Seventy Years Later: The Zoot Suit Riots and the Complexity of Youth Culture

*This is a good read, now that the Cesar Chavez movie has brought conversation about U.S. Latino history to kitchen tables and social media. Coverage of the Zoot Suit riots has been a textbook example of the misinformation that comes from non-Latinos telling Latino stories. The piece is a little slow at the start (references to the “American Me” movie weigh it down), but it goes into an interesting and needed discussion of women zootsuiters, multi-racial aspects of the riots, and the common traits of youth movements. Good history! VL

By Ryan Reft, KCET

This June marks the 70th anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots, which some critics call “the worst mob violence in Los Angeles history.”… the riots provide insight into wartime Los Angeles, zoot culture, and the tensions inherent to living in and navigating a multiethnic/multiracial metropolis like the City of Angels.

For several days in early June 1943, Los Angeles seethed as servicemen and zoots — often referred to as pachucos — clashed. As servicemen and others poured in from other states, sometimes as far away as Las Vegas, the violence became lopsided. However, depicting zoots only from the perspectives of fearful middle class social reformers, paranoid law enforcement, and hostile servicemen unfairly obscures the politics and meaning of the zoot culture.

The importance of the Zoot Suit Riots lay not only in what they told us about the contradictions of WWII America — fighting for freedom and anti-racism abroad while maintaining Jim Crow and segregation domestically — but also in how it might be used to gain insight into subsequent youth culture movements, which can demonstrate how populations, hamstrung by institutional prejudice, can exert agency over their own lives and identities.

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