alvarez who teaches a class about the 1943 zoot suit riots in los angeles. he describes race relations during the world war ii era, and how young people who wore zoot suits came to symbolize a challengey to conventional gendr and racial identities. this is about an hour and a half. all right. so let me just remind you where we are and theve ongoing narrate of mexican-american history. last week we talked a lot about 1910 l and the mexican revoluti and the dramatic changes that this made for the mexican origin folk on the northern side of te border. this week we areoi going to beg discussion of 1943 as a stand-in for world war ii. if you recall, at the end of last week, we had been discussing those million-plus mexican migrants who moved north of the border into the united states, many of them, hundreds of thousands of them and their children t settling in the southwestern united states, s california, texas and elsewhere. we discussed their experiences, theirxp trials and tribulations what they lived through in the 1920s and the 1930s and the great depression. i mentioned a couple of times and we'll bee spending most of today discussing what happened to their children. those million-plus migrants who brought children with them in the '20s and '30s or who had children who were born asam american citizens and came of age in the 1930s and early 1940s and would become known as the mexican-american generation, who would wbecome young adults livg in the united states as the nation went to war during world war iii to defeat hitler, mussolini and the japanese and fascism around j the world. this is whatth we'll be talking about this week, and i want to remind youou a couple of the bi questions that h we had been tracingv 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 changesig with the million-plus migrants and the offspring. it is a dramatic moment and shift in the mexican-american history that we'll be talking about this week during the 1940s and world war ii in part because if nothing else this moment reminds ushe that there are contradictions, fissures and deep finequities when it comes o who and what is considereded a full member of american society. one of thehe main arguments and points i want you to take away from todayke and wednesday is tt worldwa 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 americans andnd mexican-america and non-white racialized minorities fighting for american democracy overseas. they're fighting on the front lines of europe, and when those soldiers and s sailors return he it would stand to reason that they would expect to be afforded the privileges and benefits of americanit democracy and citizenship. they just spent month, if not years, tours of duty fighting for it overseas, putting themselves and their physical bodies on the line. so it doesn't seem out of the realm. of reasonable expectatios thatat they would expect first-class citizenship back on the home front. these contradictions, because, in fact, many were not afforded first-class citizenship and the conversation we've a been havin about where the boundaries are drawn, who is in and who is out become highlighted when those soldiers andnd 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 w some place el. 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. 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 have ever seen or perhaps even worn a zoot suit? anyone? >> where have you seen it or worn it? where? [ inaudible ] >> in your class, of course. this is a topic often covered in dock as well as other classes. anyone else seen or heard of the zoot suit? one of the t things i want you consider about the zoot is that it has a long life. we're going to talk about it in the context of world war ii, but it has reappeared in recent years in the late '90s and 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 and the resurgence in swing music in the late '90s and early 2000s, and jim carey wore it, and when it comes to the zoot, what i want you to remember is, yes, it isa suit of clothes, but a suit of clothes even with its exaggerated style, often flashy colors, it didn't inherently mean anything. the zoot suitol itself, just li the rest of popular culture and the worldit that we live garner its meaning from the context in which it was worn. more on this in a few minute, buthi i want to begin by sharin two stories of the zoot suit during world war ii. that i think illustrate the differenti. racial experiences that came with the zoot suit, and to underscore that it meant different things to different folks. the first comesnt t from a very well-known former zoot suitor by the name of malcolm little. most of us know him by malcolm x. anyone read the autobiography of malcolm x? if youou haven't this is a crucl and piece of american history that we should all take a look at at someyo point in our lives. before he became malcolm x, he was malcolm little. this is longg before he was a member of the nation of islam or became an icon of the civil rights movement. early on in theen pages of his autobiography malcolm little recalls venturing to his recruitment office during world war ii and this is in new york and hehe rolls through the fron doors of the armed forces deep owe, quote, costumed like an actor. with my wild zoot suit, i wore my yellow knob tshoes and i wen in skipping and tipping and i scattered my tattered greetings at that reception desk like a soldier. praise yo, daddy-o get me moving, i can't wait to get moving. that soldierda hasn't recovered from me yet. following this initial encounter malcolmnc gets sent to visit wi the army psychiatrist where he tells him, quote, daddy-o, now north me we're from up here so don't you tell nobody. iou want to get sent down south organize them nigger soldier, you dig? steal up some guns and blow crackers,ke and he stared as mes if i were aed snake saying hatching fumbling for his red pencil, i knew i had him, end quote. soon after this, malcolm gets his 4f card in the mail which basically excuses him in the army draft. around the same time in the early years of world war ii there is another zoot suitor and one far less known unless you've read myle book then his story i in there. his name is alfred bar ella, a mexican-american living in lango a los angeles, and he had balled him out for disturbing the peace. barrera in his letter argued to the judge that, quote, ever since ir can remember, i've bee pushed around and called names because i'm a mexican. i was born in this country. like you trsaid, i should have e same rights, and privileges of other americans. pretty soon, i guess i'll be in the army and i'll be glad to go, but i i want to be treated like everybody else. we're tired of being pushed around. we'red. tired of being told we can't go to this t show or that dance hall because we're mexican or that we better not be seen on the beach front or that we can't wear draped pant which is is what mexican americans 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 little's zoot's story juxtaposed to alfred barella's zoot story. malcolm used his zoot suit to alienate himself from the mainstream united states, to evade the endraft, to evade havg to enlist in the armed forces. barella's comments suggest that his zoot suit style, very different from malcolm's did not preclude him from willingly joining the service in an effort to assimilate, and eventually fight for f american democracy overseas. my pointnt is that zoot suitors mexican american, african-americans as well as the filipino, japanese-american and increasingli numbers of white youth who often wore the zoot suit as the war unfolded, felt differently about theirht style and theirab fashion and that th zoot suit t meant different this to all of them, that the zoot itself professed a wide variety of political views during wartime. some of them were heavily critical of the war. heavily critical of the kind of hypocrisy that the contradictions in american democracy meant for mexican-american and other non-white folks. barella perhaps saw themselves andes their style in the zoot suit as part and parcel ofwe what we might call a polits 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 and putting my bodybo on the line for american democracy as anyone else. the zoot, in other words, meant different things to different people and i want us to use it as a kind of window into the complicated, contested and shifting world of mexican-american identity and ethnicic politics during world r ii. this is my way of saying that it has a lot to teach us, the zoot suit does, about the complex identities, racial experiencesd and. culture during world war i when it comes toth mexican americans. soing this is where we are toda and for the next hour or so, i want us to use the zoot as a lens to think through who and whatwh is considered american during world war ii because by the end of the next hour i suspect it will be painfully obvious that zoott suitors, mexican american, 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 from which it was worn, right? world war ii and that to wear the zoot suit on the streets of los angeles in 1943 meant putting yourself at risk of getting -- pardon my french, your ass kicked by white sailors soldiers on the streets of los angeles, it didn't mean the same thing. say in the late '90s or early 2000s when scores of youth were wearing them to prom so we need to think about the hifting shifting historical context of world war ii in order to understand fully what the zoot suit meant in that time and place. so let's talk a littleii in or what the zoot suit meant in that time and place. so let's talk a little bit about the shifting context in world war w ii. we'll a leave the outline up the asth we make our way through so you can follow along. worldg. war ii brings massive changes to the american economy, politics and related social and cultural worlds that mexican-americans again, these young folks who are coming of age ass american citizens in numbers larger than we've seen up to this point in mexican-american history. asry a number of u.s. historian most, inst fact, have argued ov the ayears, world war ii helps pull the country as a whole out of the great depression. it lifts the nation from the economicat doldrums of the 1930 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 hadn't been certainly during the depression, butut one could arg even for a a longer stretch of history beforefo then. labor is needed to fuel wartime production. this is necessaryry to win the war. this leads to massive internal migration. so we'vemi just had a million mexican folks and f their childn over the previous two decades move into the u.s., southwest and elsewhere. during world war ii there were massive internaler migrations a not just for mexican-americans and african-americans and others who are seeking to benefit from this employment surge that comes with the war. so black folks leaving the south and settling in war production centers like los angeles or san francisco, chicago, and elsewhere around thels country not uncommon. part of why this is important for us as we will see in a few minutes is that the kind of demographic context in which mexican americans find themselves living changes big cities like los angeles where they are now living. these young folks living, going to schoolin with, perhaps worki with on occasion even dating folks that might not be part of mexican american communities or eve mexican-american themselves. los angeles, in particular, is home to a boom in wartime industry like shipbuilding, aircraft construction, and whether folksft were finding wo as welders or in other sorts of professions working in wartime industry came to be seen as doing d one's patriotic duty. it became a marker of citizenship, of productivity is zensh citizenship so if you weren't a sailor or afol soldier, right, next best thing to doing your duty during world war ii was to work in the war industry and in fact, asn i've said, many wome and minorities, not just mexican-americans did so. it's important to keep in mind, however, thatt there is a glass ceiling and many would argue, a really low glass ceiling to the kindnd of employment and opportunity that the war offers to non-white folks and women. they are often the last hired and the first fired. that is to say, when the war is overer they are often the firsto lose their positions. the kinds of jobs that they were able to accrue during the war were ofteni those with the leas amountnt of social mobility, so they weren't able to move up the employment ladder, right? their jobs were stunted in terms of the kind of growth that they were offered and then after war wasve 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 mexican-americans and others together. it's not just one or the other.h so there are big economic changes during the war. if people havee a little bit of extraa money in their pocket tht they may not have had in the 1930s, chances are the reason they'll spend it and one of the ways that young mexican americans, amongca others, spen it is on style and fashion and this is part of a kind of up surge inn world war ii-era popular culture. there is a kind of newfound economic freedom that many americans pursued and this really helps fuel the growth of pop culture and commodities to newdi heights, so people had mo money to spend and they spent it. they t did so on leisure and entertainment, onn recreation. there's a dramatic rise in the film and of literature, sports, eccentric club, jazz music, dance halls, right? all of this despite a kind of popular wartime rhetoric in which people are expected in many ways to contribute war effort.to the if part of the argument is what good american should be doing world war ii, what they should be doing during the war is working to defeat fascism overseas, oneov of the popular ideasla was that they should be investing in war bonds and not in suits of clothes, that the spare money folks should be diverted back into the war effort in some form or fashion. so we have newfound economic freedom and opportunity despite itsp glass ceiling limits. we have a rise in popular culture, andla we also have ongoing and dramatically shifting battles over civil rights. many mexican-americans and african-americans and japanese-americans particularly after pearlse harbor in decembe 1941 support what was known as the double v campaign. the double vpa campaign was victory abroad against hitler, mous mous mussolini, you can't win abroad without also winning at home. that you couldn't fight for american democracy overseast yo without fighting for equal citizenship on the home front. this became a fundamental and core principle for many mexican-american, african-american and other fo s 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 i order 8802 that band 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 of american urban populations. we have african-americans migrating internally to big cities across the country and by the time we get to the end of the war and evenhe during the w as it goes on year by year we have black and brown veterans returning to their old lives expecting equality. and there are responses to this, and racism and discrimination and lack of opportunity and the entrenchment, not just of jim crow segregation against african-americans in the deep south and jim crow and what we might call juan or jaime crow segregation against mexican-americans in southern ie california, andns elsewhere arod theif country is commonplace. inco 1946 at the end of the war just to leap ahead for a momen, it shouldn't be surprising that asng veterans are returning and claiming rights and new ways after having fought for american democracy overseas that there is an uptick in lynching with african-americans at the end of the war. if we're talking about civil rights during world war ie ai a who and what are considered americans and more importantly, who is not, we at least have to spend a a minute or two remindi ourselves of japanese-american internment. following pearl harbor in december of '41 we all are aware that japanese and japanese-americans 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 wasnt devastating for man japanese-americans. when american patriotism during the war sort of bleeds into and becomes very hard to distinguish from a kind of y yellow peril. i anmean, the larger argument he and this is wanot unique to the second world war is that the line between patriotism and fascism is sometimes hard to distinguish, and in the early 1940s and 1942 the first months of that year in particular, franklin delano roosevelt signs another executive which essentially suspends the r citizenship and human rights of japanese americans and sends them to concentration camps.at their property, their homes, their belongings are confiscated. two-thirds! two-thirds of the some 120,000 men, women and children that are interned in these concentration camps are american citizens.en they're basically given one week, one week's notice before being shipped off to one of ten camps, most of which were located in remote areas across e the west. these camps were managed by the war relocation authority. there were some resistance by japanese americans who charged racism, including by a group of young japanese american 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.ri what would you sign?es what would you say, yes or no, if you were locked up and givenu 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 american men, japanese american men, who responded no to these loyalty questionnaires were known as the no-no boys, and i mention them in part because they were also,w not all of them, but many of them were also fond of wearing zoot suits from manzanar to zo concentration camps in colorado and arkansas, there was an internal zoot suit scene in many of the concentration camps. but we'll come back to that in just a moment or two. it wasn't until 1944, more thant two years after japanese americans were interned that the supreme court finally ruled that a civilian agency, the war relocation authority, did not have the right to incarceration law-abiding citizens, and the he federal camps began to close down, japanese americans returned to their homes. my point here is that there's a lot happening in world war ii when it comes to the economy, when it comes to pop culture, it and when it comes to the politics of civil rights. and it's in that context, with all of this swirling around, that youth, mexican american and other youth, african-american, japanese american, interned or not, wearing zoot suits comes to mean something more than just ai 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 flashpoint, 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 japanese americans who were interned throughout much of 1942 and '43 into '44, zoot suitors, mexican american zoot suitors in particular, were viewed as rs public enemy, if not number one, then number two or 1b, right behind japanese americans. they were seen as un-american. they were seen as disloyal. they were seen as subversive toy the war effort.re and it's in part because of the context, right, the shifting dramatic changes of economy and politics and social and cultural allegiances that the zoot suit comes to garner this deep meaning, and that's where i want to turn to next. i want to talk a little bit more about the zoot suit itself. it's often told as a story or history during world war ii as a mexican american story on the west coast or an african-american story on the east coast, right? the story i began with, or malcolm little's story sort of dominate the narrative of what the zoot suit was and why it mattered and how we can use it h 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 om west coast, not just a black thing on the east coast, but it was an american thing. and actually, after the war, as a footnote, it becomes an international youth popular style, but that's another lecture for another day.w it was popular across the country, in virtually every urban center, from san diego and los angeles to new york and d points in between, chicago, detroit, philadelphia, houston, san antonio, on down the list. it was worn by mexican americans, by african-americans, japanese americans, and especially on the west coast, filipino americans as well.an 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 quote/unquote punjab pants. they were often accompanied by a coat with long tails flowing from behind. it wasn't uncommon for youth to have a gold or silver watch ou chain that they carried in their pocket and kind of swung as they walked along the streets. the pancake or wide-brimmed hat, often with a feather stuck in on it, was not unusual. my great uncle tony, the brothek of robert alvarez sr., who we watched in the lemon grove be incident last week, was a zoot suter.de and in fact, here's an interesting footnote, the first time i ever studied and wrote any academic paper about the zoot suit, long before it became a book, was when i was in a class like this here at ucsd in 1993 or '94 on the history of los angeles, and i interviewed my uncle tony.ir and 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 didn't have the right build, if you didn't look good and big and strong and have the right e stature, then with that wide-brimmed pancake hat, you'dr look like a thumbtack, 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 mexican american youth and others were expected to be silent and invisible. w they were expected to find theie niche in the wartime economy or serve overseas, but here you had zoot suiters 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 suiters, mexican t american and otherwise, were both zoot suiters and soldiers or sailors, like alfred barella or my uncle tony, that it wasn't necessarily a contradiction to be both. but as we will see the conflict and the 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 wasn't just young men, either. particularly on the west coast, young mexican american women hau their own zoot suit style fashion. they often wore short, black skirts, sometimes the same coats as their male counterparts. it wasn't unusual for them to wear heavy makeup and their hair up in high pompadores. some even wore men's clothes, pants or dress socks up to thei thighs. i talked to one mexican american woman zoot suiter who told me she used to buy the biggest socks she could find at the men's department stores in los angeles and pull them all the way up underneath a very short skirt to nearly the top of her e 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 wouldn't fall down, that looking good, that maintaining the style meant that she would literally glue her ma 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 wartime ki 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's sort of a short version of the who, the what, the where, the when, i do want s you to consider and at least begin to ask, why should we care about the zoot suit?nt i mean, this is the case that i'm making today, but i'm not t 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 african-american author, activist and thinker who wrote, among many other important works, a book called "the invisible man," which you o should also read, if you k haven't.in he said in part, writing in 1943, that "perhaps the zoot suit conceals profound political meaning.e perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the lindy hop conceals cluesl to great potential power." and it's that power of the zoot, what it meant in the context in which it was worn of world war o ii that i think this riddle, ifo we can call it that, ralph ellison asks us to think about. so, i want you to think about ll several big points and questions here. number one, how the zoot suit helps us see the connections between mexican american history and the history of other groupss and communities during wartime. that is to say, we can't tell the history of mexican americant during world war ii without accounting for how it overlaps and intersects with that of african-americans and others. the power of the zoot, in other words, is at least partially drawn from its multiracial er quality. number two, and here i will sound like a broken record, but it is worth emphasizing the point that the zoot suit helps t us see the boundaries of the un national policy, where the racial, gendered, and class lines of who is considered fully american and afforded first-class american citizenshil are drawn, who's in and who's wh out. number three, that the zoot suit afforded young mexican american 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 i'm suggesting is that it's kind of a dress rehearsal, right, for other arenas of american life, where experimentation can happen, where people can cross racial boundaries, where young men can wear men's clothes and articulate or perform different gender identities.lo 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 to activity seriously because it serves as a kind of oppositional memory, an archive of a mexican american experience that is not recorded in, say, the archives of the los angeles police or department or mayor's office orn county supervisor records, that if we want to see and hear, list listen to the full scope of the mexican american experience during the war, we have to pay attention to things like music and fashion. and when we do, it helps us seea how some were challenging what it meant to be an american! that there's a different kind of racial engendered 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. and finally, as a fourth point, just to underscore in a different way what i've just said, is that the zoot suit helps us see something, at least a glimpse of the historically lived experience of folks who are left out of the dominant historical narrative, the conventional records that most folks turn to. who's left out of history? that sometimes as historians, we have to look at different kinds of sources.ha i mean, you all are reading primary sources, documents from 1948 through the chicano movement that we'll 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 we these periods. so i want to tell a version of e zoot suit history that at least attempts to account for the perspective and point of view ov the zoot suiter himself or herself, and i want to tell thaf story in three parts. with the time that we have left before we take a break. the first part is, they may be denied. the second part, the struggle for dignity. and finally, we'll wrap up briefly with riots and violence on the home front. just a theoretical note of what i mean by dignity. dignity is more than just being honored or esteemed, but it's also what i would call a kind of politics of refusal. where being able to live your l life in a dignified way means rejecting, means refusing being dehumanized. it's a refusal of conformity. a refusal of being humiliated. and this i argue, whether you agree with me, the argument is that the zoot suit was one way s of reclaiming dignity at a timet and a place during world war iio when that dignity was taken from young mexican american youth. so let's start with dignity denied. this is a part of the story of the zoot suit where nonwhite youth, mexican americans and african-americans 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 as climate, and the shifting me 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 ea mississippi, but was d segregation. this is a movie bulletin from i los angeles, and you'll note that there is a mexican night every wednesday, a colored nighe every thursday. this was commonplace. so, in this context, with the demands of the wartime economy, with segregation and ongoing battles for civil rights and the many contradictions that all of that evoked, the zoot suit g garnered its meaning. it wasn't 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, and here is where i would urge you to think about something called the racialization of juvenile delinquency. it's not uncommon during wartime for concerns about juvenile li delinquency to skyrocket. it's logical, in fact. if we need young people to fight in wars, they should be in the armed forces the army or the navy.. if they're not in the army or navy, they should be employed in war industry, as we talked about already.e if they're not doing one of re those two things, there is this concern that they are not doing what they should be doing, that they're delinquent. and 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.on during world war ii, right, this rise and concern over juvenile delinquency works hand in hand with concerns over race. so what we see is that along with japanese americans, it's young mexican american and en african-american 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 suiters in en particular in the popular mainstream press, where they are depicted as criminal, as immoral, as a drain on the war effort, as animal-like, basically un-american in every way imaginable. this is what i would argue was indicative of the racializationi of juvenile delinquency. juvenile delinquency during world war ii became conflated with being a race problem.in and in southern california, it was mexican american youth, and perhaps even to a lesser degree african-american youth, that 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 so-called mexican american youth gangs in l.a. one of the expert witnesses that provides testimony to the grand jury is an l.a. county sheriff named edwin duran ayers. and in his testimony to the grand jury, he argues that, "the caucasian, especially the anglo saxton, particularly 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 that all to be a sign of weakness, and all he knows ee and feels is the desire to use a knife or some lethal weapon. h in other words, his desire is to kill, or at least let blood." in his testimony, he goes on to compare mexican american zoot suiters to wildcats that need to be caged. there are numerous instances of judges across los angeles county referring to zoot suiters, mexican american and african-american zoot suiters as traveling in wolf packs. a kind of language and vocabulary that animalizes folks, that dehumanizes them. the racialization of juvenile delinquency and the focus of nu zoot suiters as a massive part of the problem with the americaa home front takes off in los angeles after august of 1942, us when there is an incident known as the sleepy lagoon case. i'm not going to go into great detail about it because we're going to watch a film about it later today, but the general outline is that mexican american youth, upwards of 600 of them, are rounded up by city police in august of 1942 after a young ed mexican man named jose diaz is found bleeding to death after a gang fight on the outskirts of the city near a popular swimming hole known as sleepy lagoon. sleepy lagoon was a popular place for mexican american youth to hang out, in part because the municipal swimming pools within city limits were segregated.d. there was usually one day of the week when mexican american and african-american people were allowed to swim in city pools. anybody want to take a guess? which day of the week? w this was a movie bulletin. sunday, last day of the week. it depended on the pool, but it was usually the day before the pool is 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 diaz's body -- and he dies. he's eventually murdered.. he's killed in this skirmish between competing mexican american youth gangs. the lapd rounds up 600-some odd mexican youth.x they end up arresting and putting on trial upwards of 19 d youth that are affiliated with the 38th street gang.tr this becomes the largest mass murder trial in california history up to this point.pr and those youth are sent to prison, despite, many would argue, a lack of evidence that e they were the ones who actuallyy 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,d in part because of what was w happening around them in this context of world war ii. and it's not an accident that the "l.a. times," "the daily an herald," "the examiner," the popular press in l.a. picks up y on this racialization of juvenile delinquency and the zoot suit, because many of these youth that are rounded up are actually zoot suiters, and the zoot suit becomes front-page, headline news across the city. this is a story picked up across the country. it even becomes 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 they are convicted and sent away andt locked up.e this becomes a massive story, n and part of it is followed p. across the u.s. because the zoot suit becomes this icon of everything that is wrong and destabilized and immoral and b violent and detracting from the war effort.i the 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 ll racialization of juvenile delinquency before we move on to part two. dignity reclaimed. but i talked to one mexican american woman zoot suiter who remembered the ways that young female zoot suiters in particular were talked about in the press after sleepy lagoon, after the zoot suit came to sort of 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 oa articles talking about the pompadores that the young women were fond of wearing and articles talking about how in their hairdo's, 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 nd that they could fight the an sailors and soldiers.r and lupe said, "they made it out like we had knives in our hair and all that. that was comical, actually. they also said every girl was going from one guy to another, s you know, for sexual favors. the papers made us out to be real tramps." right, this is the way that these young women were depicted. it reminds me -- i'm going to a date myself here, but this reminds me of when i was a kid and one of my favorite morning saturday cartoons was "scooby-doo." w and if you remember, there were episodes of scooby-doo, they were my favorite, when the harlem globetrotters, the basketball team, were guests, right?t? and the globetrotters -- this is was an animated cartoon -- the globetrotters were depicted in these really racist caricatures with exaggerated black to african-american features with afros out to here. and they would reach into theirh afros and pull all kinds of crazy stuff out. they'd pull out the opposing team, the team bus, the basketball court, but it was a cartoon, right? it wasn't real. it was make-believe. it was a cartoon, and this is the way these young women were depicted in the press.n. this was the racialization of m juvenile delinquency. in response, we could argue that zoot suiters, what they were doing by spending so much time looking good, it didn't just mean they cared about looking good., they were responding to this context in which they were beinc dehumanized, in which their dignity was being stripped and i taken away from them.y they were saying, here i am, see me, hear me in this context in which i'm supposed to be invisible and silent. h and this is a good transition to the next part of the story, thet struggle for dignity, right? that the zoot suit is not just about a negative depiction of black and brown youth, but it's also how those same youth took it upon themselves to be seen os and heard, and there's two wayse i want you to think about them doing that.a one is through mobilizing their own body, that sometimes the ob most accessible weapon people e have to combat conditions that are oppressive are themselves. and what these youth did was their bodies became -- their physical bodies became the vehicle for them to speak back to power about the ways they were being treated during world war ii. they also did so by occupying public space, right? they weren't just doing it in their bedrooms in front of a mirror, wearing the zoot suit, n but they were doing it on city streets, on corners, in dance ea halls, in malt shops and pool tr halls, walking down the street, literally occupying public space, being seen in these, i i would argue, powerful ways. this is a shot of two black zoot suiters in detroit shot from behind walking down the sidewalk. if any of you have seen the denzel washington and spike lee film "malcolm x," you will recall that the opening scene from that film is denzel playin malcolm little before he becomes malcolm x, and spike lee playing his sidekick, shorty, decked oue in their zoot suits in boston in the early years of world war ii, walking down the street literally like this, hunched over, arms out, swinging their arms, occupying public space. their watches, their hats, their feathers, their tails, their ballooned-out pants, a spectacle to be seen, people having to ho off the sidewalk in order to let them pass.lo that their bodies and public space were mobilized and occupied to be seen, to be heard, to challenge this dehumanization that many of them faced up to as a part of everyday life in wartime american society. and my point here is that what they were, in fact, doing was making an argument that there is a different way to be a young man or woman in american society during world war ii, that they were challenging status quo notions of wartime race, gendera and u.s. identity. so i want you to think about the different pieces of what i just said. the first is gender. let's imagine zoot suiters juxtaposed to another popular le icon of the wartime american woman, rosie the riveter. most of us have seen this image, right? rosie the riveter flashing her bicep. "we can do it" dressed in heavy-duty work clothes, sort of embodying and signifying this idea that american women are doing the work needed to win the war, to fuel the war effort. it's this kind of female masculinity. and here i will offer you a a brief theoretical footnote. jack halberstam has written a terrific book, a number of years old now, called "female masculinity," and in the ve introduction to that book, he writes about james bond. seems far afield, but halberstam writes about james bond as the kind of heroic, masculine e figure, right? handsome, dressed to the nines all the time, gets all the r ladies, uses the secret spy tools and such, but that james bond's heroic masculinity is only seen as being the man's man when juxtaposed to other masculinities in the james bond movies and books, like for example, money penny, who is his boss in the british intelligence offices, and she is sort of this very butch, masculine figure, right? sort of projecting a kind of female masculinity, or q, the very nerdy scientist who inventa all of the innovative, technical devices that bond uses in his escapades.o and q, halberstam argues, is not an accident, right? q is "q" for queer. right? it's this queer masculinity, so that we only have an heroic masculine figure when we juxtapose it to different kinds of other masculine figures. and i would argue that world wak ii is the same!! that the sailor or the soldier becomes the heroic figure, juxtaposed to the zoot suiter, the male or the female zoot suiter. you have the female zoot suiter projecting these female-masculine characteristics, wearing men's clothes, roaming the streets in ways that young women weren't supposed to be doing, or you have the male zoot suiters a paying too much attention to their hair, trying to act too o pretty, acting too womanly, too women. so, you had female masculinity, but you also had masculine femininity, and what zoot suiters were doing is in part challenging what a young american man or a woman could be when it came to their gendered identity.. i would argue that they're also challenging what they could be when it came to their racial identity. that as i've already said, a big part of the zoot suit was its multiracial quality. when it came to the music and dancing, zoot suiters weren't t just listening and dancing to th anything, but they were big into the jazz and big band scene. so black jazz artists who were circulating and traveling across the country would come to l.a. or houston or other places, and youth would go, not just black m youth, but mexican american youth and l.a. with central avenue, where the jazz and blues joints became sort of the home to a kind of multiracial scene, where in the face of wartime segregation, youth were saying, at least for a moment, temporarily, on the dance floor, we're going to hang out with one another. and guess what? if people were dancing and socializing together, it stands to reason they were doing other stuff together, too, right?a having sex. the spector and fear of f misogynation, of this cross-racial mixing, became associated with the zoot, right, as a challenge, as an alternative to the kind of jim and juan crow segregation that we've talked about. and i'm emphasizing the kind of sexual dimensions to this scene that the zoot was a part of on because it was real. i talked to one tailor who said, quote -- this was a tailor who made zoot suits for black and mexican american youth during the war. and when i interviewed him, he said, "you could see the whole world when a good zoot suit dancer threw his female partner over her shoulders," right? that it was this hypersexual kind of performance that crossed racial lines. and even the zoot suit itself ac was kind of seen as a kind of visual extravaganza as zoot en suiters moved across the floor. malcolm x, again, when he was malcolm little, remembers a night of zoot suit dancing like this -- "once i got myself warmed and loosened up, i was snatching partners from among the hundreds of unattached e freelancing girls along the sidelines. almost every one of them could really dance, and i just about went wild.al band wailing, i was whirling ne girls so fast, their skirts were snapping.st black girls, brown skins, high yellows, even a couple of white girls there, boosting them over my hips, my shoulders, into the air, circling, tap dancing, i was underneath them when they landed doing the flapping eagle, the kangaroo, and the split."" so, both in its visual projection and in the kind of practices and social relationships that it cultivatet and embodied, the zoot was a challenge to the status quo and conventional gender and racial dimensions of wartime american identity. my point here is that the zoot embodied a different way of being american. if zoot suiters were reclaiming their dignity and projecting that there were more than one if way to be a young american during world war ii, it evoked w response. and here's the third part of the story.ed where we need to talk for a few minutes about race, riots, and violence. i'll go back to the outline. and just in terms of the timeline that we're working with, we'll remind you that the zoot suit riots, this clash, this violent clash between zoot suiters and largely white hi servicemen in los angeles, explodes on the streets of l.a. during june of 1943. that's about eight or nine months after sleepy lagoon, about eight or nine months aftee this racialization of juvenile e delinquency intensifies in the press, on the front pages daily, day after day. it's not a surprise, then, that if zoot suiters were reclaiming their dignity, that part of what happens in wartime society is that some folks say, you know what, i'm going to stamp it out, you can't have it back! and it becomes a violent stamping out.go it's one in which wearing a zoot suit did put you at risk of getting your ass kicked on the streets of l.a. in june of 1943, that's exactly what happens, right? the intensification of the zoot as a kind of icon of everything that's wrong with the home front leads to the so-called zoot suit riots. and the zoot suit riots are most known for servicemen and zoot suiters, mexican american and also african-american, clashing on the streets of los angeles. the majority of violence in june of 1943 is carried out by white sailors, and to a lesser degreer soldiers and civilians against mexican american youth in zoot a suits, but also black and even some white youth in zoot suit. in other words, part of what is happening is that american society is responding violently to these different articulations of what it meant to be a young man or woman during the war. so, for four days, the first week of june 1943, the story iso the same. there are sailors initially, and then increasing numbers of other servicemen and civilians, who attack zoot suiters on the streets. and the narrative is replayed over and over, that mexican american and african-american youth wearing zoot suits are beaten by sailors and soldiers in uniform, left, bloodied, stripped of their clothes in front of gathering crowds of onlookers on city streets.s. civilians and the lapd in the background, who swoop in only pd after the beatings to arrest thn zoot suiters themselves for disturbing the peace or vagrancy, while the sailors and soldiers are sent back to base camp to be dealt with by the shore patrol or the military police. this is the first week of june 1943. this is the so-called zoot suit riots, a moment in mexican american history that is probably not amply named, because much of the rioting is done by white american servicemen, right? we could term them the servicemen riots as much as the zoot suit riots. and my point here is that this is a moment where the streets of los angeles are actually the site in which that boundary th around who's in and who's out, the national polity is being drawn. it's being drawn violently.'s people are being stripped and at beaten and arrested because ther are being targeted for what they're wearing and what their racial identity is. let me just underscore the point by noting that wartime american democracy is not the kind of democracy that afforded mexican american youth to wear what they wanted to wear without getting beaten. that wartime democracy didn't allow them that kind of freedom and expression. we're going to get into this a lot more in the second half of class today in the film on the zoot suit riots, but i do want to wrap up with an argument thaf we should have seen this coming. if we were alive in los angelesn in 1942 and '43, around the time of sleepy lagoon in august of '42 and the zoot suit riots in june of '43, the writing was on the wall. one of the ways that we know this in hindsight, as w historians, all of us, is that we can go to the archives of the u.s. navy, and there's a stack you of records in which sailors who a were on leave or out for a night on the town in los angeles and got into a skirmish or two or l three or four with zoot suiters in late 1942 or even the first months of 1943 leading up to the riots themselves, and then would go back to base and file a th report with their superiors and with the shore patrol.po we can look at those records, and even though we have to take them with a huge grain of salt because they are only delivered from the perspective of the sailors, not the zoot suiters, right, they might be true, they might be totally made up, but they still can tell us a lot gh about what those sailors thought about who was in and who was out, where the boundaries of ths national polity were drawn.e so when i looked through all ofy these records, i pulled out four different themes, and i want to share a few of them with you. so, we're talking about complaints by sailors against zoot suiters. one of the themes is the protection of white womanhood. in this stack of archives, there are dozens and dozens, i mean, probably hundreds of complaints by sailors against zoot suiters that they said were threatening their white wives, girlfriends, mothers, aunts, cousins, daughters, stepdaughters, you name it, right, but that they were threatening their quote/unquote white women, and they had to step in to protect s white women from these black and brown zoot suiters. second theme is charges from sailors against zoot suiters as homosexual or that zoot suitersd were calling them homosexual in different ways. a third theme is that sailors claim zoot suiters insulted their service in the military. and a fourth theme is that they outnumbered them in attacks or that they conducted sneak attacks. remember, this is after pearl harbor, when the idea of a sneak attack means something very different than what we might think of now. so, just a couple of examples as a way to close out this part of the class. in one typical case, a sailor reported that two zoot suiters , accosted his wife as she walked near chavez ravine. and i should say there is from some of these quotes, at least r-rated label. they pulled up alongside her and asked her to get in the car, propositioning her by cursing, "how about a fuck?" other reports abound of zoot suiters allegedly calling sailors belittling names like boy scouts, insulting their military service, bastards, , dirty sons of bitches, in one instance, a sailor claimed that a zoot suiter called him a sucker for being in the navy when there were so many damn ways to keep out of it. there were many more sailors whose charges included being called "fucking navy bastards," or one of my all-time favorites, "a cock-sucker of the first water," "god damn swab jockeys," another favorite of mine, "uncle sam's pet cock-sucker." then there was the sailor who said that a group of 200 zootsuitors or more jumped him from around a corner. o yet, he somehow, miraculously survived and made it back to base to file this report. again, these reports should be taken with a huge grain of salt. but what they remind us, even though they don't include the zoot suiter's perspective of the story, is that the sailors and much of the rest of american society were seeing gender and race and sexuality as the kind p of tools that they were using to draw those boundaries of who's in and who's out, who is afforded first-class citizenship and who wasn't. we will come back to this and rd pick up with more on the zoot suit riots. >> you're watching american history tv on c-span3. we'll continue our look at latino history in the civil rights movement in just a moment. but tonight, more lectures in history focusing on religion and its impact on the american revolution. join us at 8:00 p.m. eastern right here on c-span3. >> and this might be the only government class you ever take. you're going to be a voter forever. you're going to be a juror forever, so i need to give you tools to help you in your pursuits do them well. tonight high school teachers discuss how current effects affect their lessons on history. >> and as a history component, you know, this is a chance for them to learn a little bit about their story. wait a minute, this doesn't just start with me, but what i contribute and where i'm coming from is all part of this bigger story. and so, in that way, allowing them then to take in other people's opinions, take in the perspectives of others through social media, but again, also through video, it gives them a chance to be able to really think, well, okay, this is how i see the world, but why is it that i see the world this way? how can i maybe expand that a little bit by taking in other people's perspectives? >> tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span, c-span.org and listen on the c-span free radio app. you're watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspanhistory. next on "lectures in history," bakersfield college professor oliver rosales teaches a class on latinos, the delano grape vik of the mid-1960s and their place in the larger civil rights movement of the period. his class is about an hour and a half. >> tonight we are going to be talking about the delano grape strike within the bigger context of united states history, labor history and civil rights

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