it made in physical places. Young men wearing pancake hats with feathers in them, large and long jackets with flowing lines, and pants with forty-two inches of fabric at the knees invaded public space; this clothing was also propelled by the stylized strut of the zoot suiter. Repression of the zoot suit came about because of the perceived threat to propriety and public order posed by the outfit’s effect on the private space of the body and the public space of the street.
SLDC activists mobilized an older generation of Black, Brown, and Jewish parents and community leaders into a symbolic alliance with a younger generation. By linking human rights to zoot suit culture, this alliance was undergirded by an intergenerational understanding of the ways that the federal government, court systems, and local police used Black and Brown cultural expressions as a means to justify oppression and containment (even though many older participants roundly denounced zoot suit culture). From this implicit understanding emerged powerful and unapologetic articulations of the link between zoot culture and the Mexican community. As the SLDC maintained in a press release:
It was not just these boys who were on trial. The Mexican people were being tried. And the trial took place not only in the courtroom but in the press with its barrage of lies against the “Mexican pachucos” and “zoot suiters,” and before the Grand Jury where a sheriff’s report characterizing the Mexican people as bloodthirsty wildcats was submitted. . . . Yes, these boys were convicted. So was the Mexican community. Neither is guilty. The blot against both must be removed.76
Zoot culture had deep roots in Black communities. The zoot suit was associated with Black urban youth in cities like Detroit, New York, and Chicago when it first appeared around 1940. The Autobiography of Malcolm X recounts the importance of X’s first zoot suit and suggests that the style had racial connotations as the preferred choice of hip black men and entertainers.77 In Los Angeles, Jewish, Black, Filipino, and primarily Mexican youth made the zoot suit popular.78 Garment fabrics were rationed during WWII; therefore, its purchase on the black market by makers of the zoot suit was considered treasonous. But it was the “calo” slang adopted by pachucos, the clean lines and flamboyant colors, the flaunting of expensive style on working-class bodies, and the culture of music that appealed to interracial audiences that infuriated many whites, who identified pachucos in LA as traitors and criminals.
A number of Black musical styles converged to create the sonic politics of zoot culture, what Robin Kelley calls “the wonderful collision and reconstitution of Kansas City big band blues, East Coast swing music, and the secular as well as religious sounds of the black South.”79 Jump blues evolved in the 1930s from Harlem bands like those of Cab Calloway and the Kansas City groups of Count Basie. It was pioneered by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five and pervaded both early rhythm and blues and doo-wop. Johnny Otis, a Greek American raised in an African-American Berkeley neighborhood was the person principally responsible for bringing jump blues to the East Side with his 1948 shows at Angelus Hall.80 Chicanos heard the difference between swing and jump blues, with its more raw “honking” saxophone sound and stronger drum beat, by hearing artists like Roy Milton, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, and Johnny Otis on the thriving ballroom circuit in East LA, downtown, and on Central Avenue. Jump saxists like Chuck Higgins (“Pachuko Hop,” 1953), Joe Houston, and Big Jay McNeely became the influences of 1950s honkers like Lil’ Bobby Rey and the Masked Phantom Band and Danny “Chuck Rio” Flores.
The same year that Johnny Otis played the Angelus Hall, one of the most popular bands in East LA was the Pachuco Boogie Boys, led by Raul Diaz and East San Francisco Bay transplant Don Tosti. Their 1948 hit “Pachuco Boogie” celebrated and publicized the street speech and style encoded in calo narratives, long a part of the pachuco and zoot suit style. This song in particular, but also songs by the Armenta Brothers and Lalo Guerrero, such as “Chucos Suaves” and “Marijuana Boogie,” made jump blues and honking popular in East LA. Indeed, a distinct sound, “Chicano honking,” emerged that combined jump blues and calo.
It is not just that the interactions between Mexicans and Blacks in music resembled the alliances created in the political coalitions led by Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno, but that music became a shared social space that enacted on the quotidian level of everyday life the parallels and affinities that flowed from the linked fate that Blacks and Mexicans suffered because of white supremacy. The aggressive festivity, celebratory self-activity, and collective creativity permeating popular music served as an alternative space where the identities of race took on new meanings.
Sometimes, the music had direct connections to political mobilizations. Musicians and cultural actors offered direct critiques of common problems and gave practical and symbolic support to community mobilizations. For example, on July 2, 1944, Boyle Heights native and Verve founder Norman Granz staged a benefit concert to help fund the SLDC. Nearly 2,000 people attended the inaugural Jazz at the Philharmonic Concert, where the imagined solidarities across racial lines took material form in music made by Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet, J.J. Johnson, Les Paul, and Nat King Cole. As musicologist and jazz historian Scott DeVeaux notes, the performers that night presented music that was “firmly aligned with racial politics . . . with all proceeds donated to the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Fund.”81
Music that raised money for political purposes and that asserted and punctuated the self-activity and solidarity of the coalition that supported the Sleepy Lagoon defendants manifested one form of spatial contestation and entitlement. Another manifestation came from the citations of street life that pervaded the music composed and performed by Lalo Guerrero and the Pachuco Boogie Boys. Their songs countered the image of pachucos as treasonous and unpatriotic by celebrating a sociopolitical and cultural identity that Blacks and Chicanos shared. The songs “Pachuco Boogie,” “Chucos Suaves,” and “Marijuana Boogie” contained lyrics, but they were also nonlinguistic communications that projected “an alternative body of cultural and political expression that considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation.”82 Like the concomitant political struggles waged in their constituent communities, these sounds had a legacy most immediately heard in the music of Thee Midnighters (“Whittier Boulevard”), Cannibal & The Headhunters (“Land of 1000 Dances”), and The Salas Brothers, all of whom forged their own East LA sound on these foundations.
Young Black zoot suiters created “a fast-paced, improvisational language which sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering, tongue-tied Sambo,” enabling them to “negotiate an identity that resisted the hegemonic culture and its attendant racism and patriotism.”83 In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison wrote of the protagonist’s first encounter with zoot suiters, calling them “the stewards of something uncomfortable.”84 Indeed, it was through the experiences of participating in zoot suit riots in Harlem that Malcolm X began his transformative political education. Here we can even see a sonic politics of the vernacular. As Kelley explains, “in a world where whites commonly addressed them as ‘boy,’ zoot suiters made a fetish of calling each other ‘man.’”85 He observes that for many Black youths, this subculture allowed them to break with “the rural folkways (for many, the ‘parent culture’) which still survived in most black urban households, and the class-conscious, integrationist attitudes of middle-class blacks.”86
Similarly, Mexican-American youths stood in symbolic opposition to the assimilationist aims of their middle-class counterparts. Both groups “received similar treatment from law enforcement, judges, juries, and the general Anglo public.”87 Through zoot culture, however, Black and Mexican working-class youth crossed boundaries to form alliances and assert their humanity in the face of this degrading treatment. Moreover, the practices of commercial popular culture offered opportunities to develop skills that could be utilized in political mobilizations. As Mark Anthony Neal argues in his cogent analysis of the relationship between Black culture and Black politics in his work on the Chitlin’ Circuit:
that same network that was used in order to promote shows would be the same network that would be used when Martin Luther King came to town and was
