Ashley Lucas. Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Volume 3, Issue 1. 2009.
On 12 January 1943, at the highly publicized Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, a court wrongly convicted seventeen young men from the 38th Street neighborhood for murder and assault associated with the death of a young Mexican American named José Díaz. The Zoot Suit Riots occurred later that spring when members of the U.S. Navy and Marines attacked Mexican American youths, beat them, and stripped them naked in the streets of Los Angeles. In 1978, Luis Valdez’s landmark play Zoot Suit opened at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and in doing so became the first professionally produced Chicana play.
All three events reflect the performance of terror in Mexican American communities and the processes of racial othering that create that terror. In his book Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History, Anthony Kubiak describes the fundamental links between the performance of terror in life to the performance of terror in theater and the media. He sees acts of terror as necessarily taking place in view of a specific audience, those being terrorized. Acts committed with the intention of inspiring terror in others possess a theatrical or performative quality; they put on a show to elicit the specific emotional response of terror. This article examines the ways in which the play Zoot Suit reshapes performances of terror from the 1940s media, making the zoot suiter a symbol for resilience, creativity, and community pride rather than a threat to the safety of others.
The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial and the Zoot Suit Riots were both incited in large part by extremely negative media representations of Mexican American youth in the early 1940s. Historian Edward J. Escobar argues that the terrorizing acts committed against Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in 1943 caused the community to organize politically and to articulate their identity as Mexican Americans for the first time. This shift in community identity and political consciousness set the stage for the Chicano movement that would mobilize Mexican Americans more than two decades later.
In theatrical expressions of identity politics, Luis Valdez and his theater company, El Teatro Campesino, used political performances to gain support for the United Farm Workers and the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Zoot Suit builds on the political work done by activists and artists during the Chicano movement by refashioning the once criminalized zoot suiter as a symbol for Chicano power. The play attacks the 1940s media’s condemnation of young Mexican Americans and their culture, while also portraying the events that terrorized Mexican Americans literally and symbolically during the trial and the riots.
The performance of Zoot Suit situates the judgmental media images of the early 1940s in light of a sociopolitical ideology from the Chicano movement that counters the hegemonic discourses that criminalize Chicana/o youth. In using the same images that stigmatize Chicana/os to promote a positive image of their ethnic identity, Valdez uses the tools of media terrorism, including language and visual imagery, to dismantle the ideology that stigmatized Mexican Americans in the mainstream media of the 1940s and to promote a positive conception of Chicana/o identity in the 1970s through the reworking of previously negative media images. In effect, he revises the historical memory of the zoot-suited Mexican Americans of the 1940s, transforming these youths from symbols of criminality into heroic icons of radical resistance against cultural oppression.
Criminally Fashionable: The Symbolic Resonances of the Pachuco
The early 1940s media representations of Mexican American youth as dangerous criminals in stylized clothing set up Mexican Americans as ethnic others outside of U.S. hegemonic culture. This discourse is located in mainstream conceptions of the Mexican American zoot suiter, otherwise known as the pachuco. In an essay entitled “In Search of the Authentic Pachuco,” Arturo Madrid asserts, “From his beginnings the Pachuco has been a character endowed with mythic dimensions, a construct of fact and fiction, viewed with both hostility and curiosity, revulsion and fascination.” Historian Luis Alvarez also describes zoot suiters as figures to be understood in multiple ways. He argues that in the 1940s the media and government associated the zoot suit with “violence, drinking, premarital sex, and other immoral behavior,” whereas those actually wearing the zoot suit saw it as a “positive affirmation of one another.” The “mythic dimensions” of the pachuco stem from these contrasts in perception as well as from early media representations. The complex mythology of the pachuco as a cultural figure offers up dramatically captivating images in the media and the theater because the pachuco is alluring yet frightening, working class yet dressed in expensive clothes, representative of a real community yet one imagined from the outside.
Two of the more performative traits that defined the pachuco were his zoot suit and his language. The famous outfit of the zoot suiters consisted of “undershirts, baggy pants, long and colorful jackets, chains and little hats with a feather on the side.” Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz describes the appeal of the zoot suiter’s style: “One of the principles that rules in North American fashions is that clothing must be comfortable, and the pachuco, by changing ordinary apparel into art, makes it ‘impractical.’ Hence it negates the very principles of the model that inspired it. Hence its aggressiveness.” Paz’s emphasis on the zoot suit as art rather than mere fashion defines the pachuco as deliberately and overtly excessive. The flashy and performative quality of the zoot suit, whether read as aggressive or not, makes the pachuco a captivating subject for theater-makers. Long aft er real pachucos made their clothes into art, a Chicano playwright and his collaborators made art out of the pachuco himself.
Luis Valdez and the Center Theatre Group capitalized on the visual and dramatic potential of the stylish pachuco as a symbol of popular Chicana/o culture when they marketed the play Zoot Suit. The most famous poster for the play, designed by Ignacio Gómez, exoticizes the pachuco by advertising the boldness of zoot suit fashion and revealing its aesthetic attractiveness as a theatrical symbol. This full-color image outlines the pachuco’s black and red zoot suit with a thin white halo effect, as though the pachuco had stage lights behind him. This pachuco’s body faces the spectator, whereas his head turns in slight profile, giving the impression that he is aware of his audience but does not feel the need to address them directly. Gómez depicts actor Edward James Olmos in his dramatic representation of the pachuco. In doing so, he glamorizes not only the pachuco image but Olmos himself, contributing to his status as a theatrical icon of pachuquismo. Gómez’s image markets the pachuco as a salable symbol of a popularized myth, a Chicano hero who battled the stigma of criminality and looked good doing it.
Gómez and the show’s costume designers played up the fashion of the zoot suiters, while Valdez constructed characters whose radical use of language made the pachuco seem suave, defiant, and dangerously intelligent. The distinctive language practices of the pachuco capitalize on the fluidity of the youth culture and the hybridity of Mexican American identity. Pachuca/os in the 1930s and 1940s adopted archaic gypsy Spanish words and endowed them with new meaning. They created new words from combinations of English and Spanish and started speaking in a form of slang called caló that was deliberately unintelligible to their parents’ generation. The dramatic shift s and improvisational nature of caló mixed with varieties of English and Spanish made the pachuco way of speaking excessive, like the zoot suit. These qualities made the pachuco highly visible, creating an easily recognizable target for those who would persecute Mexican American youths.
Terror in a Drape Shape: Pachucos in the 1940s Media
Instead of headlining the failing economy and other huge social and political problems in the United States during World War II, the media targeted young Mexican Americans in distinctive dress as a major threat to the safety of the good people of Los Angeles. The pachucos were portrayed in the media as perpetrators of violence with enormous potential for further violent behavior. In the general public’s eyes, the racialized depiction of the pachuco in the news linked all ethnic Mexicans in the United States to crime, defining them as fundamentally outside of mainstream society. The zoot suiter became, in Anthony Kubiak’s terms, “an objectification of terror in the ideology of the violent image.” The media produced a false terror that helped to shift the national consciousness away from the real horrors of World War II, and ironically, as U.S. nationalism rallied against Hitler’s genocidal ideology, a new racially charged brand of terror arose in inner-city Los Angeles. The persecution of Mexican Americans in the Los Angeles media immediately follows, not coincidentally, the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942. As historian Rodolfo Acuña succinctly states, “With the Japanese gone, Mexicans became the most natural scapegoats.”
Prejudicial, race-based ideologies expressed in public discourse before the trial created the hostile climate from which the Sleepy Lagoon media frenzy erupted. This case set long-lasting precedents in public conceptions of Mexican Americans: “Until the advent of the Sleepy Lagoon case Mexican American youth had not been the focus of either widespread police or journalistic investigation.” This proved to be a landmark case not only because of the extensive press coverage but because of the ways in which that coverage focused on race as an inherently criminalizing factor. This media offensive took specific aim at the pachucos as an easily targeted, highly visible, and already stigmatized group.
Though the journalistic portrayal of pachucos played a major role in the events of 1943, Eduardo Obregón Pagán critiques earlier historians for relying too heavily on a media-induced, racist hysteria as the sole cause of the Sleepy Lagoon Trial and Zoot Suit Riots. Pagán proposes that these events arose when a number of social forces converged, including “demographic pressures, city planning, racism, segregation, and an incipient, street-level insurgency against what Tomás Almaguer called ‘the master narrative of white supremacy.'” In his effort to reclaim and transform the figure of the pachuco, Luis Valdez falls into the trap of blaming racism and sensationalism in the media for much of the criminalization of the pachuco. However, he also uses very human portrayals of working class Mexican Americans as well as the highly styled character of El Pachuco to comment on the intersecting societal pressures that Pagán describes above.
Valdez’s Reworking of the Pachuco’s Image
The character El Pachuco epitomizes the glamorous, reactionary, stylish, and stylized aspects of pachuco culture and craft s them in legendary dramatic form. On stage, El Pachuco’s calculated demeanor, exaggerated posture, and smooth way of talking indicate his subversive power. In life, pachucos came in many varieties and were not necessarily trying to make a political statement with their fashion. They were teenagers experimenting with clothes, language, music, and dance, and though the media characterized all young Mexican Americans as pachucos, only 3 to 5 percent of Mexican Americans in the 1940s actually wore a zoot suit. In a chapter entitled “Dangerous Fashion” from his book Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, Pagán argues that the pachuco’s style and jazz culture more broadly signaled a cultural shift that the middle class found threatening to the established social order. Whether the pachucos were celebrating their culture with style, engaging in what Luis Alvarez describes as their “struggle for dignity,” or intentionally resisting the status quo, the news media of the 1940s frequently interpreted their clothing as a sign of defiance and criminality, particularly in the context of the Sleepy Lagoon trial. The play Zoot Suit pays particular attention to the role of the press in defining a public characterization of pachucos as inherently dangerous and identifiable by their remarkable fashion.
The very first moment of the play draws the audience into the idealized image of the pachuco literally emerging from the curtain of newspapers that enshrouds his genesis:
A switchblade plunges through the newspaper. It slowly cuts a rip to the bottom of the drop … el pachuco emerges from the slit … Then he reaches into the slit and pulls out his coat and hat … he is transformed into the very image of the pachuco myth, from his pork-pie hat to the tip of his four-foot watch chain … he proudly, slovenly, defiantly makes his way downstage.
Valdez makes no apology for his mythologizing of the pachuco. This pachuco literally cuts through the defamatory press coverage and uses his larger-than-life status to attack the negative stereotypes about Mexican Americans. The painstaking detail with which Valdez stages this character heightens the dramatic flair of the pachuco’s look, manner, and movements. He embodies the menace of Mexican American youth as perceived by the mainstream and uses the power of that terrorizing symbol to reverse the audience’s expectations of him.
El Pachuco’s over-emphasized machismo and unwavering self-assuredness make him a forceful narrator, and this sense of his own power underlies the character’s skillful manipulation of language. Breaking the fourth wall, he speaks the first lines of the play directly to the audience:
¿Que le watcha a mis trapos, ese?
¿Sabe qué, carnal?
Estas garras me las planté porque
Vamos a dejarnos caer un play, ¿sabe?
Providing an excellent example of caló, El Pachuco defies the grammatical rules and vocabulary of standard Spanish to further define himself as a pachuco. In the first line, he asks the audience if they like his zoot suit, adopting the pachuco persona even in his choice of subject matter, and he poses the question as though he were speaking to a fellow pachuco. The caló verb watchar, also sometimes spelled guachar to reflect the pronunciation in Spanish, comes from the English to watch but is conjugated like the Spanish equivalent mirar. In this usage, El Pachuco is asking, “Did you check out my trapos, ese?” The program to El Teatro Campesino’s 2002 revival of Zoot Suit includes a brief glossary of pachuquismos (caló words), defining trapos (rags) as “clothes or outfit” and ese/esa as “equivalent to ‘bro,’ ‘man,’ ‘dude,’ ‘girl.'” El Pachuco is ostensibly asking the audience to pay attention to his zoot suit, but this linguistic moment is more about the excessiveness that Paz attributes to the zoot suiter. Only a blind audience member could have failed to notice this ese’s trapos.
El Pachuco establishes a level of familiarity with the audience members by addressing them as ese and furthers that intimacy in the next line by asking the audience, “You know what, carnal?” Carnal, a caló word used to refer to a close friend, exists in standard Spanish as well but denotes a blood relation, usually a brother. The word in El Pachuco’s usage functions as caló because it changes the meaning of the standard Spanish to co-opt the word as pachuco slang. El Pachuco’s formal verb tense contradicts the familiarity shown by calling the audience carnal. Instead of using the familiar tú form of the verb saber (to know), he employs the formal usted form sabe, addressing the audience members with a level of distance and respect not shown in the words ese and carnal. El Pachuco uses language to play with the idea of intimacy between himself and the audience, giving himself an air of mystery, unpredictability, sensuousness, and danger.
The last two lines take on a poetic quality, not quite rhyming “planté porque” with “play, ¿sabe?” The rhythm of the lines feed into the smooth, stylized image and movements of El Pachuco and reinforce the sense that he controls not just the play but the very language of the text itself. He plays up the concept of pachuco as a creative manipulator of standards for behavior and language as he tells the audience, “I dressed up in these garras (caló for clothes) because we’re going to put on a play, you know?” El Pachuco employs the standard Spanish verb plantar (to plant or to give up) in its caló usage, meaning to dress elegantly. He uses a combination of the standard Spanish verbs dejar (to leave) and caer (to fall) to mean to put on or to stage a play, giving the words a caló meaning simply because of their juxtaposition to one another. In a common manipulation of caló sentence structure, he uses the word play in English, as opposed to the Spanish obra, breaking up any sense of a monolithic voice in his speech.
Aft er setting up these complex language patterns to establish groups of insiders and outsiders (those in the audience who do and do not understand caló), El Pachuco toys with the audience’s assumptions about him. Following the delivery of four more lines in caló, he transforms himself before the audience’s eyes:
(el pachuco breaks character and addresses
the audience in perfect English.)
Ladies and gentlemen
the play you are about to see
is a construct of fact and fantasy.
I speak as an actor on the stage.
The Pachuco was existential
for he was an Actor in the streets
both profane and reverential.
It was the secret fantasy of every bato
In or out of the Chicanada
To put on a Zoot Suit and play the Myth
Más chucote que la chingada.
The shift from addressing the audience as ese to ladies and gentlemen agrees more with El Pachuco’s formal use of saber and breaks the stereotype of the Mexican American as being incapable of performing an identity other than that of the disrespectful, criminalized pachuco. In this moment, the actor playing El Pachuco speaks to the audience as the actor rather than the character. In doing so, he employs a Brechtian technique to distance the audience from the events being portrayed on stage. Such a break in the world of the play forces the audience to question their own ideas about representation, performance, and the social significance of the play itself. Through this radical manipulation of language, El Pachuco pushes the audience to abandon predominant stereotypes of Latina/os as uneducated, unsophisticated, monolingual Spanish speakers.
In the above monologue, Valdez points to the ways in which the historical pachucos consciously performed their identities. This implies that the pachucos aimed their performance at a particular audience, but the playwright does not define that audience, leaving open the possibilities that the mainstream populations in both the United States and México, older generations of Mexican Americans, or fellow pachuca/os could be the target audiences. Rosa Linda Fregoso asserts that El Pachuco’s very presence in this play as lead defendant Hank Reyna’s alter ego represents the search for a Chicano identity: “Thus, the notion of identity as a struggle between the self and the other is reproduced in the Pachuco (as thought) and Hank (as being).” El Pachuco symbolizes not just thought but radical thought, thought as resistance to the norm. The pachuco captured the imaginations of a media-consuming generation in the 1940s and has still not relinquished his hold on sectors of the U.S. population up to the present generation of Chicana/os and theater goers.
The fact that the pachuco culture was radical is not disputed. However, the significance of that radicalism is highly contested. Some argue that the literature that glorifies and mythologizes the pachuco often elides the pachuco’s historical associations with drugs, violence, and juvenile delinquency. Theater scholars Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano and Tomás Ibarra-Frausto critique Luis Valdez’s treatment of the character of El Pachuco as an idealization of this violently separatist Mexican American youth culture. Octavio Paz identifies the pachuco culture as something to be avoided and reviled rather than glorified, even going so far as to say that the pachuco “ought to be destroyed.” Paz views the pachuco as having fundamentally malevolent intentions toward the society that he strives to counteract. This idea of a deliberately antagonistic identity implicates the pachuco, and perhaps gives him too much credit, in his own construction as a terrorizing media symbol.
Some pachucos were undoubtedly involved in crime, as are a percentage of young people from any cultural group. However, the categorization of any group as criminal because of ethnicity or cultural practices leads to the oppression of that community and miscarriages of justice. Eduardo Obregón Pagán argues that the traits used to identify Mexican American youth as criminals (i.e., their language patterns, dress, and haircuts) were shared by many young people of many other ethnic backgrounds. He asserts, “for all practical purposes the public discourse on the so-called Pachuco menace reveals more about public anxieties over assertive, racialized non-white youths than it does about an actual Mexican American subculture.” Pagán’s critique suggests that perhaps the pachucos did not make themselves radical through the degree of their perceived or real criminality. The media and government authorities took notice of the pachucos’ ostentatious performance of identity and targeted them as a criminal group rather than seeking out the individuals who committed actual crimes. Pagán argues that the pachucos’ radicalism lay in their challenging white privilege by unapologetically asserting their presence in public spaces and discourse. In writing El Pachuco as an empowered and articulate character, Valdez makes a similarly radical move. He took Zoot Suit into traditionally white spaces, including the Mark Taper Forum, Broadway, and the silver screen, and asserted the presence of Chicanos in mainstream forums of U.S. culture. Ironically, the incidents that originally made pachucos the most famous were acts of terror committed against them and the larger Mexican American community rather than acts of self-definition motivated by the pachucos themselves.
The Sleepy Lagoon Trial
In segregated Los Angeles in the early 1940s, young Mexican Americans, denied access to the public pool, went swimming near the Williams Ranch on the east side of the city in a gravel pit, later named Sleepy Lagoon after a popular song of the day. On 1 August 1942, Henry Leyvas, a young man from the East 38th Street neighborhood, took his girlfriend on a date to Sleepy Lagoon, where youth from a rival neighborhood attacked them. Leyvas and other young people from 38th Street returned to Sleepy Lagoon later that night to avenge the afternoon’s ambush, but they found no one at the Lagoon. Instead, the group saw a party already in progress at the Williams Ranch and decided to crash it. Upon the arrival of the group from 38th Street, a fight ensued at the party.
The next morning the body of a young party guest named José Díaz was found on a dirt road near the house where the party was held. Díaz died at General Hospital without regaining consciousness. Examiners at the autopsy determined that Díaz was most likely drunk when he died and that his death resulted from a fracture at the base of his skull. His hands and face were bruised, and he had suffered two stab wounds in the stomach from an ice pick. Díaz’s two friends who left the party with him and who were most likely the last people to have seen him alive were never called as witnesses. No known record of their version of the story exists. Historian Mauricio Mazón points out that one of the most striking things about the Sleepy Lagoon case is “the fact that the central event did not occur” because the evidence never established that Díaz was deliberately murdered.
The press immediately sensationalized the incident, and the police picked up and questioned more than six hundred people under suspicion of the Díaz killing. Eventually they not only arrested but assaulted 24 boys from 38th Street. Two of those indicted requested separate trials, and charges against those two were later entirely dropped. The remaining 22 stood trial together in the Sleepy Lagoon case.
The defendants ranged in age from 17 to 21. Henry Leyvas, 21, upon whom Luis Valdez based the character of the lead defendant in Zoot Suit, worked on a ranch owned by his father. Robert Telles, 18, worked in a defense plant. Manuel Reyes, 17, and Jack Melendez, 21, had both joined the U.S. Navy before their arrests. Henry Ynostrosa, 18, and Manuel Delgado, 19, both supported wives and young children. The humanity of the defendants was eclipsed as the police, the courts, and the press made these young men the symbols of violent youth in the United States and of the inherent criminality of Mexican Americans.
The police worked in conjunction with the prosecution to make the defendants look as though they had been involved in a brutal fight before their arrests. Henry Leyvas was handcuffed to a chair and beaten by police. He and his codefendants were brought before the Grand Jury covered in bruises. Also, they had not been allowed to bathe or change clothes and were “completely terrified by the treatment they had just received.” Placing such a visible depiction of criminalized youth in front of the Grand Jury and the news media made the defendants symbols of violence before they were officially indicted. The public discourse on Mexican American youth specifically set up the defendants as symbols of a perceived threat to the mainstream community, a threat that needed to be eradicated or contained in order to protect the status quo.
Restaging the Terror of the Courtroom: The Trial in Zoot Suit as Compared to the Historical Case
Through Zoot Suit, Valdez breaks down the cognitive process that constructs pachucos as racialized others. He begins by exposing the media’s role in the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial and continues that critique into a commentary on the U.S. criminal justice system. Valdez effectively argues that the media tries and convicts the defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial long before the court does so. As theater historian Yolanda Broyles-González points out, in the staging of Zoot Suit, from its first production in 1978 to its most recent revival in 2002, the actor who plays the Press character doubles as the character of the Prosecution. In an even more visual representation of the media’s domination of the trial, all of the sets in the major California productions of this play have been made out of newspapers, from the curtain to the judge’s bench.
The characters of the defendants in the trial have an acute awareness of the public’s perception of them as criminals, as did the historical Sleepy Lagoon defendants. Henry Leyvas, upon whom the character of Hank Reyna is based, believed that “he had been convicted of being a Mexican long years ago and the damage was done” even before the Sleepy Lagoon trial. He does not directly indict the media, as Valdez does in Zoot Suit, but certainly felt that public opinion condemned him as a criminalized and racialized body from the start.
Hank Reyna, the character of the lead defendant in Zoot Suit, says in his first conversation with his lawyer, “The press has already tried and convicted us. Think you can change that?” The character of defense attorney George Shearer replies, “Probably not. But then, public opinion comes and goes, Henry. What matters is our system of justice. I believe it works, no matter how slowly the wheels may grind.” Shearer proves true to his word and fights resolutely on his clients’ behalf, but he cannot win the case merely by trying it in the courtroom. He must also try the case in the realm of the media. He oversimplifies in the above passage when he says, “public opinion comes and goes,” because he neglects to point out the media’s role in the production of that opinion. In reality as well as the world of the play, the media controls public opinion to such a degree that every high-profile court case is tried in the United States under powerful media influence. Shearer recognizes the media’s role in the operations of the court and the production of public opinion and “truth,” and with the help of the communist journalist character Alice Bloomfield, Shearer engages the media in a campaign to prove the innocence of Hank Reyna and his codefendants.
Shearer cannot immediately manipulate the media on his clients’ behalf but rather must try the case in court during the oppressive height of the media’s condemnation of the 38th Street boys as representative of all Mexican Americans. The judge’s belligerent attitude toward the defendants couples with the press’s image of the criminal zoot suiter to pursue a conviction rather than a trial to discover an impartial truth. In this aspect Zoot Suit comments on the apparatuses of the performativity of the law and the actual performance of law. Kubiak describes both of these mechanisms as flawed ways to pursue the elusive concept of truth: “The laws of theatre and the theatre of law determine their limits on the acting body by rehearsing, through the repetition of testimonies, the appearance of transgression which is consequently reformed in the staged appearance of correction legitimated by convention-the judicial sentence, the tragic ‘fall’ and resolution” (emphasis in original). In the staging of an actual trial and the staged performance of a trial in a play, both sides of a case bring forward witnesses, experts, and attorneys to create the appearance of guilt or innocence. The presentations of evidence on stage and in life are ultimately performances of specific sociopolitical and moral ideologies. Zoot Suit argues that even while the media portrayed Mexican American youth as a terrorizing force, the Sleepy Lagoon defendants and other youth of color were being terrorized by the public’s and the justice system’s reactions to the media representations of pachucos.
Valdez critiques the weighty imbalance the media causes in the courtroom, as he illustrates the prosecution’s construction of an appearance of guilt. Naturally, as Zoot Suit reveals the strategies used to incriminate Mexican Americans, it casts the play’s protagonists in the appearance of innocence. In the courtroom, the prosecutor and judge reinforce the zoot suiter as a symbol of terror, using the visual signifiers previously targeted by the media. At the prosecution’s request, the judge denies the defendants clean clothes to wear to court and haircuts to clean up their appearance aft er months in jail. The judge also requires each defendant to stand every time his name is mentioned in the trial so that whenever the prosecution makes an accusation, the defendant appears to admit to his guilt by standing with the accusation. The judge even denies Shearer the right to sit with his clients and consult with them throughout the course of the trial. Each of these strategies was employed in the actual Sleepy Lagoon trial and reinforced the media’s performance of the zoot suiter as a symbol of both guilt and a volatile threat to the community. Each nuance of the biased representation of the defendants worked incrementally in silencing the voices of the defendants and the defense.
The prosecution in the Sleepy Lagoon case actually made an even more insidious, race-based argument than the one seen on stage in Zoot Suit. In an unusual prosecutorial strategy, Lieutenant Edward Duran Ayers of the sheriff’s department gave testimony to the grand jury on the genetic predetermination of violence and juvenile delinquency in Mexican American youth, stemming from a racial heritage that can be traced back to ancient Oriental and Mexican Indian ancestry in all its various levels of depravity. He argued that young Mexican Americans could not avoid their utter disregard for human life and that they should be proactively punished even before they carry out the crimes they will inevitably commit. Such a feat could be achieved through the imprisonment of all gang members under the age of 18 and mandatory service in the U.S. military for those over 18. Acuña specifically cites the Ayers testimony as the factor that “justified the gross violation of human rights suffered by the defendants.” In a popular discourse and a court system that would not only admit but agree with such evidence, the racialized body took on the status of a wildly dangerous criminal.
The defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon case and Zoot Suit had no chance of winning the trial. In his closing statement, Shearer says, “All the prosecution has been able to prove is that these boys wear long hair and zoot suits. And all the rest has been circumstantial evidence, hearsay, and war hysteria. The prosecution has tried to lead you to believe they are some kind of inhuman gangsters. Yet they are Americans.” Unfortunately the terrorizing, media-generated image stands in for the defendants in the trial, and all the prosecution needs “to prove is that these boys wear long hair and zoot suits.” The defendants fit the recognized image of terror, and they stand trial for a “crime” of phenotype and fashion rather than a criminal action. The jury and the larger media audience believe in the portrayal of the 38th Street boys as “some kind of inhuman gangsters,” and the image-based argument overrides the provable facts. The jury finds the four defendants guilty, and the judge sentences them to life imprisonment. The play mirrors history fairly closely but condenses the experiences of a large number of defendants to four characters for the purposes of making them more accessible to the audience. The 24 defendants in the Sleepy Lagoon Case were arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy-to trespass and crash the party held at the Williams Ranch on the night of José Díaz’s death. The crimes of which 17 of the defendants were convicted were entirely different from the original accusation:
If the theory of conspiracy to commit a crime had been strictly pressed, logically the defendants would have received equal verdicts. However, on 12 January 1943, the court passed sentences: three defendants were guilty of first-degree murder, nine of second-degree murder, five of assault, and five were found not guilty.
Regardless of the glaring inconsistencies in the trial and sentencing, the court ignored evidence and rules of law to support the heavy conviction of public opinion that pachucos were a threat to white America.
The American Defense: Deconstructing the Terror of the Pachuco
In the play Zoot Suit, defense attorney Shearer’s plea for the jury to view the defendants as “Americans” invokes an opposing image, one of sameness, hegemony, and nationalistic ideology. The concept of American identity as attached to the defendants counters the perception of Mexican Americans as foreigners and criminals. Shearer attempts to cast the defendants not just as American citizens in the legal sense but as Americans in the sense that the jury and larger media audience see themselves as Americans, as categorically belonging to the same national culture. In Shearer’s reasoning, if the jury could see the pachucos more as Americans and less as others, then perhaps the jurors would perceive the defendants as good citizens rather than terrorists. Unfortunately for the defendants, this strategy does not hold the strength to combat the prolific media images surrounding the trial.
From a late 1970s perspective, the playwright Valdez uses the concept of American identity to validate the Chicana/os in his own time through this historical portrayal. As Chicano theater scholar Jorge Huerta writes in the introduction to Zoot Suit: “As Valdez so emphatically stated when this play first appeared, ‘this is an American play,’ attempting to dispel previous notions of separatism from the society at large. He is also reminding us that Americans populate The Americas, not just the U.S.” Additionally, Valdez emphasizes the American rhetoric in his play because of the importance of such terminology in the historical campaign for the release of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants.
Aft er the conviction, the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee formed as an offshoot of the Citizen’s Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth. The Defense Committee served to raise funds for new lawyers and to appeal the case. Members of the government and the press who opposed the committee seized on the fact that the suggestion to form the committee came from a member of the Communist Party, LaRue McCormick. Several members of the committee, including McCormick, were called before the Committee on Un-American Activities in California and questioned extensively. Actor Anthony Quinn, along with many other celebrities of the day, served on the defense committee, and at one point the studio for which he was working threatened to drop him from their latest picture because of his connection to this “Communist” organization. In another strategic deployment of terror, the media coverage of the accusations of communism against members of the committee effectively deflected support from the committee’s fundraising activities for a time.
To secure the release of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants, the Defense Committee had to convince the courts as well as the American public that these young Mexican Americans were not the symbols of violence and foreign threat that previous media images had conjured, as the U.S. mainstream struggled to deal with its anger and fear over the war: “The Sleepy Lagoon trial provided a substitute hate object for a home front where the real enemy was too distant and beginning to retreat.” The Defense Committee published pamphlets and articles arguing the positive contributions of “the Mexican” to the U.S. economy and culture, raising money and public support for their campaign in the courts through the media. In doing so, the committee won the backing of a wide variety of unions and professional guilds as well as key individuals of a broad spectrum of racial and political identifications.
The play Zoot Suit embodies the efforts of the Defense Committee in the character of Alice Bloomfield, based on the real Alice McGrath, a member of the committee with whom Luis Valdez consulted while writing the script. In a scene that recalls some of the historical Defense Committee’s rhetoric about Mexicans as being productive assets to the United States, the character Alice Bloomfield argues with lead defendant Henry Reyna about the committee’s political stake in his case:
HENRY: You think I haven’t seen through your bullshit? Always so concerned. Come on, boys. Speak out, boys. Stand up for your people. Well, you leave my people out of this! Can’t you understand that?
ALICE: No, I can’t understand that.
HENRY: You’re just using Mexicans to play politics.
ALICE: Henry, that’s the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.
HENRY: Who are you going to help next-the Colored People?
ALICE: No, as a matter of fact, I’ve already helped the Colored People. What are you going to do next-go to the gas chamber?
Henry accuses Alice of making him a media symbol yet again, as opposed to helping him and his codefendants as individual disenfranchised people. Alice responds that her strategic use of the defendants as media symbols may be the only alternative to the life sentences awarded them aft er the first wave of media coverage about the case. As a communist and a Jew, Alice has been deemed “un-American” herself, and she and the rest of the Defense Committee work hard, not only to battle for the boys’ freedom in court but also to generate public sympathy for them in the press.
The efforts of the real Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee eventually paid off. A unanimous decision in the District Court of Appeals reversed the convictions of all the Sleepy Lagoon defendants on 4 October 1944, and they regained their freedom on 24 October, aft er serving almost two years in San Quentin. During the time that they spent in prison, the anti-pachuco sentiments of the day reached their violent climax in the historic Zoot Suit Riots.
Transcending the Terror in the Streets: El Pachuco Reframes the Zoot Suit Riots
The press continued to fuel the already criminalized perception of Mexican American youth aft er the Sleepy Lagoon trial, despite attempts to diffuse the negative media stereotypes. Valdez’s character El Pachuco knows exactly what the media is doing with their strategic manipulation of terrorizing language and interrupts a news report given by the Press character to confront him directly:
PRESS: The Zoot Suiters, those gamin’ dandies …
PACHUCO: (Cutting them off.) Why don’t you tell them what I really am, ese, or how you’ve been forbidden to use the very word …
PRESS: We are complying in the interest of the war.
PACHUCO: How have you complied?
PRESS: We’re using other terms.
PACHUCO: Like “pachuco” and “zoot suiter?”
PRESS: What’s wrong with that? The Zoot Suit Crime Wave is even beginning to push the war news off the front page.
PACHUCO: The Press distorted the very meaning of the word “zoot suit.” All it is for you guys is another way to say Mexican.
El Pachuco, in an act very much like what Valdez himself is doing with the figure of the pachuco in the play, reclaims the words pachuco and zoot suiter. Actual pachucos did not have the power to interrupt the media outlets in the middle of their reports and deconstruct their racism. With the force of the Chicano movement behind him, Valdez has the power in the late 1970s to eclipse the terrorizing image of the pachuco with one who assertively resists the oppression of the Mexican American community.
The pervasive negative media reports fed the growing tensions in Los Angeles in 1943, as it became “the temporary home of one of the largest concentrations of military personnel.” These servicemen enjoyed the city but also felt vulnerable to the dangers that awaited them there: “Among the expected drawbacks of visiting the city were those of being on unfamiliar terrain, with unfamiliar customs, traditions, and peoples. Outstanding among these was the fact that major military posts were … bounded by Mexican neighborhoods.” The servicemen were surrounded by the symbols of violence in the homeland that the media had taught them to revile. On 7 June 1943, after months of minor altercations between U.S. servicemen and Mexican American youths and four days of rioting, “thousands of soldiers, sailors, and civilians surged down Main Street and Broadway [in Los Angeles] in search of pachucos.” Mexican Americans, Blacks, and Filipinos all suffered brutal and humiliating attacks in the streets and movie theaters of the city, and the police intervened to arrest over six hundred Mexican American youths, calling the action a “preventative” measure.
In an oft en-repeated hate crime during the Zoot Suit Riots, members of the U.S. Navy and Marines publicly stripped pachucos of their zoot suits, destroying the clothes and leaving the victims naked in the street. Members of the U.S. military who were waiting to be deployed against the arbiters of terror in the war overseas now engaged in the systematic destruction of the zoot suit as a symbol of terror in the homeland. Newspapers encouraged this act, and one even printed a set of instructions on how to strip the zoot suiter: “Grab a zooter. Take off his pants and frock coat and tear them up or burn them. Trim the Argentine ducktail that goes with the screwy costume.” Pachucos were simultaneously labeled “criminals” and became victims of crime specifically aimed to eradicate their “criminal” appearance. The symbol of terror (the zoot suit) literally was ripped to shreds in this performative act of violence, signifying the eradication of the ethnic other and the danger the zoot suiter causes.
Valdez redefines this act of symbolic destruction by countering it with the mythic strength of the pachuco. Henry Reyna’s little brother Rudy was not among those arrested and indicted in the Sleepy Lagoon case, but the majority of his group of friends is serving time in San Quentin when the Zoot Suit Riots hit Los Angeles. As a group of sailors try to pick up his sister and another girl, Rudy draws a knife and gets involved in a barroom brawl already in progress. Before the situation gets out of hand, El Pachuco freezes the action and takes Rudy’s knife and his place in the fight. The myth replaces the man. In a way that Rudy could not, El Pachuco’s symbolic suffering through stalking, beating, and humiliation represents the many Mexican Americans, Blacks, and Filipinos who suffered at the hands of U.S. military men during the riots. The Press yells, “kill the pachuco bastard!!” Four servicemen chase El Pachuco, yelling things, like, “You think you’re more important than the war, zooter?” and “You trying to outdo the white man in them glad rags, Mex?” Henry, trapped in his prison cell on the other side of the stage, watches in horror as El Pachuco’s pursuers finally corner him:
EL PACHUCO is overpowered and stripped as henry watches helplessly from his position. The press and servicemen exit with pieces of el pachuco’s zoot suit. el pachuco stands. The only item of clothing on his body is a small loincloth. HE turns and looks at henry, with mystic intensity. he opens his arms as an Aztec conch blows, and he slowly exits backward with powerful calm into the shadows.
El Pachuco’s power in the face of near annihilation romanticizes the experiences of the many zoot suiters who were unable to escape the brutality rained upon them during the riots. Writing in a post-Chicano Movement context, Valdez draws on the movement tradition of using indigenous symbols to express the strength of Mexican heritage. The mythic and even magical character of El Pachuco has the power to embody such symbols, but his more human counterpart Henry cannot transcend either his imprisonment nor the impact of the riots on his community.
This contrast in personas creates a balance between the pachuco myth and the “reality” of the play. Despite this balance, El Pachuco literally and metaphorically outshines Henry and all other characters in the play, standing at the foreground of the posters for the play (and later the movie) and speaking the play’s opening and closing lines. His last words to the audience are, “Henry Reyna … El Pachuco … the man … The myth … still lives.”85 Indeed Valdez makes sure that the memory of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants and the idea of the pachuco still live in the minds of his audience members and in Chicana/o culture.
The Pachuco Lives, Más Chucote Que la Chingada
Indeed both the pachuco as a terrorizing symbol and as heroic and mythologized figure survive in the collective consciousness of Chicana/os today. The intense media coverage and heightened violence surrounding the pachuco combined with his flashy image to make him a lasting representation of terror. Unfortunately the legacies of the negative media portrayals of the 1940s pachuco continue to resonate in the United States today. Images of criminalized Latina/o youth flood our entertainment and news media, and Latina/os become incarcerated at ever-increasing rates and are overrepresented in U.S. prison populations.
In the conclusion to his landmark study on the symbolic force of the pachuco, Mario Mazón theorizes that perhaps the most damaging aspect of the violence against pachuca/os in the 1940s was the enduring criminalization of Mexican American youth. He refers to this phenomenon as a “stigma that was institutionalized by the investigatory activities of youth authorities and law enforcement officials, and that was immortalized in the postwar profile of barrio youth as the quintessential picture of delinquency, marginality, and deviance.” Indeed racial profiling, the over-policing of certain Latina/o neighborhoods, and the rhetoric of fear surrounding current debates on immigration in the United States all indicate that Mazón has drawn accurate conclusions about the institutional racism that Latina/o youth face.
Mazón also suggests that the stigma of criminality has infused Chicana/o culture to such a great extent that it influences the way that Mexican and Mexican American writers address what he calls “the deficits of Mexican- American adolescence.” He looks at a number of literary reflections on the pachuco, including Valdez’s Zoot Suit, and finds that they engage in a “romance of victimization.” Mazón analyzes Zoot Suit as though it were a piece of literature rather than a performance. Putting the play alongside Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude and Thomas Sánchez’s novel Zoot-Suit Murders, he reads all of these pieces as written texts that valorize the pachuca/os for their suffering and help the Mexican American community to make sense of the tragedies of 1943 and their continuing legacies. Valdez certainly engages in the romanticization of the victim that Mazón describes, as can be seen when El Pachuco rises up from the aftermath of the riots wearing an indigenous loincloth. However, because Zoot Suit experienced a degree of unprecedented commercial success for a Chicana/o play, it should be analyzed in terms of its performative power in the industry as well as a dramatic text.
Valdez’s portrayal of the pachuco opened the doors for many more positive portrayals of Chicana/os on stage and screen.93 Zoot Suit served as the ground-breaking play in terms of the professionalization and mainstream success of Chicana/o theater. It also immortalized Valdez’s stylized and glamorized version of the pachuco as arguably the most memorable and highly publicized figure in Chicana/o theater history. The play launched many successful acting careers, positioning Chicana/o actors such as Rose Portillo, Evelina Fernandez, Tony Plana, Lupe Ontiveros, and Edward James Olmos to find further jobs in stage, TV, and film work.
The success of the play, those who performed in it, and Valdez himself are radical breakthroughs in U.S. professional theater, which remains a realm heavily dominated by whites. In this sense, Zoot Suit behaves in much the way the pachuca/os did, ostentatiously asserting the beauty and power of the performance of Chicana/o culture in arenas where people of color have often been excluded. Valdez’s portrayal of pachuco culture cannot fully counteract the stigma of criminality surrounding Latina/o youth, but Zoot Suit’s successes in the professional theater and the film industry opened many doors for the transmission of U.S. Latina/o cultures on stage and screen. Whenever productions of Zoot Suit are mounted or the film is watched, the mythic figure of the pachuco reemerges as a Mexican American cultural icon.