Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon

Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A.

Eduardo Obregón Pagán

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780807862094
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios de las minorías

The notorious 1942 "Sleepy Lagoon" murder trial in Los Angeles concluded with the conviction of seventeen young Mexican American men for the alleged gang slaying of fellow youth Jose Diaz. Just five months later, the so-called Zoot Suit Riot erupted, as white soldiers in the city attacked minority youths and burned their distinctive zoot suits. Eduardo Obregon Pagan here provides the first comprehensive social history of both the trial and the riot and argues that they resulted from a volatile mix of racial and social tensions that had long been simmering. In reconstructing the lives of the murder victim and those accused of the crime, Pagan contends that neither the convictions (which were based on little hard evidence) nor the ensuing riot arose simply from anti-Mexican sentiment. He demonstrates instead that a variety of pre-existing stresses, including demographic pressures, anxiety about nascent youth culture, and the war effort all contributed to the social tension and the eruption of violence. Moreover, he recovers a multidimensional picture of Los Angeles during World War II that incorporates the complex intersections of music, fashion, violence, race relations, and neighborhood activism. Drawing upon overlooked evidence, Pagan concludes by reconstructing the murder scene and proposes a compelling theory about what really happened the night of the murder.

Part I
Make Noise Broken Windows

1: Introduction

For many Americans, World War II was “the good war,” both at the time of the conflict and in popular memory today.¹ Although the war may have seemed “good” for some, it was not for all. The nation celebrated a kind of patriotism that was layered with troubling assumptions about power, race, and culture.² Indeed, those who looked too foreign or who failed to conform to the celebrated “American” ideal often paid the price. Cultural difference was confused with political dissent, and Japanese Americans, for example, were interned not for crimes committed but for criminality suspected.³ Race riots, furthermore, raged from Los Angeles to New York, ultimately serving to reinforce the racial barriers of a segregated nation.⁴ Of these home front tensions that revealed the social cleavages of American society, none attracted more national and international attention during the war than two events in Los Angeles: the “Sleepy Lagoon” murder trial of 1942 and the Zoot Suit Riot of 1943.

The riot followed the trial during a climate of growing public concern that the children of refugees from the Mexican Revolution, who were increasingly called “Pachucos,” were becoming juvenile delinquents in their failure to conform to American social standards. Open confrontation along racial fault lines for this generation began as early as 1940, when mostly Mexican American youths aggressively challenged the intrusion of white military men into their social spaces as they passed through Los Angeles by the thousands. What educators, policy makers, social workers, law enforcement authorities—even members of their own community—were unable to see in viewing these children through the lens of social propriety was that part of their failure to conform came from a direct refusal to accept the racialized norms of segregated America. But in refusing to concede to the privileges of whiteness they were not resisting American culture in its entirety, as contemporary observers believed and some still contend. Rather, they embraced the uniquely American cultural invention of jazz as a means of negotiating their sense of place on terms of their own choosing. Their assertions of self found multiple expressions, from the music to which they danced, the slang they spoke, and the clothing they wore to refusing to defer to the privileges of whiteness and physically assaulting whites in order to maintain the integrity of their social spaces.⁵

The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riot are familiar to students of the American home front during World War II. Among Chicanos, the zoot-suited Pachuco captured the imagination of a generation of poets, artists, dramatists, and writers, who envisioned the social crises of the murder trial and riot as a kind of Pachuco passion play that transformed the children of Mexican refugees into the forerunners of the politicized Chicano. As a consequence, what Carlos Jiménez characterized as “the zoot suit years” has enjoyed the attention of numerous scholarly articles, books, works of art, poetry, fiction, movies—and even a Broadway musical—since the time that noted Hollywood screenwriter Guy Endore wrote The Sleepy Lagoon Mystery in 1944.⁶

The most detailed discussions to date about the Sleepy Lagoon murder and the Zoot Suit Riot come from the work of Mauricio Mazón and Edward Escobar.⁷ Mazón’s extraordinarily nuanced work The Zoot-Suit Riots (1984) has shaped current understanding of the events by utilizing psychoanalytic theory to explain mob behavior. Escobar’s excellent study Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity (1999) places the Zoot Suit Riot within the larger historical context of Mexican American tensions with the Los Angeles Police Department since the turn of the century. The dominant explanation for why the trial and riot occurred draws from the basic premise argued by Carey McWilliams and Guy Endore in the 1940s, that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst intentionally used his Los Angeles newspapers, the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express and the Los Angeles Examiner, to promote “anti-Mexican hysteria.”⁸ As a causal explanation for the Zoot Suit Riot, anti-Mexican hysteria was a favored theory of the Left in Los Angeles during World War II and afterward. Progressive activists of the period such as Endore and McWilliams viewed the trial and riot through the lens of conspiracy and corruption, discovering in the sequence of events the machinations of wealth and power unfettered. The appeal of this interpretation was that it simplified the complicated social dynamics and contradictory alliances of wartime Los Angeles by locating the origins of the social conflicts solely within white irrationality stirred by Hearst’s pro-fascist designs. Although the notion of riot as irrationality certainly holds merit from a historical and psychoanalytic perspective, it obscures more than it illuminates in relegating the actors in this social crisis to the roles of hapless victims of inflammatory rhetoric. Both white military men and Mexican Americans exist in this interpretation only as pawns of manipulating industrialists. Such casting worked well for the purposes of the leftist polemic of the day because it provided a kind of bloody shirt—or bloodied zoot suit, as it were—that they could wave in condemnation of concentrated wealth and power.

The anti-Mexican hysteria thesis proved supple enough for Chicano historians to continue utilizing it as an explanation for the conflicts as they began to write their own histories thirty years later. But rather than locate the origins of hysteria in the manipulations of corporate interests, Chicano scholars saw anti-Mexican hysteria deriving from the pathology of American society. The appeal of this interpretation was that it moved away from Guy Endore’s Hollywood view of sinister men controlling the puppet strings of society and highlighted the pervasiveness of racism and the propensity toward violence in American society. Yet this interpretation rests on a circular line of reasoning, that anti-Mexican hysteria caused news reporters to write unfavorable stories about Mexicans, which led to anti-Mexican hysteria. Furthermore, how racial animosity transformed into a murder trial and riot at that particular moment in that particular manner has yet to be adequately explained. In looking to “the press” as the instigator of racial violence, one must assume that riot is the natural and uncomplicated outcome of unfavorable news reports.

The anti-Mexican hysteria thesis, as the singular explanation for the social tensions, disregards critical aspects of the social dynamic before the outbreak of rioting.⁹ If widespread and long-standing anti-Mexican tensions led to the murder trial, why did the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office vigorously prosecute the death of a Mexican national when white authorities could have easily ignored brown-on-brown violence as their counterparts in the South did with black-on-black violence? Why did military men riot when they were only temporarily stationed in Los Angeles on their way overseas and had little prior interaction with Mexican Americans, instead of longtime white residents who would have been the most saturated with and invested in anti-Mexican animosity?¹⁰ The anti-Mexican hysteria thesis also obscures much by placing the actions and motivations of white Los Angeles within the realm of widespread madness and irrationality. I do not seek to dismiss the reality of racial animosity in California, and I have no quarrel with seeing violence as madness, particularly racial violence. My point is that the anti-Mexican hysteria thesis does not account for why rioting sailors targeted zoot-suited young men across the color line, and not all or even most Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. Nor does it account for why some Mexican Americans responded at least in tacit support of the sailors.

The field of Chicano studies has increasingly moved away from the paradigm of “victimology” to explore the ways in which Mexican Americans have exercised historical agency and fashioned their lives within the confines of their times, however unintended the consequences. My hope is to contribute to this trend in probing the articulations of key factions in Los Angeles that played critical roles leading up to the riot. I ask how popular culture both articulated and shaped the tensions that exploded into riot, how jazz facilitated the negotiation of place for working-class youths, and what their engagement with jazz meant to Mexican Americans and white Angelenos. Through my exploration of popular culture, I shift the origins of the trial and riot away from a monocausal explanation toward a multivalent theory that looks at competing social tensions deriving from demographic pressures, city planning, racism, segregation, and an incipient, street-level insurgency against what Tomás Almaguer called “the master narrative of white supremacy.”¹¹

A closer look at this specific moment in time reveals a complex social dialogue. Among the young men tried for murder in the Sleepy Lagoon case were white working-class youths, such as Victor “Bobby” Thompson and Hungarian American John Matuz, who socialized, dated, and sided with Mexican American peers through the cultural language of mostly black music, manner, and fashion.¹² At the same moment, Mexican American professionals such as Manuel Ruíz Jr. looked askance at these “Pachucos,” sided with the LAPD, and defended the actions of the rioting servicemen. White activists such as LaRue McCormick, Carey McWilliams, and Alice McGrath defied political allegiances to work tirelessly on behalf of the predominantly black and Mexican American communities targeted during this crisis. Accounting for the complicated cross loyalties during the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riot requires a rethinking of power and power relations during this period. Indeed, what does it mean for the Chicano historical memory when the young men and women directly involved in the quintessential “Pachuco” moment spoke English exclusively, never wore zoot suits, and did not identify as Pachuco?¹³

The trial and riot were two episodes in a larger struggle over the structures of power and privilege in America, played out through contests over culture and social propriety. The public spaces of Los Angeles served as the arena where the very definitions of who constituted “the public,” who could lay claim to those spaces, who could enforce social behavior in those spaces, and who could define the terms of propriety and delinquency all were hotly contested. One unintended consequence of segregation was that it produced a social, cultural, and political fluidity among families thrown together, and a significant outgrowth of that exchange was that young people across the color line, mostly of the working class, discovered and increasingly embraced what Michael Bakan termed “the jazz lifeworld.” The jazz music, language, clothing, and behavior that were elements of this black urban subculture expressed aesthetic tastes and sympathies clearly in opposition to the normative social values of mainstream America, as well as to the aspirations of racial uplift and socioeconomic mobility embraced by many parents of the wartime generation. Certainly jazz was not new to American culture in the 1940s; neither were tensions between parents and youths over popular culture. Although both developments played important roles in shaping social tensions in Los Angeles during the war years, they would likely not have led to riot by themselves. Robin D. G. Kelley argues that black zoot-suited hipsters who frequented jazz clubs in eastern cities openly criticized “the white man’s war” and prided themselves in evading the draft. It is tempting, therefore, to conclude that military men attacked zoot-suited civilian youths in Los Angeles because of their opposition to the war. Yet jazz never developed into a vehicle for defining, articulating, or communicating an opposition to the war, although some contemporary observers alleged as much. Indeed, as Burton Peretti shows, the successful appropriation of swing jazz and jazz musicians by the national war effort sufficiently divested jazz of its controversial origins as it became mainstream. Working-class youths in Los Angeles engaged swing jazz in qualitatively different ways than black youths in the East, refashioning the politics of black hipsters into a more complicated view of patriotism and civic disobedience as they refashioned the zoot suit into the more conservative “drape.” Rather than resisting the war, they were eager to do their part through working in defense industries or proving their valor on the battlefield, but they also found ways of undermining white privilege that underwrote home front social relations in the public sphere.¹⁴

A parallel development in Los Angeles, wholly unrelated to the growing popularity of swing jazz, created the context for the demonization of the drape as competition between young civilians and military men over social space escalated into open conflict. With the coming of war, city planners imposed a million-dollar training facility for white sailors in an area of town long occupied by working-class and immigrant families. Raúl Villa’s observation that “the experience of being displaced in multiple ways from a perceived homeland has been an essential element of Chicanos’ social identity in this country” could well describe the reaction that many young people had in the neighborhoods that were directly affected.¹⁵ Their responses to these changes provide another window into the ways in which they interacted with American society. A year before the outbreak of riot, young men living in the neighborhoods surrounding the naval facility, the majority of whom were Mexican or Mexican American, began a guerrilla campaign on the streets that consisted of harassment, intimidation, and resistance to the ideals of white privilege. So...