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. Twenty-two Mexican-American men were subsequently arrested and indicted on murder charges. 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. 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. The previous year, the death of José Gallardo Díaz became the focal point of a highly politicized trial in Los Angeles. 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. “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. “It hit me right in the head at that moment,” he told the Los Angeles Times in a 2018 interview. If anything, he says, they drove in front of the trucks so as to escort them. He recalls that the LAPD did nothing to stop them. 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. 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. In 1943, the zoot suit became the focal point of a frontal attack on the Mexican-American community of Los Angeles. 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. The expensive suit, which Malcolm X recalls buying on credit in his autobiography, was proof of status. 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 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. 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. 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. It was flamboyant in every possible way, a conscious call to attention and much more than a fashion statement.
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. 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. The suit has a long and storied history, one that includes political subversion and violent repression. 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.
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OG History is a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens.