cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16120967

Zoot Suit Riots (1943) 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 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.

    • anon6789
      9•6 months ago

      From Smithsonian Magazine:

      With its super-sized shoulder pads, sprawling lapels and peg leg pants, the zoot suit grew out of the “drape” suits popular in Harlem dance halls in the mid-1930s. The flowing trousers were tapered at the ankles to prevent jitterbugging couples from getting tripped up while they twirled. By the ’40s, the suits were worn by minority men in working-class neighborhoods throughout the country. Though the zoot suit would be donned by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, it was “not a costume or uniform from the world of entertainment,” the Chicago big-band trumpeter and clothier Harold Fox once said. “It came right off the street and out of the ghetto.’’

      Fox was one among many, from Chicago to Harlem to Memphis, who took credit for inventing the zoot suit—the term came out of African-American slang—but it was actually unbranded and illicit: There was no one designer associated with the look, no department store where you could buy one. These were ad hoc outfits, regular suits bought two sizes too large and then creatively tailored to dandyish effect.

      To some men, the suit’s ostentatiousness was a way of refusing to be ignored. The garment had “profound political meaning,” wrote Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man. “For those without other forms of cultural capital,” says Peiss, “fashion can be a way of claiming space for yourself.”

      Wartime rations on fabric made wearing such oversized clothing an inherently disobedient act. Langston Hughes wrote in 1943 that for people with a history of cultural and economic poverty, “too much becomes JUST ENOUGH for them.” To underscore the style’s almost treasonous indulgence, press accounts exaggerated the price of zoot suits by upwards of 50 percent. But even the real cost of one was near-prohibitive for the young men who coveted them—Malcolm X, in his autobiography, recounts buying one on credit.