The Zoot Suit Riots
In 1943 in Los Angeles, during WW2, Mexicans and Yankees clashed on the streets in what became known as the zoot suit riots.
In LA this is still something of a serious trauma that you can argue has reverberations to this day. To the rest of the world it seems like a comical and bizarre sideshow to the more serious business of WW2.
The wartime economy saw the rationing of many goods to help with the war effort. Among them was the textile industry, especially wool, for the purpose of ensuring the military had sufficient quantities for uniforms and other military gear. This led to the War Production Board (WPB) decreeing that mens fashions must be constrained in the use of fabrics (a cutback of 26% specifically). This meant more ostentatious suit designs that required more fabric than necessary were were effectively illegal to manufacture, along with full-length womens skirts and dresses.
However, among the non-”white” ethnic minorities of LA - Mexicans, African-Americans, Filipinos and Italians - they were a highly-prized fashion statement, and their illicit wearing … and production.. continued. There was even an underground network of tailors illegally making zoot suits.
On the streets, those who continued to wear zoot suits in public were seen as treacherous outlaws, and increasingly resented as being seen as unsupportive of the US war effort. Adding fuel to the mix was an LAPD and local government authority with a fairly corrupt streak, and numerous white servicemen who had arrived from around the country to port cities such as LA, in between legs to the frontline of action. These non-local GIs were unfamiliar with the eccentricities of Mexican fashion.
There was violence on both sides, as they say.
To be so defiant as to continue to wear a suit heightened the odds that you were in a youth gang, and thus up to other sorts of mischief and mayhem. The atmosphere on the streets was tense. The reports mention hostile remarks, physical and sexual assaults of growing severity. When allegations of rapes against white women started popping up, that appeared to be the last straw. Vengeance was to be had.
Complicit with the police, and thus covered up, a mob took to the streets and started targeting anyone seen wearing a zoot suit. Accounts include beatings, zoot-suiters being ripped off public transport and movie theatres.
In one incident, sailors dragged two zoot suiters on-stage as a film was being screened, stripped them in front of the audience, and then urinated on their suits.
This riot appears to have gone on for several days, and in the end the police crackdown led to arrests only being made against the zoot-suit side, and not the non-zoot-suit belligerants. To be fair it does sound like a number of these zoot-suiters were bad news (The media reported one of the Pachucas, Amelia Venegas, was charged with possession of a knuckleduster), and the press hailed the action as a much-needed cleanup of the streets of LA, but to say that the response was one-sided and heavy-handed seems pretty accurate. In the post-mortem, Mayor Fletcher Bowron downplayed racism as a cause, blaming juvenile delinquents instead, while the wearing of the zoot-suit was outright banned.
The press were notoriously partisan in their account of events and who they blamed. Crimes by the mob against zoot-suiters were not reported. Nationwide, the voices of dissent from this narrative seemed few, but does appear to include President FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt (albeit in a fairly guarded form of phrasing that alludes alot but states explicitly less so). But you can see why she got the positive reputation that she did, via wiki:
On June 16, 1943, a week after the riots, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the riots in her newspaper column. "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."[37] The Los Angeles Times published an editorial the next day expressing outrage: it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having communist leanings and stirring "race discord".[39]
There was even a fairly wild claim that the riots were a Nazi/Axis Plot designed to divide the US and Latin American nations.
In 2023, 80 years after the incident took place, LA City Council issued a formal statement condemning the zoot suit riot and officially apologized for it’s role in it. When you consider that zoot suit-wearing youth include names like Malcolm X and Cezar Chavez, it’s clear that this event, despite being downplayed and covered up at the time, nevertheless had significant shockwaves afterwards. LA rioted again in 1965, in 1992, in 2020 and again just a few days ago. Unlike the others, the Zoot-Suit Riot of 1943 kind-of looks like the establishment (government and mainstream) rioting against the minorities and rebels, so in that sense it’s kindof the outlier of the lot. None of these ever starts in a vacuum, and there is always a tit-for-tat buildup. Still one can’t help but draw two conclusions for this:
1: The phenomenon of Mexicans living in America preferring to maintain an otherness from the mainstream does seem to have an partial origin at least from this incident. There are gangs in existence today, such as the 38th St Gang, that have their origins in the years around the Zoot Suit Era.
and 2: LA riots a lot, If you are aged in your mid 80s or older and lived your whole life in the area, you would’ve seen five big ones in your lifetime. Schedule the next one in a couple of decades from now.
Links:
-more on zoot suits and pachucos and pachucas. (scroll to the end to see the 2min trailer of some video feature called Zoot Suit, starring Edward James Olmos.
-A photo taken shortly post-riot of some LA youths
-Comparing the riots of ‘92 and 2025, in case you still care what the MSM thinks
-Some photos of original and imitation zoot-suite fashion featuring Pachucos and Pachucas.
-Lalo Guerrero - There’s No Tortillias
-Lalo Guerrero - No Way, Jose
-Lalo Guerrero - There’s No Chicanos on TV
-Jonny Chingas - Chorizo Blues