How the Zoot Suit Became a Symbol of Resistance for Mexican-American People
OG History is a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens.
The nameless protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man vividly details the first time they encountered a zoot suit: “It was as though I'd never seen their like before: walking slowly, their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips in trousers that ballooned upward from cuffs fitting snug about their ankles; their coats long and hip-tight with shoulders far too broad to be those of natural western men.” Almost 10 years before the book’s publication, Ellison wrote a piece for a small magazine in which he reimagined the ostentatious suit as an attempt by black working-class youth to consciously reject white middle-class ideas of respectability. The suit has a long and storied history, one that includes political subversion and violent repression. The zoot suit — a style of suit defined by exaggerated shoulder pads, high-waisted ballooned trousers cuffed at the ankle, and long, gleaming watch chains — can be directly traced back to black dance halls in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in the mid-1930s, where its creators found the oversize fit and cuffed ankles ideal for moving freely on the dance floor. A decade later, black and non-black working-class people around the country could be seen donning an ensemble perceived by the white middle-class as gaudy, even offensive. It was flamboyant in every possible way, a conscious call to attention and much more than a fashion statement.
In the Mexican-American community, especially in Los Angeles, it became a hyper visible reminder to society and the Los Angeles Police Department that despite efforts to pacify Mexican pride, young people especially remained committed to loudly claiming their identity and occupying space on their own terms. During World War II, the zoot suit became illicit among white society, and the reason was two-fold: on the one hand, there was a fabric shortage and zoot suits were seen as unpatriotic by the sheer nature of how much fabric they required, and on the other hand, they were a sartorial form of disobedience. The suit was an open rejection of the moral codes propagated by sanctimonious white middle-class Americans, who saw it as a sign of juvenile delinquency and proof that unsupervised Mexican-American kids, many of whose parents were likely either serving in the war or had new factory jobs, were spiraling out of control. But to Mexican-American youth, the suit was the staple of a rebellious subculture that was defined by jazz music, swing dancing, marijuana smoking, and jive slang. The expensive suit, which Malcolm X recalls buying on credit in his autobiography, was proof of status. Its popularity was not spurred by the desire to make a political statement, but the social context in which it became popular made it inherently political.
In 1943, the zoot suit became the focal point of a frontal attack on the Mexican-American community of Los Angeles. Tensions had been mounting for years between the LAPD and Latinx community and reached a boiling point that summer when white American sailors, soldiers, and Marines stationed throughout Southern California stormed Mexican-American and black communities in Los Angeles, attacking and stripping anyone who wore a zoot suit — even those not wearing one. Victor Silva, who was 12 years old at the time, remembers sitting in a Spanish-language theater when uniformed men jumped out of a truck and began dragging Latinx movie-goers outside, beating then stripping them down to their underwear. He recalls that the LAPD did nothing to stop them. If anything, he says, they drove in front of the trucks so as to escort them. “It hit me right in the head at that moment,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 2018 interview. “They could do whatever they wanted.” For 10 days, Los Angeles was immersed in what would eventually go down in history as the Zoot Suit Riots.
The original motivation for the attacks is often contested by historians, but its connection, direct or otherwise, to the Sleepy Lagoon Trial and the political climate that it produced is clear. The previous year, the death of José Gallardo Díaz became the focal point of a highly politicized trial in Los Angeles. His body was found near a swimming hole that was known by locals as the Sleepy Lagoon, a place that was frequented by Mexican-American youth. Despite the fact that medical evidence pointing to Díaz having been hit by a car while inebriated, the LAPD was quick to attribute the death to gang-related violence. Twenty-two Mexican-American men were subsequently arrested and indicted on murder charges. Before the trial began, the sheriff’’s department’s so-called expert told a grand jury committee, “the Mexican element has an inbred desire to use a knife or some lethal weapon. In other words, his desire is to kill, or at least, let blood.” The men were eventually released in 1944, when the state Court of Appeals unanimously decided that there was not enough evidence to sustain the guilty verdict and reversed the convictions, but not before the force of Mexican-American civil rights organization The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee rained down on the city. Still, LAPD and local media remained committed to making sure that the Mexican-American community did not go unscathed. The city made clear of its stance on the zoot suit, which, to it, represented both the gall of Mexican youth and the threat of criminality.
And so the attacks by off-the-clock military servicemen on these communities in 1943 presented the opportunity for blatant violence on zoot suiters. While the police may have only tacitly sanctioned the attacks, the Los Angeles media shamelessly endorsed them. As the riots began to die down, the Los Angeles Times ran a story that summer that read: "Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights."
Eventually, the zoot suit craze died down, but not without claiming a place in history as a symbol of resistance during a period of spiraling racial tensions.
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