NARRATOR: The Zoot Suit Riots.
In June of 1943, the city of Los Angeles
experienced one of the most significant episodes
of racial violence in the 20th century,
known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Racial tensions had been rising in the city,
and were made only worse by the biased reporting
of the Los Angeles media.
When a group of American sailors attacked
a group of mostly Mexican-Americans in East LA,
the city exploded.
In hindsight, this seemed inevitable.
With many young men overseas as a result of World War II,
labor in the United States was in short supply.
So in 1942, the US government reached a deal
with Mexico named the Bracero Program, which
allowed some Mexican citizens to move to the US
as temporary workers.
Los Angeles already had a large Mexican-American population,
but this new influx of workers provoked
greater racial animosity.
Much of the white population, whose views
were echoed in the mass media, blamed
Mexican-American teenagers and young adults for various issues
in the city, especially crime.
Even the way Mexican-Americans dressed angered the city's
more conservative population.
Many young Mexican-Americans started donning the "Zoot
Suit," a style that incorporated an oversized coat,
pork pie hat, long chain, thick-soled shoes,
and baggy pants.
This fashion evolved out of Harlem nightclubs,
and was popularized by cultural icons
like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway.
The suits themselves weren't inherently offensive,
but in the context of World War II, they were.
You see, during the war, wool had
been rationed in order to make uniforms for the troops.
The very manufacturing of zoot suits,
with their excessive use of fabric, was banned.
But a black market developed, and so
those zoot suit-wearing Mexican Americans, known as "pachucos,"
were seen as unpatriotic.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
On the night of August 1, 1942, pachucos
were involved in a brawl in a home near Los
Angeles' Sleepy Lagoon.
The next morning, the body of Jose Diaz
was discovered nearby.
The media and police quickly blamed the zoot suit-wearing
38th Street Gang.
Hundreds of pachucos were rounded
up, regardless of affiliation.
22 were eventually found guilty for the Sleepy Lagoon Murder,
in what was later considered a great miscarriage of justice.
To some, the verdict was grossly unfair.
To others, it confirmed what they
already believed, that the zoot suit wearers
were inherently violent.
This all helped to create a powder cake bound to explode.
A few months later, a group of 16 American sailors stationed
in Los Angeles claimed they were verbally taunted by a group
of pachuco zoot suiters.
Seeking retaliation, the servicemen
took cabs over to the Mexican neighborhoods in East LA,
and started attacking those wearing zoot suits
with makeshift weapons.
The pachucos were thrown into the street,
their zoot suits torn off and burned on the spot.
The ensuing riot continued to snowball
over the following days.
Violence spread to include both pachucos and young
African-American men.
But instead of arresting the attackers,
police arrested the victims, supposedly
for their own protection.
By June 8, the rioting had become
so severe that all military personnel
were banned from Los Angeles.
And military police were brought in to subdue the attackers.
Miraculously, no one was killed.
But the impact of the Zoot Suit Riots
would reach far beyond the number of casualties.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Once the dust had settled, Governor Earl Warren
commissioned a report that was meant to paint Californians
in a more positive light.
Instead, the Independent Citizen's Commission
found the chief cause of the riots
was racism, blaming the city's newspapers for encouraging
the riots, and the city government and US military
for allowing those riots to continue.
Historians view the Zoot Suit Riots
as a culmination of Anti-Mexican racism
that had been building for years in Los
Angeles, exacerbated by the stresses of World War II.
The riots forced the country to face these problems head on,
and confront the systemic oppression faced
by Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles
and throughout the country.