The Woman in the Zoot Suit

The Woman in the Zoot Suit
Author: Catherine S. Ramírez
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2009-01-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822388642

The Mexican American woman zoot suiter, or pachuca, often wore a V-neck sweater or a long, broad-shouldered coat, a knee-length pleated skirt, fishnet stockings or bobby socks, platform heels or saddle shoes, dark lipstick, and a bouffant. Or she donned the same style of zoot suit that her male counterparts wore. With their striking attire, pachucos and pachucas represented a new generation of Mexican American youth, which arrived on the public scene in the 1940s. Yet while pachucos have often been the subject of literature, visual art, and scholarship, The Woman in the Zoot Suit is the first book focused on pachucas. Two events in wartime Los Angeles thrust young Mexican American zoot suiters into the media spotlight. In the Sleepy Lagoon incident, a man was murdered during a mass brawl in August 1942. Twenty-two young men, all but one of Mexican descent, were tried and convicted of the crime. In the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, white servicemen attacked young zoot suiters, particularly Mexican Americans, throughout Los Angeles. The Chicano movement of the 1960s–1980s cast these events as key moments in the political awakening of Mexican Americans and pachucos as exemplars of Chicano identity, resistance, and style. While pachucas and other Mexican American women figured in the two incidents, they were barely acknowledged in later Chicano movement narratives. Catherine S. Ramírez draws on interviews she conducted with Mexican American women who came of age in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as she recovers the neglected stories of pachucas. Investigating their relative absence in scholarly and artistic works, she argues that both wartime U.S. culture and the Chicano movement rejected pachucas because they threatened traditional gender roles. Ramírez reveals how pachucas challenged dominant notions of Mexican American and Chicano identity, how feminists have reinterpreted la pachuca, and how attention to an overlooked figure can disclose much about history making, nationalism, and resistant identities.

From Coveralls to Zoot Suits

From Coveralls to Zoot Suits
Author: Elizabeth R. Escobedo
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-03-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469602067

During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.S. defense industries at the same time that massive population shifts and the war challenged Americans to rethink notions of race. At this extraordinary historical moment, Mexican American women found new means to exercise control over their lives in the home, workplace, and nation. In From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, Elizabeth R. Escobedo explores how, as war workers and volunteers, dance hostesses and zoot suiters, respectable young ladies and rebellious daughters, these young women used wartime conditions to serve the United States in its time of need and to pursue their own desires. But even after the war, as Escobedo shows, Mexican American women had to continue challenging workplace inequities and confronting family and communal resistance to their broadening public presence. Highlighting seldom heard voices of the "Greatest Generation," Escobedo examines these contradictions within Mexican families and their communities, exploring the impact of youth culture, outside employment, and family relations on the lives of women whose home-front experiences and everyday life choices would fundamentally alter the history of a generation.

Zoot Suit & Other Plays

Zoot Suit & Other Plays
Author: Luis Valdez
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1992-04-30
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781611923414

This critically acclaimed play by Luis Valdez cracks open the depiction of Chicanos on stage, challenging viewers to revisit a troubled moment in our nationÕs history. From the moment the myth-infused character El Pachuco burst onto the stage, cutting his way through the drop curtain with a switchblade, Luis Valdez spurred a revolution in Chicano theater. Focusing on the events surrounding the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial of 1942 and the ensuing Zoot Suit Riots that turned Los Angeles into a bloody war zone, this is a gritty and vivid depiction of the horrifying violence and racism suffered by young Mexican Americans on the home front during World War II. ValdezÕs cadre of young urban characters struggle with the stereotypes and generalizations of AmericaÕs dominant culture, the questions of assimilation and patriotism, and a desire to rebel against the mainstream pressures that threaten to wipe them out. Experimenting with brash forms of narration, pop culture of the war era, and complex characterizations, this quintessential exploration of the Mexican-American experience in the United States during the 1940Õs was the first, and only, Chicano play to open on Broadway. This collection contains three of playwright and screenwriter Luis ValdezÕs most important and recognized plays: Zoot Suit, Bandido! and I DonÕt Have to Show You No Stinking Badges. The anthology also includes an introduction by noted theater critic Dr. Jorge Huerta of the University of California-San Diego. Luis Valdez, the most recognized and celebrated Hispanic playwright of our times, is the director of the famous farm-worker theater, El Teatro Campesino.

Lizard in a Zoot Suit

Lizard in a Zoot Suit
Author: Marco Finnegan
Publisher: Graphic Universe
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1541591135

Los Angeles, 1943. It's the era of the Zoot Suit Riots, and Flaca and Cuata have a problem. It's bigger than being grounded by their strict mother. It's bigger than tensions with the soldiers stationed nearby. And it's shaped like a five-foot-tall lizard. When a lost member of an unknown underground species needs help, the sisters must scramble to keep their new friend away from a corrupt military scientist—but they'll do it in style. Cartoonist Marco Finnegan presents Lizard in a Zoot Suit, an outrageous, historical, sci-fi graphic novel.

The Little Black Dress and Zoot Suits

The Little Black Dress and Zoot Suits
Author: Alison Behnke
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0761358927

Looks at the different modes of dress in America in the mid twentieth century, from every day clothes to high fashion.

The Zoot-Suit Riots

The Zoot-Suit Riots
Author: Mauricio Mazón
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2010-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292788215

“The most incisive analytic study yet produced by a Chicano scholar . . . Mazón looks at the bloody incidents that erupted in Los Angeles during June, 1943.” —California History Los Angeles, the summer of 1943. For ten days in June, Anglo servicemen and civilians clashed in the streets of the city with young Mexican Americans whose fingertip coats and pegged, draped trousers announced their rebellion. At their height, the riots involved several thousand men and women, fighting with fists, rocks, sticks, and sometimes knives. In the end none were killed, few were seriously injured, and property damage was slight and yet, even today, the zoot-suit riots are remembered and hold emotional and symbolic significance for Mexican Americans and Anglos alike. The causes of the rioting were complex, as Mazón demonstrates in this illuminating analysis of their psychodynamics. Based in part on previously undisclosed FBI and military records, this engrossing study goes beyond sensational headlines and biased memories to provide an understanding of the zoot-suit riots in the context of both Mexican American and Anglo social history. “The latest scholarly work to probe the significance of the brawls that erupted in Los Angeles between uniformed servicemen and young Mexican-Americans in June, 1943 . . . Mazon’s contribution is a psychohistory of the riots in which he concludes that they were not as dangerous, or even riotous, as often portrayed.” —Los Angeles Times “In the nascent field of Chicano history psychohistorical studies are not abundant. Thus Mazón makes an immense contribution to the study of the Mexican American.” —American Historical Review

The Power of the Zoot

The Power of the Zoot
Author: Luis Alvarez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2008-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520934210

Flamboyant zoot suit culture, with its ties to fashion, jazz and swing music, jitterbug and Lindy Hop dancing, unique patterns of speech, and even risqué experimentation with gender and sexuality, captivated the country's youth in the 1940s. The Power of the Zoot is the first book to give national consideration to this famous phenomenon. Providing a new history of youth culture based on rare, in-depth interviews with former zoot-suiters, Luis Alvarez explores race, region, and the politics of culture in urban America during World War II. He argues that Mexican American and African American youths, along with many nisei and white youths, used popular culture to oppose accepted modes of youthful behavior, the dominance of white middle-class norms, and expectations from within their own communities.

Zoot Suit

Zoot Suit
Author: Kathy Peiss
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2011-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 081220459X

ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit. —Cab Calloway, The Hepster's Dictionary, 1944 Before the fashion statements of hippies, punks, or hip-hop, there was the zoot suit, a striking urban look of the World War II era that captivated the imagination. Created by poor African American men and obscure tailors, the "drape shape" was embraced by Mexican American pachucos, working-class youth, entertainers, and swing dancers, yet condemned by the U.S. government as wasteful and unpatriotic in a time of war. The fashion became notorious when it appeared to trigger violence and disorder in Los Angeles in 1943—events forever known as the "zoot suit riot." In its wake, social scientists, psychiatrists, journalists, and politicians all tried to explain the riddle of the zoot suit, transforming it into a multifaceted symbol: to some, a sign of social deviance and psychological disturbance, to others, a gesture of resistance against racial prejudice and discrimination. As controversy swirled at home, young men in other places—French zazous, South African tsotsi, Trinidadian saga boys, and Russian stiliagi—made the American zoot suit their own. In Zoot Suit, historian Kathy Peiss explores this extreme fashion and its mysterious career during World War II and after, as it spread from Harlem across the United States and around the world. She traces the unfolding history of this style and its importance to the youth who adopted it as their uniform, and at the same time considers the way public figures, experts, political activists, and historians have interpreted it. This outré style was a turning point in the way we understand the meaning of clothing as an expression of social conditions and power relations. Zoot Suit offers a new perspective on youth culture and the politics of style, tracing the seam between fashion and social action.

Zoot-Suit Murders

Zoot-Suit Murders
Author: Thomas Sanchez
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1978
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

It's the tumultuous days of World War II and from the mean streets of the Los Angeles barrio to the mansions of the Hollywood Hills the atmosphere is choked with tension. Nathan Younger, an undercover agent, is investigating the brutal murder of two FBI men and the infiltration of zoot-suit gangs by fascists when he crosses paths with Kathleen La Rue, a beautiful apostle of a bizarre religious cult. The search for the killers leads these two improbable lovers along a dangerous trail of heroin pushers, movie stars, and fanatical politicians. Like his lavishly praised novels Rabbit Boss and Mile Zero, Thomas Sanchez's Zoot-Suit Murders combines a tautly arched narrative with fiercely visual prose and a starkly revisionist view of the American melting pot.

Stylin'

Stylin'
Author: Shane White
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2018-10-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501718088

For over two centuries, in the North as well as the South, both within their own community and in the public arena, African Americans have presented their bodies in culturally distinctive ways. Shane White and Graham White consider the deeper significance of the ways in which African Americans have dressed, walked, danced, arranged their hair, and communicated in silent gestures. They ask what elaborate hair styles, bright colors, bandanas, long watch chains, and zoot suits, for example, have really meant, and discuss style itself as an expression of deep-seated cultural imperatives. Their wide-ranging exploration of black style from its African origins to the 1940s reveals a culture that differed from that of the dominant racial group in ways that were often subtle and elusive. A wealth of black-and-white illustrations show the range of African American experience in America, emanating from all parts of the country, from cities and farms, from slave plantations, and Chicago beauty contests. White and White argue that the politics of black style is, in fact, the politics of metaphor, always ambiguous because it is always indirect. To tease out these ambiguities, they examine extensive sources, including advertisements for runaway slaves, interviews recorded with surviving ex-slaves in the 1930s, autobiographies, travelers' accounts, photographs, paintings, prints, newspapers, and images drawn from popular culture, such as the stereotypes of Jim Crow and Zip Coon.