as a space of possibility, one that hooks later described as a “radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”63 Further, as I explore later in this chapter, Moreno’s work with El Congreso recalls an important intersection between the philosophies of liberation shared by Black and Brown people in the United States.
In their mutual and separate struggles, Bass and Moreno produced spaces of what bell hooks calls “radical openness”—a space that “affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.”64 In this way, these women foregrounded Afro–Chicano struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, through which young people sought to legitimize cultural identities reflecting symbolic and material histories of interracial interaction.
Black and Brown women activists of this period in Los Angeles have received far less attention than their male counterparts. As female activists, Bass and Moreno refused traditional domesticity at a time when the available categories of acceptable womanhood were dominated by discourses of political and domestic containment, in both local and national contexts. Yet women like Bass and Moreno helped to shape the civil rights struggle and subsequent social movements in the region; their activism helped to define Black and Mexican-American languages and epistemologies of resistance. As historical actors engaged in fair housing, integration, labor, and youth struggles, they crafted counter-narratives that emphasized Black and Brown humanity and entitlement. Catherine S. Ramirez has observed that until recently, “only a handful of writers or artists acknowledged the roles that women, especially Mexican-American women, played in the Sleepy Lagoon incident and trial.”65 Studying the impact of these women together reveals a significant and overlooked combination of strategic resistance that was fundamental to the success of the SLDC.
THE SLEEPY LAGOON DEFENSE COMMITTEE
While the SLDC was not the most radical coalition of the 1940s, the antiracist legacy engendered by its members and their respective communities provides an inheritance that informed both the histories and the futures of interracial struggle among Mexican-American, Black, and Anglo working-class people in Los Angeles. Cochaired by Luisa Moreno, labor organizer Bert Corona, and writer/activist Carey McWilliams, the SLDC included among its members and supporters labor organizer Josefina Fierro de Bright, Congress of Industrial Organizations activist Alice McGrath, and Charlotta Bass. For two years, the SLDC fought for the release of twelve young Chicanos convicted of murder by an all-white jury in People v. Zamora. In this “highly publicized and deeply flawed trial,” twenty-two Chicanos were originally charged with criminal conspiracy in the murder of José Díaz, a twenty-two-year-old farm worker whose body was found at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir in southeast Los Angeles. Díaz, on his way home from a neighbor’s birthday party early on the morning of August 2, 1942, was seen leaving with two young men who were never questioned during the investigation or the ensuing trial. One “expert witness” (who was actually a member of the LA County Sheriff’s office) testified that Mexicans possessed a “blood thirst” and a “biological predisposition” to crime and killing. The evidence, he argued, was in the history of human sacrifices among the youths’ Aztec ancestors.66 Moreover, presiding judge Charles W. Fricke allowed attorneys to make routine racist references toward Mexicans while arguing for the prosecution. At the end of the trial, three of the defendants were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; nine were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to five years to life in prison, five were convicted of assault and released for time served, and five were acquitted. It was the largest mass conviction in California history.67 In the original and appellate cases, the juries were all white. The defendants began serving their sentences in January 1943.68
The Los Angeles police used Díaz’s murder to launch a widespread attack on what they perceived as unruly Mexican-American youth. More than 600 youths were arrested, most of them Mexicans. The press consistently referred to Díaz—as well as his assailants—as gang members. During the trial, labor activist LaRue McCormick established an ad hoc committee to publicize the events surrounding the case. After the defendants were sentenced, the committee reorganized as the SLDC. Carey McWilliams recalled:
I wanted to make it clear that the committee would have to be broadened, because there was no way of raising the money that was needed with that committee; it was too narrow. You’d have to have some labor people on it, some prominent Jewish businessmen, and motion picture people, and some blacks, one or two blacks.69
The SLDC worked not only toward an appeal for those convicted but also to expose anti-Mexican discrimination in the Southwest. The constellations of historical struggle that informed the strategies of the SLDC also worked to produce something particularly significant: Black and Brown people’s articulation of rights to social membership and human dignity. Significantly, these articulations illumine the role of culture in both the oppression and the freedom of marginalized communities. The possibility of interethnic economic and political mobilization was rooted in evidence of shared oppression among the mixed working classes in California, and examples of its shared vision and legacy for this period abound. The activism I am describing is one link in a long chain of interethnic economic and political mobilization that these groups have shared.70
As a result of the development of the first substantial generation of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, identity politics in the barrio had undergone several changes. By the end of World War II there was a new sense of entitlement and national citizenship felt by a generation of American-born Mexicans who had served in the war, and who had seen their parents suffer from housing, educational, and hiring discrimination because of racist city or national policies. The SLDC began its work in the wake of the mass deportations of Mexicans in the 1930s. Like some of the other political and labor activism of this decade, the SLDC drew upon an increase in Chicano political activity that occurred just before its founding. George Sanchez has argued that this “upsurge . . . involved at its core an attempt by the children of the immigrant generation and those who had arrived in the United States as youngsters to integrate themselves into American society. . . . [I]t was the second-generation experience that shaped most profoundly the emergence of Mexican-American activism, linking workers’ rights to civil rights.” Furthermore, this kind of “labor and political activity often served as the greatest ‘Americanizing agent’ of the 1930s and early 1940s.”71
World War II marked a similar change in attitude about the role of African Americans as national citizens. Not unlike Chicanos, Black intellectuals and working people after the War “articulated and acted upon a suspicion about the relationship between World War II and white-supremacy widely held in their community.”72 To fight for democracy and freedom abroad was a battle that held particular irony for aggrieved minorities in the United States, where struggles to achieve the same goals seemed just as intense. In Los Angeles, it was significant that the city was transformed during this period by the immigration of over 70,000 African Americans between 1940 and 1946.73 It would be transformed again in the following decade, when more Blacks migrated to California than to any other state.74
In this context, women were central to the efforts linking workers’ rights to civil rights.75 Bass and Moreno encountered this historical moment attuned to the economic, migration, cultural, and political histories of their respective constituencies, each bringing with her a constellation of people, politics, places, and strategies of resistance garnered from decades of action and vision.
SONIC POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION
The politics of spatial entitlement enacted by the constellations of struggle in which Bass and Moreno participated had important sonic dimensions. Space, sound, and racial politics were powerfully intertwined with the music associated with this political moment and with zoot culture more specifically, which included Black, Brown, and Jewish working-class popular cultures. Zoot suit culture became a culmination of intersecting constellations of decades-long struggles over style, the body, and public space.
The
