbreak of the Zoot Suit Riots on 3 June 1943, two sailors made moves on two Mexican-American girls at a dance in the seaside Venice district of Los Angeles and provoked a full-scale brawl between young sailors and young Mexican-American men, some of them in zoot suits.
[p. 105, 1943] It was a volatile time in general. Hundreds of thousands of young men, were being trained . . .
[p. 106, 1943] "It had become a tense time in the garrison state. In the two weeks prior to the Zoot Suit Riots, there were eighteen serious incidents involving servicemen in Southern California. Seven of those involved involved fatalities . . .
[p. 106] . . . the punch ups and scuffles between zoot suiters and service men [ ] resulted in no fatalities and only a few minor injuries . .
[p. 109, 1943] "However horrible and racist [Zoot Suit Riots] incident, it could not compare to the race riots erupting in Detroit a week later in which thirty-one people died, mostly African-Americans, fifteen of them gunned down by the police. . . .
[p. 109, 1943] "Writing in the aftermath of the Sleepy Lagoon case and fully aware of the long history of anti-Mexican repression in Los Angeles, Carey McWilliams reported on the Zoot Suit Riots as if they were a full-scale race riot analogous to the Detroit riot or the riot that broke out in Harlem on 1 August, in which six people were killed and three hundred were injured. Not so, argues Mazon. Photographs of the Zoot Suit Riots . . . depict an atmosphere that could almost be described as festive . . . What transpired was a carnival-like atmosphere in which [p. 110] servicemen and civilians acted out inhibitions about the war in a complex series of rituals . . .
[p. 110, 1943] Even military authorities seemed initially willing to allow young servicemen [to mutiny, AWOL] to riot . . .
[p. 110, 1943] . . .Washington was displeased as well. . . . Mexico was an ally. The U.S. Navy was using naval bases in Baja California. By the fall of 1943 some 233,000 Mexican nationals-called braceros, or the srongarm ones-were working in the fields of California, harvesting crops, Another 3,325 Mexican nationals were working for the Southern Pacific, comprising 72 percent of its track maintenance force. By the end of 1944, more than eighty thousand Mexican nationals were engaged in railroad work in the United States. . . . constituting a significant portion of the national wartime economy.
[p. 122] ' . . . Mexican-Americans liked the special uniform worn by airborne troops. It reminded them of a zoot suit. . . . On 13 June 1943 the Los Angeles City Council had passed an ordinance prohibiting the wearing of zoot suits within the city limits, classifying it as a misdemeanor. There is no record of the City Council or the LAPD having served a warrant of any kind on the Andrew Sisters.
Chapter 3 1943 Swing Shift
[p. 129] "Initially fearful of sexuality in the workplace, the aviation industry was beginning to see it as an asset by 1943. Companies sponsored swing bands and dances as morale boosters. North American initiated a date-counseling bureau, which matched women newly arriving in Los Angeles with suitable gentlemen already at work in the aircraft industry: a species of industrial matchmaking that raised to new heights the social outreach programs of Los Angeles aviation. There was no comparable need for assisting unmarried men.