Los angeles boot suit riots. He described how they came to symbol ice symbolize a challenge to racial identities. This is about an hour and a half. All right. So let me just remind you where we are in our ongoing narrative of Mexican American history. Last week we talked a lot about 1910 and the mexican revolution and the dramatic changes that this made for the mexicanorigin folk on the northern side of the border. This week we are going to begin discussion of our third flash point in the course, which is 1943, really as a standin for world war ii. If you recall, at the end of last week we had been discussing those millionplus mexican migrants who moved north of the border into the United States, many of them hundreds of thousands of them and their children settling in the south western United States, california, texas and elsewhere. We discussed their experiences, their trials and tribulations, what they lived there in the 1920s and the 1930s and the great depression. I mentioned a couple of times, and well be spending most of today discussing what happened to their children, those millionplus migrants who brought children with them in the20s and30s or had children who were born as american citizens and came of age in the 1930s and early 1940s and would become known as the Mexican American generation, who would become young adults living in the United States as the nation went to war during world war ii to defeat hitler, mussolini, the japanese and fascism around the world. This is what we will be talking about this week. I want to remind you a couple of the Big Questions that we have been tracing over the last several weeks, not the least of which is who and what is considered Mexican American or american more generally. Who is afforded first class citizenship in American Society . This changes with these millionplus migrants and their offspring. It is a dramatic moment and shift in Mexican American history we will be talking about this week in the 1940s during world war ii in part because, if nothing else, this moment reminds us that there are contradictions, fissures and deep iniquities when it comes to who and what is considered a full member of American Society. One of the main arguments and points i want you to take away from today and wednesday is that world war ii highlights these contradictions of American Society and democracy in dramatic, fundamental, powerful ways, not least because we have literally tens of thousands of america americans not to mention africanamerican and other nonwhite racialized minorities fighting for american democracy overseas. Theyre fighting in the pacific. Theyre fighting on the front lines of europe. When those soldiers and sailors are return home it would stand to reason that they would expect to be afforded the privileges and benefits of american democracy and citizenship. They just spent months, if not years, tours of duty fighting for it overseas, putting themselves and their physical bodies on the line. It doesnt seem out of the realm of reasonable expectations that they would expect first class citizenship back on the home front. These could create contradictions, because many were not afforded first class citizenship and that conversation weve been having about where the boundaries are drawn, who is in and who is out, become highlighted when those soldiers and sailors return. So these contradictions in wartime democracy, who and what is considered american is one big question i want you to continue wrestling with as we navigate world war ii. The second big point i want you to consider is that the war was not only fought someplace else. There is, many would argue, a war raging on the home front, a war for some of the very same principles that folks were fighting overseas for, a war for american democracy, for first class membership and citizenship. Were going to talk mainly about the war on the home front today, and the lens that i want to use to talk about this for the first half of class today is youth culture, popular fashion, and, more specifically, the zoot suit. How many of you have ever seen or perhaps even worn a zoot suit . Anyone . Where have you seen it or worn it . Where . In your doc class, of course. This is a topic that is often covered in doc as well as a few other classes around campus. Anyone else seen or heard of the zoot suit . One of the things i want you to consider about the zoot is that it has a long life. Were going to talk about it in the context of world war ii, but it has reappeared in recent years, in the late90s, in the early 2000s when High School Kids were wearing it to prom, when it became the topic of popular fashion in music by the cherry popping daddies, big bad voodoo daddy or this resurgence in swing music in the late90s and early 2000s. Jim carrie wore one in the mask. Were going to talk about the zoot suit in the context of world war ii. When it comes to the zoot, what i want you to remember is, yes, it is a suit of clothes. A suit of clothes, even with its exaggerated style, often flashy colors, it didnt inherently mean anything. The zoot suit itself, just like the rest of Popular Culture in the world we live, garners its meaning in the context in which it was worn. More on this in a few minutes. I want to begin by sharing two stories of the zoot suit during world war ii. I think this illustrates the different racial experiences that came with the zoot suit, and to underscore that it meant Different Things to different folks. The first comes from a wellknown former zoot suitor by the name of malcolm little. Most of us know him by malcolm x. Has anyone read the biography of malcolm x . If you have not, it is a thing you should read, it is a crucial piece of history we should all take a look at in our lives. Before he became malcolm x he was malcolm little. This is long before he was a member of the nation of islam or became an icon of the civil rights movement. Early on in the pages of his autobiography malcolm little recalls venturing to his local Army Recruitment office during the early years of world war ii. This is in new york. He rolls through the front doors of the armed forces depot, quote, costumed like an actor, with my wild zoot suit i wore my yellow knob toed shoes and frizz willed my hair up. I went in skipping and tipping and thrusted my tattered greetings at that reception desks white soldier. Crazyo, daddyon, get moving, i cant wait to get in. Shortly following this initial encounter malcolm is sent to visit with the Army Psychiatrist where he tells him, quote, daddio, now you and me were from up north here, so dont you tell nobody, i want to get sent down south, organize them soldiers, you dig, steal us some gun and kill us crackers. That psychiatrists blue pencil dropped and he stared at me as if i was a snakes egg hatching. I knew i had him. Soon after this he gets his 4f card in the mail which basically excuses him from the army draft. Around the same time, theres another zoot suitor, one far less known unless you have read my book, his name is alfred barella, a mexicanamerican living in los angeles. Barella wrote a letter to the Municipal Court judge who had balled him out for disturbing the peace. He in his letter argued to the judge, quote, ever since i can remember ive been pushed around and called names because im a mexican. I was born in this country. Like you said, i should have the same rights and privileges of other americans. Pretty soon i guess ill be in the army and ill be glad to go, but i want to be treated like everybody else. Were tired of being pushed around. Were tired of being told we cant go to this show or that dance hall because were mexican or that we better not be seen on the beach front or that we cant wear draped pants which is what mexicanamericans often called the ballooned at the thigh, tapered closely at the ankle zoot suit pants or have our haircut the way we want to, end quote. So think about malcolm littles zoot story juxtaposed to alfred barellas zoot story. Malcolm used his zoot suit to alienate himself from the mainstream United States, to evade the draft, to evade from having to enlist in the armed forces. Barellas comments suggest his zoot suit style, very different from malcolms, did not preclude him from willingly joining the service in an effort to assimilate and eventually fight for american democracy overseas. My point is that zoot suitors, mexicanamericans, africanamericans wells the filipino, japaneseamerican and increasing number of white youth who also wore the zoot suit after the war unfolded thought differently about their style and their fashion, and that the zoot suit meant Different Things to all of them, that the zoot itself professed a kind of wide variety of political views during war time. Some of them were heavily critical of the war, heavily critical of the kind of hypocrisy that the contradictions in american democracy meant for mexicanamerican and other nonwhite folks. Others like barella perhaps saw themselves and their style and the zoot suit as part and parcel of what we might call a kind of politics of worthiness, that this is my opportunity to demonstrate that i am worthy of full membership in American Society, and i will show you by joining the service. I will show you by being as deeply committed as putting my body on the line for american democracy as anyone else. The zoot in other words meant different thing to different people, and i want us to kind of use it as a window into the complicated, contested and shifting world of mexicanamerican identity during world war 2 it has a lot to teach us, the zoot suit does, about the complex identities, racial experiences and culture during world war ii when it comes to Mexican Americans. This is where we are today, and for the next hour or so i want us to use the zoot as a lens to think through who and what is considered american during world war ii. Because by the end of the next hour, i suspect it will be painfully obvious that zoot suitors, mexicanamerican, black in particular, were not considered first class citizens. If part of my argument is that the zoot suit garnered its meaning from the context in which it was worn, right, world war ii, and that to wear the zoot suit on the streets of los angeles in june 1943 meant putting yourself at risk of getting pardon my french, your kicked by white sailors and soldiers on the streets of los angeles, it didnt mean the same thing, say, in the late90s, early 2000s when scores of youth were wearing them to prom. So we need to think about the shifting Historical Context of world war ii in order to understand fully what the zoot suit meant in that time and place. So lets talk a little bit about the shifting context and history of world war ii. I will leave the outline up there as we make our way through, so you can follow along. World war ii brings massive changes to the american economy, politics and related social and cultural worlds that mexicanamericans, again, these young folks who are coming of age as american citizens in numbers larger than weve seen up to this point in mexicanAmerican History. As a number of u. S. Historians, most in fact, have argued over the years, world war ii helped pull the country as a whole out of the great depression. It lifts the nation from the economic dolldrums of the 1930s that we spent last week talking about. Many women and minorities in particular gained Employment Opportunities during the war. This is in part because the u. S. War Industry Needs to produce goods to fuel the war effort and defeat fascism overseas, and women and minorities are afforded opportunities that they hadnt been, certainly during the depression, but one could argue even for a longer stretch of history before then. Labor is needed to fuel wartime production. This is needed to win the war. This leads to massive internal migration. People are looking to benefit from the employment search from the war. So black folks leaving the south and settling in war Production Centers like los angeles or san francisco, chicago and elsewhere around the. Country is not uncommon. Part of why this is important for us, as we will see in a few minutes, is the kind of demographic context in which Mexican Americans find themselves living changes especially in big cities like los angeles where they are now living, these young folks living, going to school with, perhaps working with, on occasion even dating folks that might not be part of mexicanamerican communities or even mexicanamerican themselves. Los angeles in particular is home to a boom in wartime industry like ship building, aircraft construction. And whether folks were finding work as welders or in other sorts of professions, working in wartime industry came to be seen as doing ones patriotic duty. It became a marker of citizenship, of productive citizenship for Many Americans. So if you werent a sailor or a soldier, the next best thing to doing your duty during world war ii was to work in the war industry. In fact, as ive said, many women and minorities, not just mexicanamericans, did so. It is important to keep in mind however that theres a Glass Ceiling, and many would argue a really low Glass Ceiling to the kind of employment and Economic Opportunity that the war offers to nonwhite folks and women. They are often the last hired and the first fired. That is to say when the war is over they are often the first to lose their positions. The kinds of jobs that they were able to accrue during the war were often those with the least amount of social mobility, so they werent able to move up the employment ladder. Their jobs were stunted in terms of the kind of growth that they were offered. And then after the war was over, as i said, many of them lost these positions. So we have to take the opportunities of the wartime industry and the limits of those opportunities to mexicanamericans and others together. It is not just one or the other. So there are big economic changes during the war. If people have a little bit of extra money in their pocket that they might not have had during the 1930s, it stands to reason that theyre going to spend it. One of the ways that young mexicanamericans, among others, spend it is on style and fashion, and this is part of a kind of upsurge in world war ii era Popular Culture. Theres a kind of newfound Economic Freedom that Many Americans pursued, and this really helps fuel the growth of pop culture and commodities to new heights. So people had more money to spend and they spent it. They did some on leisure and entertainment, on recreation. Theres a dramatic rise in the popularity of film and literature, sports, eccentric clubs, jazz music, dance halls. All of this despite a kind of popular wartime rhetoric in which people are expected in many ways to contribute financially to the war effort. Right, if part of the argument is that what good americans should be doing in world war ii, what they should be doing during the war is working to defeat fascism overseas, one of the popular ideas was that they should be investing in war bonds, not in suits of clothes, that the spare money folks had should be being diverted back into the war effort in some form or fashion. So we have newfound Economic Freedom and opportunity despite its Glass Ceiling limits, we have a rise in Popular Culture, and we also have ongoing and dramatically shifting battles over civil rights. Many mexicanamerican and africanamericans and japaneseamericans, particularly after pearl harbor in december of 1941, support what was known as the double v campaign. The vv campaign was victory abroad against hitler, mussolini and fascism, but also victory at home for first class membership in American Society. You cant win abroad without also winning at home. That you couldnt fight for american democracy overseas without fighting for equal citizenship on the homefront. This became a fundamental and core principle for many mexicanamerican, africanamerican and other folks. There were some successes in civil rights during the war. Franklin delano roosevelt, president during the initial years of world war ii signed executive order 8802 that banned discrimination in the workplace and called for fair Employment Practices and fair housing opportunities. There were also movements against and resistance to civil rights progress. Remember, we have mexicans becoming a larger portion, we have africanamerican migrating internally to big cities across the country. Eventually by the time we gent to the end of the war and even during the war as it goes on year by year, we have black and brown veterans returning to their old lives expecting equality. There are responses to this and racism and discrimination and lack of opportunity and the entrenchment not just of jim crow segregation against africanamericans in the deep south, but also jim crow and what we might call juan or jamie crow segregation against mexicanamericans in Southern California and elsewhere around the country is commonplace. In 1946 at the end of the war, just to leap ahead for a moment, it shouldnt be surprising that as veterans are returning and claiming rights and new ways after having fought for american democracy overseas, that theres an uptick in lynchings against africanamericans at the end of the war. If were talking about civil rights during world war ii and who and what is considered american, or perhaps more importantly who is not, we at least have to spend a minute or two reminding yourselves of japaneseamerican internment. Following pearl harbor in december of41 we all are aware that japanese and japaneseamericans living in much of the west coast of the United States were interned. When the u. S. Goes to war with japan, the fallout on the home front was devastating for many japaneseamericans. When american patriotism during the war sort of bleeds into and becomes very hard to distinguish from a kind of yellow peril. I mean the larger argument here and this is not unique to the second world war, is that the line between patriotism and fascism is sometimes hard to distinguish. In the early 1940s, in 1942, the first few months of the year in particular, roosevelt signs executive order 9066 which essentially suspends the citizenship and human rights of japanese americans and sends them to concentration camps. Their property, their homes, their belongings are confiscated. Twothirds, twothirds of the some 120,000 men, women and children that are interned in these concentration camps are american citizens. Theyre basically given one week, one weeks notice before being shipped off to one of ten camps, most of which were located in remote areas across the west. These camps were managed by the war relocation authority. There was some resistance by japaneseamericans who charged racism, including by a group of young japaneseamerican men who when they were interned signed no on surveys that asked if they were patriotic and devoted to the United States. Now, think about that. What would you sign . What would you say, yes or no, if you were locked up and given a week and lost your home and your property and your belongings and then asked to pledge your solidarity and patriotism and commitment to the folks that lock you up . This group of young japaneseamerican men who responded no to this loyalty questionnaires were known as the nono boys. I mention them in part because they were also not all of them, but many of them were fond of wearing zoot suits, from manzinar to concentration camps in colorado and arkansas there was an internal zoot suit scene in many of the concentration camps, but well come back to that in just a moment or two. It wasnt until 1944, more than two years after yap japaneseamericans were interned that the Supreme Court finally ruled that the civilian agency, the war relocation authority, did not have the right to incarcerate lawabiding citizens and the federal camps began to close down. Japaneseamericans returned to their homes. My point here is that theres a lot happening in world war ii when it comes to the economy, when it comes to pop culture, and when it comes to the politics of civil rights. It is in that context with all of this swirling around that youth, mexicanamerican and other youth, africanamerican, japaneseamerican, interned or not, wearing zoot suits comes to mean something more than just a youth cultural style. That in that volatile context, right, where literally the lines of who and what is considered american are being redrawn, sometimes in these violent ways, that wearing a zoot suit becomes a flash point, becomes like a lightning rod for this kind of debate on the home front. Who and what is considered american . And to give away the punch line, perhaps next to japaneseamericans who were interned throughout much of 1942 and43, into44, zoot suitors, mexicanamerican zoot suitors in particular, were viewed as public enemy, if not number one then number two or oneb right behind japaneseamericans. They were seen as unamerican. They were seen as disloyal. They were seen as sub versive to the war effort, and it is in part because of the context, right, these shifting dramatic changes of economy, politics and social and cultural allegiances that the zoot suit comes to garner this deep meaning. Thats where i want to turn to next. I want to talk a little bit more about the zoot suit itself. It is often told as a story or history of world war ii as an mexicanamerican story on the west coast or an africanamerican story on the east coast, right. Barellas story that i began with or malcolm littles story, sort of dominate the narrative of what the zoot suit was and why it mattered and how we can use it to make sense of world war ii. I want you to think of them together, that the zoot suit was not just a brown thing on the west coast, not just a black thing on the east coast, but it was an american thing. Actually after the war, as a footnote, it becomes an International Youth popular style, but thats another lecture for another day. It was popular across the country in virtually every urban center from san diego and los angeles to new york and points in between, chicago, detroit, philadelphia, houston, san antonio, on down the list. It was worn by mexicanamericans, by africanamericans, japaneseamericans, and especially on the west coast filipinoamericans as well. White youth adopted the zoot suit as part of their own sense of style and fashion. It is defined by a number of things. The baggy pants that ballooned out at the thigh and were tapered very closely at the ankle. The pants were something that malcolm little described as punjab pants. They were often accompanied by a coat with long tails flowing from behind. It wasnt uncommon for youth to have a gold or silver watch chain that they carried in their pocket and kind of swung as they walked along the streets. The pancake or widebrimmed hat, often with a feather stuck in it, was not unusual. My greatuncle tony, the brother of Robert Alvarez sr. Who we watched in the lemon grove incident last week was a zoot suitor. In fact, here is an interesting footnote. The first time i ever studied or wrote an academic paper about the zoot suit long before it became a book was when i was in a class here at ucsd in 1993 or94 on the history of los angeles and i interviewed my uncle tony. One of the things he told me in that first interview when i asked him what the zoot suit style was, and he described it piece by piece. And he said if you didnt have the right build, if you didnt look big and strong with the right stature, with that widebrimmed hat you would look like a thumb tack, right . So part of his argument was that it was about looking good. It was about presenting yourself to folks who saw you in a way that you could be seen and heard, at a time during world war ii when most mexicanamerican youth and others were expected to be silent and invisible. They were expected to find their niche in the wartime economy or serve overseas, but here you had zoot suitors wearing these flashy threads out in public, spending money on recreation and leisure, when they were supposed to be 100 committed to the war effort. Now, i should point out that many zoot suitors, mexicanamerican and otherwise, were both zoot suitors and soldiers or sailors, like alfred barella. Or my uncle tony. That it wasnt necessarily a contradiction to be both. But as we will see the conflict and contestation over these different ways of being american, a zoot suiter or a serviceman, came to be drawn with a very sharp line between them. It wasnt just young men either. Particularly on the west coast, young mexicanamerican women had their own zoot suit style fashion. They often wore short black skirts, sometimes the same coats as their male counterparts. It wasnt unusual for them to wear heavy makeup and their hair up in high pompadours. Some even wore mens clothes, pants or dress socks up to their thighs. I talked to one mexicanamerican woman zoot suitor who told me she used to buy the biggest socks she could find at the Mens Department stores in los angeles and pull them all the way up underneath a very short skirt to nearly the top of her thigh and then glue the sock to her legs before she went to school or to a dance or to a party so that it wouldnt fall down. Looking good, that maintaining the style meant that she would literally glue her socks, her clothes to her physical body. Looking good meant something beyond just looking good. It was also making a statement in this context of war time society. So it was black and brown. It was east coast and west coast, it was male and female, it was gendered in other words. If that is sort of a short version of the who, the what, the where, the when, i do want you to consider and begin to ask, why should we care about the zoot suit . I mean this is the case that im making today, but im not the only one. The title of the book that i wrote on the zoot suit, the power of the zoot, took its cue in part from Ralph Ellison, the remarkable africanamerican author, activist and thinker who wrote, among many other important works, a book called the invisible man, which you should also read if you havent. He said in part, writing in 1943 that, perhaps the zoot suit conceals profound political meaning. Perhaps the symmetrical meaning of the lindy hop conceals clues to Great Potential power, and it is the power of the zoot. What it meant in the context of which it was worn in world war ii that i think this riddle, if we can call it that, Ralph Ellison asks us to think about. So i want you to think about several big points and questions here. Number one, how the zoot suit helps us see the connections between mexicanAmerican History and the history of other groups and communities during war time. That is to say we cant tell the history of mexicanamericans during world war ii without accounting for how it overlaps and intersects with that of africanamericans and others. The power of the zoot, in other words, is at least partially drawn from its multiracial quality. Number two and here i will sound like a broken record, but it is worth emphasizing the point that the zoot suit helps us see the boundaries of the national politic, where the racial, gendered and class lines of who is considered fully american and afforded first class american citizenship are drawn. Who is in, who is out. Number three, that the zoot suit afforded young mexicanamerican men and women a vehicle by which to challenge the racial, gendered and broader contours of american identity during world war ii. Partly what i want to emphasize here is that, yeah, this was a suit of clothes, but what im suggesting is that it is kind of a dress rehearsal, right, for other arenas of american life, where experimentation can happen, where people can cross racial boundaries, where young women can wear mens clothes and articulate and perform different gender identities. Where culture, right . This kind of cultural politics of what you wear matters beyond just looking good, that we have to sort of take this kind of behavior and activity seriously because it serves as a kind of oppositional memory, an archive of an mexicanamerican experience that is not recorded in, say, the archives of the Los Angeles Police department or Mayors Office or county supervisor records. That if we want to see that if we want to see and hear, listen to the full scope of the mexicanamerican experience during the war, we have to Pay Attention to things like music and fashion. When we do, it helps us see how some were challenging what it meant to be an american, that theres a kind of different racialengendered performance and articulation of what it meant to be a young person living in the United States during world war ii when we Pay Attention to the zoot. Finally, as a fourth point, just to underscore in a different way what i have just said is that the zoot suit helps us see something, at least a glimpse of the historicallylived experience of folks who are left out of the dominant historical narrative, the conventional records that most folks turn to. Whos left out of history, that sometimes as historians we have to look at different kinds of sources. I mean you all are reading primary sources, documents from 1848 through the Chicano Movement that well get to next week. Very few of even those sources for this class are music or fashion, but we have to Pay Attention to those sorts of things if we want to get a sense of how people lived through these periods. So i want to tell a version of zoot suit history that at least attempts to account for the perspective and point of view of the zoot suitor, himself or herself. I want to tell you that story in three parts, with the time that we have left before we take a break. The first part is dignity denied, the second part the struggle for dignity, and finally well wrap up briefly with riots and violence on the homefront. Just a theoretical note of what i mean by dignity. Dignity is more than just being honored or esteemed, but it is also what i would call a kind of politics of refusal, where being able to live your life in a dignified way means rejecting, it means refusing being dehumanized. It is a refusal of conformity, a refusal of being humiliated, and this, i argue, whether you agree with me or not, the argument is that the zoot suit was one way of reclaiming dignity at a time and a place during world war ii when that dignity was taken from young mexicanamerican youth. Lets start with dignity denied. This is a part of the story of the zoot suit where nonwhite youths, mexicanamericans and africanamericans in los angeles for our purposes in particular were dehumanized and stripped of their dignity by the difficult Life Conditions that they faced as part of wartime society, the economy, the Political Climate and the shifting discourse about race in the urban United States. Just to remind you that one of the daily lived realities of being black or brown during world war ii, not just in the deep south in alabama or mississippi, but was segregation. This is a movie bulletin from los angeles. You will note that there is a mexican night every wednesday, a colored night every thursday. This was commonplace. So in this context with the demand of the wartime economy, with segregation and ongoing battles for civil rights and the many contradictions all of that evoked, the zoot suit garnered its meaning. It wasnt just these larger economic and political developments, but there are ways in which young folk, young black and brown folk in particular, are caught up in this moment. Here is where i would urge you to think about something called the racialization of juvenile delinquency. It is not uncommon during war time for concerns about juvenile delinquency to skyrocket. It is logical, in fact. If we need young people to fight wars, they should be in the armed forces, in the army, the navy. If theyre not in the army or navy, then they should be employed in war industry, as weve talked about already. If theyre not doing one of those two things there is this concern that they are not doing what they should be doing, that theyre delinquent. So you can point to wars over the span of American History and concerns about what young people are doing, even when statistical data like during world war ii shows that there was not necessarily an uptick of juvenile delinquency, the concern about juvenile delinquency often goes through the roof. During world war ii, right, this rising concern over juvenile delinquency works hand in hand with concerns over race. So what we see is that along with japanese americans, its young mexicanamerican and africanamerican men and women that are blamed for wartime problems of juvenile delinquency. This results, you can probably guess, in routine instances of police brutality, ugly representations of black and brown youth, zoot suitors in particular, in the popular Mainstream Press where they are depicted as criminal, as immoral, as a drain on the war effort, as animallike, basically unamerican in every way imaginable. This is what, i would argue, was indicative of the racialzation of juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquency was conflated with being a race problem. In Southern California, it was mexicoamerican youth and to a lesser degree, africanamerican youth who came to take the brunt of this focus. As an example, in 1942, late 1942, the Los Angeles County grand jury launches an investigation of socalled mexicanamerican youth gangs in l. A. One of the expert witnesses that provides testimony to the grand jury is an l. A. County sheriff named edward duran ayers. This is in his testimony to the grand jury, he argues that, quote, the caucasian, especially the anglosaxon, when engaged in fighting, particularly among youths, resort to fisticuffs and may at times kick each other, which is considered unsportive. Unsportive. But this mexican element considers all that to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows and feels is a desire to use a knife or some lethal weapon. In other words, his desire is to kill or at least let blood. In his testimony, he goes on to compare mexicanamerican zoot suitors to wildcats that need to be caged. There are numerous instances of judges across Los Angeles County referring to zoot suitors, mexicanamerican and africanamerican zoot suiters, as traveling in wolfpacks, a kind of language and vocabulary that annimalizes folks,. The racialization of juvenile delinquency and the focus on zoot suiters as a massive problem on the American Home front takes off in los angeles after 1942, when there is an incident known as the sleepy lagoon case. Im not going to go into great detail about it because were going to watch a film about it later today. But the general outline is that mexicanamerican youth, upwards of 600 of mechanics, are rounded up by city police in august of 1942, after a young mexican man named jose diaz is found bleeding to death after a gang fight at sleepy lagoon, a popular place for mexicanamerican youth to hang out in part because of the municipal swimming pools in city limits were segregated. There was usually one day of the week when mexicanamerican and africanamerican people were allowed to swim in city pools. Anyone want to take a guess which day of the week . This was a movie bulletin. Sunday, last day of the week. It depended on the pool. But it was usually the day before the pools were supposed to be cleaned. So it gives you a sense of how these people and their bodies were actually considered. So following the discovery of jose diazbody, and he dies, hes eventually murdered, hes killed in this skirmish between competing youth gangs, the lapd rounds up 600someodd mexican youth. They end up arresting and put on trial upwards of 19 youth that are affiliated with the 38th street gang. This becomes the largest mass murder trial in california history up to this point. And those youth are sent to prison, despite, many would argue, a lack of evidence that they were the ones who actually killed jose diaz. More on this story in the film. But for our purposes and the racialization of juvenile delinquency, what i want you to remember is the sweeps, these 600 youth that were rounded up in part because of what was happening around them in this context of world war ii. Its not an accident that the la times, the daily herald, picks up on this racialization of juvenile delinquency. The zoot suit becomes a front page headline news, across the country, Even International news, as does the effort of the sleepy lagoon defense committee, which is multiracial, by the way, that seeks to get the youth released from prison after theyre convicted, sent away and locked up. This becomes a massive story. And part of it is followed across the u. S. Because the zoot suit becomes this icon of everything that is wrong and destabilized and immoral and violent and detracting from the war effort. This zoot suit and the folks that wear it become a kind of internal enemy. And we see this get played out on the front pages of the press and on the streets of los angeles, where the zoot suit itself becomes the target not just of the lapd but of everyday citizens, and eventually, as we will see, sailors and soldiers. One final story on the racialization of juvenile delinquency before we move on to part 2, dignity reclaimed. But i talked to one woman who remembered that young female zoot suiters came to accrue this negative meaning. She had this to say. And this is at a time when you can look, i mean, you can go to the archives of the l. A. Press, and you can find dozens of articles talking about the pompadours that the young women were fond of wearing. And articles talking about how in their hairdos like this, they hid weapons. Tire irons. Knives. Chains. Bricks. In their hair. And when they came across sailors or soldiers in the streets of l. A. When they were walking with their zoot boyfriends, they could reach into their hair and hand the weapon to their boyfriend so they can fight the sailors and