Zoot Suit Riots (1943)

Thu Jun 03, 1943

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Image: Two boys, beaten during the Zoot Suit riots, lie in the street, surrounded by a crowd. One is stripped down to his underwear. [Wikipedia]

On this day in 1943, the Zoot Suit Riots began when thousands of white American servicemen in California began indiscriminately attacking people (mostly Latinos) wearing Zoot Suits, which were seen as unpatriotic. The suits were ostensibly seen as unpatriotic due to wartime rations, although they were also racialized, with L.A. Councilman Norris Nelson stating “the zoot suit has become a badge of hoodlumism”.

The riots began on the night of June 3rd when ~12 sailors and a group of young Mexicans in zoot suits began fighting. The LAPD responded to the incident “seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as the loathsome influence of pachuco gangs”, according to historian Luis Alvarez. The police arrested the sailors and not the Mexicans.

The next day, 200 sailors headed for East Los Angeles, a Mexican-American part of town, and attacked and stripped everyone they came across who were wearing zoot suits. Local press heralded the violence as cleaning up the town, and soon thousands of sailors joined the riot. Journalist Carey McWilliams described what happened like this:

“Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot suiter they could find. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ran up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked from their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy.”

The L.A. City Council approved a resolution criminalizing zoot suits, although the ordinance was not signed into law. The Navy and Marine Corps Staff prohibited sailors from traveling to L.A. in an effort to curb the violence, however they officially maintained that the men were acting in self-defense.

  • @[email protected]
    9•5 months ago

    I learned about Zoot Suits from Tom&Jerry and I just checked, “The Zoot Cat” is from 1944 could be it is a nod to the riots?

    • @jpreston2005
      12•5 months ago

      That’s interesting. I’d never heard of the real incident before, only ever known it from that random 90’s ska song where the phrase “zoot suit riot” was the chorus. After having watched the episode, I think it shows a bit of the american response to these suits.

      The cartoon shows Tom trying to woo a woman, who initially rebuffs him as being uncool. Then he tries again with a zoot suit of his own making, and she is all of a sudden effortlessly his. It has some incel and racist vibes to it, honestly. The woman cat rebuffs him in a cruel fashion, and then is tricked by the wiles of the zoot suit. Meanwhile Tom seems to play as a placeholder for a mexican stereotype, with greased down hair.

      It’s a bit jarring. It reads like “save your daughters from the villainy of this tailored suit!”

      • @[email protected]
        6•5 months ago

        And in our day Tom&Jerry just seems harmless, but some/many of them were commenting on current events.

        I hope that the teens watching it in the 1940s got a different message than the older generation that definitely thought “Save our daughters”. But I’m not sure because we saw all that race stuff in the 1960s