The pachuca panic: Sexual and cultural battlegrounds in world war II Los Angeles

Western Historical Quarterly

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 133-156

  Escobedo, Elizabeth R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO   (United States)

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EID: 57349173286     PISSN: 00433810     EISSN: 19398603     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/whq/38.2.133     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. In this study, first-generation immigrants born in Mexico are called "Mexican" or "Mexican immigrant." I use the term "Mexican American" to denote the second-generation children of immigrants, born in the United States. Wartime juvenile authorities and reformers, however, often did not make a distinction in their terminology and frequently referred to young women born in the United States of Mexican descent as "Mexicans." In these cases, I have chosen to maintain the terminology of the time. The term "white" and "Anglo" will designate Americans of European descent.
2. "Brass Knuckles Found on Woman 'Zoot Suiter,'" Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1943, sec. A.
3. People v. Amelia Venegas, Los Angeles County Superior Court, case number 93615, 1943, Los Angeles Superior Court Archives and Records Center.
4. Venegas is deemed a "pachuco" in Kendrick W. Watson, "Zoot Suit, Mexican Style," The (New York) Intercollegian (September 1943), 10. Interestingly, in spite of how Venegas is labeled, neither the court nor the press made mention of the young woman ever wearing a Zoot Suit.
5. For an excellent study of the pachuca's fashion style and representation, see Catherine S. Ramírez, "Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics," Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2, no. 2 (2002): 1-35.
6. Further descriptions of pachucas include: Emory Bogardus, "Gangs of Mexican-American Youth," Sociology and Social Research 28 (September-October 1943): 56;
7. Patricia Rae Adler, "The 1943 Zoot Suit Riots: Brief Episode in a Long Conflict," in An Awakened Minority: The Mexican-Americans, ed. Manuel P. Servín (Beverly Hills, 1970), 152;
8. Beatrice Griffith, American Me (Boston, 1948), 47;
9. Carey McWilliams, North From Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (1949; reprint, New York, 1990), 219. Interviews with Mexican American women who lived in Los Angeles during World War II, conducted by the author, provide similar accounts of zooter styles and attitudes.
10. For discussion of the rise of the second-generation Mexican community, and their continued status as second-class citizens during World War II, see George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993)
11. and McWilliams, North From Mexico.
12. The emergence of zoot suiters and pachucos in wartime Los Angeles is discussed in detail in Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of A Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945 (Berkeley, 1999);
13. Eduardo Obregón Pagan, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill, 2003);
14. Anthony F. Macias, "From Pachuco Boogie to Latin Jazz: Mexican Americans, Popular Music, and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1940-1965" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001);
15. Luis Alberto Alvarez, "The Power of the Zoot: Race, Community, and Resistance in American Youth Culture, 1940-1945" (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2001). Pagan and Alvarez document the zoot subculture amongst working-class African Americans, Asian Americans, and Anglo Americans as well.
16. Historian Ed Escobar challenges the perception of a "Mexican gang crime wave," arguing that although Mexican American arrest statistics swelled during the war years, only small fractions of these arrests resulted in actual criminal prosecutions. Such findings suggest implementation of police control mechanisms rather than tremendous increases in criminal behavior amongst Mexican Americans. See Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity.
17. Two years later, due to a lack of evidence, the male defendants won acquittal upon appeal. See Frank P. Barajas, "The Defense Committees of Sleepy Lagoon: A Convergent Struggle against Fascism, 1942-1944," Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31 (Spring 2006): 33-62;
18. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity;
19. Pagan, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon;
20. and the PBS American Experience documentary Zoot Suit Riots (Boston, 2001) for the history of the Sleepy Lagoon trial and its outcome.
21. On the young women involved in the case, see Elizabeth Rachel Escobedo, "Mexican American Home Front: The Politics of Gender, Culture, and Community in World War II Los Angeles," (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2004), 65-8.
22. "Youthful Gang Evil, Vigorous Action Imperative in View of Seriousness of Situation," Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, 4 August 1942, sec. B, p. 2.
23. My assessment of the type of inmate typically sentenced to the Ventura School comes from my readings of court case files brought before the Los Angeles County Superior Court, Juvenile Division, between the years 1939-45. When the women of Sleepy Lagoon entered the school in late 1942, the institution's custodial and disciplinary procedures rivaled those of state prisons. A 1943 committee appointed by Governor Earl Warren to investigate California's penal institutions, for instance, described the punishments implemented in the Ventura School disciplinary cottage as a "disgrace to the state." See "Final Report of Governor's Investigation Committee on Penal Affairs," 21 January 1944, pp. 110-1, Administrative Files, Corrections, Governor's Prison Committee, Reports, F3640:975, Earl Warren Papers, California State Archives, Sacramento (hereafter cited as Earl Warren Papers).
24. For more information on the fate of the young women involved in the Sleepy Lagoon case, and the conditions they faced at the Ventura School, see Escobedo, "Mexican American Home Front," 65-70.
25. The cases cited in this article are examples of files where the labels "pachuco" and/or "pachuca" are included in the probation officer's description of the juvenile. Although the records used in this study are officially closed to the public, I petitioned the Juvenile Division of the Los Angeles County Superior Court for special permission to look at the files. Case files consist primarily of Los Angeles County Probation Department Intake Face Sheets and Los Angeles Police Department Juvenile Investigation and Disposition Reports; Probation Officer Reports and Recommendations based on interviews conducted with the juvenile family members, school, and reformatory officials, and other related parties; and medical reports filed upon examination of the juvenile while in detention. To protect privacy and maintain confidentiality, I changed all names of the youths, friends, and family members mentioned in the juvenile case files. I have, however, tried to retain the ethnic characteristics of surnames.
26. Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles Juvenile Court, case number 104932, Los Angeles Superior Court Archives and Records Center (hereafter cited as "case number").
27. Case number 103922.
28. Case numbers 107165, 116621.
29. Case number 106170.
30. Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1998), 51-2
31. and Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 44-5, 49.
32. Stuart Cosgrove, "The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare," History Workshop Journal 18 (Autumn 1984): 77-91.
33. Aida Loya [pseud.], interview by author, 6 January 1998, in author's possession.
34. Case number 105230.
35. "Origenes de 'Pachucos' y 'Malinches,'" La (Los Angeles) Opinion, 26 August 1942, p. 2. The attitudes of La Opinión toward the pachuca/o population were not particularly surprising, given the political bent of the Spanish-language daily. Recognizing the vulnerability of the Mexican population in the United States, the newspaper urged the Mexican population to conduct themselves honorably while living in Los Angeles.
36. See Mario T. García, "La Frontera: The Border as Symbol and Reality in Mexican-American Thought," in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David G. Gutiérrez (Wilmington, DE, 1996), 95-6.
37. Discussions of La Malinche can be found in Feminism, Nation and Myth: La Malinche, ed. Rolando Romero and Amanda Nolacea Harris (Houston, 2005).
38. For further analysis of La Opinion's use of the term " malinches" to describe the pachuca, see Ramírez, "Crimes of Fashion," 12.
39. "Girl 'Zoot Suiters' Gird to Join Gangland Battle, Pachucas Stand By Beaten Pachucos," Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, 10 June 1943, sec. A, p. 3.
40. Griffith, American Me, 322n6
41. Case numbers 131627, 103259, 104932, 105230.
42. Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 123. Several newspapers and magazines spoke of female gangs with names such as the "Black Widows," the "Cherries," and the "Bow-legs."
43. See, for example, "Girl 'Zoot Suiters' Gird to Join Gangland Battle, Pachucas Stand By Beaten Pachucos";
44. "Youthful Gang Secrets Exposed," Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1944, sec. A, p. 1;
45. "Origenes De 'Pachucos' y 'Malinches,'" La Opinión, 26 August 1942, p. 2. Lupe Leyvas recalled the "Bow-legs" in a conversation with the author. Lupe Leyvas, interview by author, 2 March 1998, in author's possession.
46. See also, Joan W. Moore, Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change (Philadelphia, 1991), 27-9.
47. Mary Odem discusses similar issues regarding sexual delinquency charges and the social circumstances affecting turn-of-the-century working-class daughters in Delinquent Daughters.
48. Case number 112504.
49. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows, 83.
50. Similarly, during a meeting of the Coordinating Council for Latin-American Youth - a community group founded in 1941 to address the situation of Mexican American youths in urban barrios - it was stated that only 9/10 of 1 percent of Mexican girls were considered juvenile delinquents. See "CCLAY Minutes," 7 June 1943, Minutes, 1943, folder 8, box 3, Manuel Ruiz Papers 295, Special Collections, Green Library, Stanford University.
51. For a general discussion of fears surrounding women's changing roles during World War II, see Elaine Tyler May, "Rosie the Riveter Gets Married," in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago, 1996), 128-43.
52. Luis Alvarez makes a similar observation, arguing that those Mexican American women who appropriated male zoot suit apparel might be viewed as problematic simply because their clothing made "an implicit statement for equality." See Alvarez, "The Power of the Zoot," 147.
53. Other scholars who have investigated American women and labor during World War II include Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, CT, 1981);
54. D'Ann Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic Era (Cambridge, MA, 1984);
55. William H. Chafe, The American Woman; Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (New York, 1972);
56. Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisted: Women, the War, and Social Change (Boston, 1987);
57. Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston, 1982);
58. Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II (Amherst, 1984).
59. For information about "victory girls" during World War II, see Anderson, Wartime Women, 103-11;
60. Campbell, Women at War with America, 208;
61. Richard Lingeman, Don't You Know There's a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York, 1970), 88-9;
62. Regina G. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890-1945 (New Haven, 1993), 156.
63. Ramírez also compares V-girls and pachucas, arguing that while the former were considered "patriotic," the latter were "vilified as un-American and treacherous." See Ramírez, "Crimes of Fashion," 17.
64. For a discussion of twentieth century miscegenation law, and understandings of Mexicans as legally "white," see David A. Hollinger, "Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States," American Historical Review 108, (December 2003): 1363-90;
65. Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 44-69.
66. "Zoot Suits and Service Stripes: Race Tension Behind the Riots," Newsweek, 21 June 1943, 35-6.
67. Case number 115630.
68. Case number 111288.
69. Vicki L. Ruiz, "'Star Struck': Acculturation, Adolescence, and the Mexican American Woman, 1920-1950," in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David G. Gutiérrez (Wilmington, DE, 1996): 125-47.
70. Ruth D. Tuck, Not With the Fist: Mexican-Americans in a Southwest City (New York, 1946), 127.
71. Case number 122004.
72. For an in-depth discussion of working-class, immigrant parents' use of the juvenile justice system to reform behavior of troublesome daughters during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, see Odem, Delinquent Daughters.
73. Memo from Adele Calhoun to Frank J. DeAndreis, "Pachuco Situation in Los Angeles," 16 June 1943, p. 1-2, Administrative, Department of Justice, Attorney General, Law Enforcement, F3640:2625, Earl Warren Papers.
74. For information on accusations of Sinarquista activities in the Mexican American community, see Barajas, "The Defense Committees of Sleepy Lagoon"
75. For an example of similar news coverage regarding the enemy Japanese and enemy Mexican gangs, see the front page of the Los Angeles Times, 10 August 1942, where the headlines "Allied Bombers Hit Japs in Rear" and "Police Seize 300 in Boys' Gang Drive" sit parallel to one another.
76. Case number 101591.
77. Case number 131627.
78. Case number 107502.
79. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944), 1021.
80. My thinking is informed here by scholar Nikhil Singh's discussion of Myrdal's An American Dilemma
81. and contemporary understandings of race and nation in World War II, in Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 38-42, 107-14.
82. Singh, Black Is a Country, 254n30.
83. See also, Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York, 1986).
84. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York, 1994), 14-8;
85. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 95-6;
86. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), 187-96.
87. Gerstle calls this belief in the erosion of ethnic differences "the growth of a common Americanness." See Gerstle, American Crucible, 196.
88. Kathy Peiss, Hope in ajar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York, 1998), 239-45.
89. Mexican American women who came of age in wartime Los Angeles describe the "rat" as a beauty accessory, consisting of a patch of synthetic or human hair, placed on the head to add lift and fullness to the pompadour hairstyle. As described in Virginia Gonzales Benavidez, interview by author, 6 November 2000, in author's possession; Teresa Rivera Cardenas, interview by author, 19 October 2000, in author's possession; Irene Malagon, interview by author, 14 March 2000, in author's possession.
90. Case number 104932.
91. Case numbers 103922, 114005.
92. For further discussion of attempts by Mexican American youths to resist authority in California reform schools, see Miroslava Chávez- García, "Youth, Evidence, and Agency: Mexican and Mexican American Youth at the Whittier State School, 1890-1920," Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 31 (Fall 2006): 55-83.
93. "Reporter's Transcript of Proceedings of Governor Earl Warren's Special Committee Investigating California Penal Institutions, Ventura School for Girls, Vol. IX," 3 January 1944, F3640:956-1007, 1666-8, Earl Warren Papers.
94. case number 101591
95. Case number 102135.
96. George J. Sánchez discusses earlier reformers' Americanization efforts in "'Go After the Women': Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915-1929" in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York, 1990), 256.
97. See case numbers 98670, 101978, 107165, 112504, 101591.
98. Case number 98670.
99. See, for example, case number 131627.
100. Case number 118703.
101. See Kunzel, Fallen Women, 163-4.
102. See also, Sanchez, "Go After the Women," 256
103. Memo from Adele Calhoun to Frank J. DeAndreis.
104. Case number 109532. Richard Griswold del Castillo states that amongst the lower class of Mexican Americans, there was often a tradition of acceptance of common-law, free-union liaisons. See Griswold del Castillo, La Familia: Chicano Families in the Urban Southwest, 1848 to Present (Indiana, 1984), 88 and 131.
105. Here too, Mexican American mothers were not alone in their condemnation. Ruth Feldstein discusses the perceived "maternal failure" of 1940s black and white women in her work Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (Ithaca, NY, 2000).
106. "Origenes de 'Pachucos' y 'Malinches,'" La Opinion, 26 August 1942, p. 2.
107. Eduardo Pagán makes a similar argument about pachucos and the middle class in his unpublished 1993 Organization of American Historians paper entitled, "'Who Are These Troublemakers?' The Mexican-American Middle Class Reacts to Pachucos, 1940-1944."
108. Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin, 1984);
109. PBS, Zoot Suit Riots (Boston, 2001).
110. "Girl 'Zoot Suiters' Gird to Join Gangland Battle, Pachucas Stand By Beaten Pachucos."
111. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 268
112. Moore, Going Down to the Barrio, 71-2.