meeting.88
In their respective activism, Bass and Moreno had drawn this conclusion many times, over many struggles. Activism was not only aimed at responding to immediate crises but was also a means of building the skills needed for deepening a democratic culture of deliberation and decision making. It required expanding the sphere of politics beyond the voting booth by creating physical and discursive spaces that could support and sustain constellations of struggle. Regina Freer identifies important elements in this work by describing Bass as emblematic of women who “combined ideologies that elsewhere competed, chose multifaceted allies in their struggles” and asserted an entitlement to opportunities that they defined as basic to their humanity and citizenry.89
The Zoot Suit Riots made the interrelationship of Black and Chicano social realities painfully clear. Both groups were losing on the labor front: by the 1945 CIO Convention, plant closures had undercut gains by those who had challenged racism on the shop floor and expanded job opportunities for Blacks in wartime defense industries. The convention proceedings noted that “Negro, Mexican, and all minority groups in California are becoming the first post-war casualty.”90
Violent attacks by whites on Mexican and Black zoot suiters the summer after the Sleepy Lagoon trial underscored the lack of legal remedies available to Blacks and Mexicans who were trying to defend themselves. Mainstream reporting on the Sleepy Lagoon case reinforced existing racial stereotypes, and comments by law-enforcement officials characterized Chicano zoot suiters as the “predictable results of the primitive and backward culture of the ‘Mexican colony.’”91 As George Sánchez demonstrates through the story of Pedro García—the American-born son of Mexican immigrants who was beaten and left unconscious by servicemen in the company of police witnesses—the physical and ideological violence exacted by white vigilantes made clear to many second-generation Chicanos that “much of their optimism about the future had been misguided.”92
Rhetorical resistance to ideological and physical racism in the wake of the Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot Suit Riots powerfully supported the efforts of the SLDC and furthered the platform of antiracism. Letters to the Eastside Sun by East Los Angeles teenagers about the riots reflect the importance of cultural spaces; they did not position themselves primarily as wageworkers or as citizens, but as people who “sought to carve out their own social space, not in terms of exercising union leadership, but by defining a youth culture.”93 Mexican, Anglo, and Black activists and reporters such as Chester Himes and Al Waxman countered mainstream press reports with their own in the Eastside Sun and the California Eagle, reframing the violence by linking official national rhetoric to uphold the principle of the self-determination of oppressed peoples to the need to extend rights to America’s minority communities.94 This strategy was clearly visible in a letter from the Committee to trade unionists asking them to adopt a resolution asking Governor Earl Warren to pardon those convicted: “In its first rounds,” wrote Cary McWilliams and Bella Joseph, “[the Sleepy Lagoon case] represents a fascist victory.”95
Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno expanded on this ideological identification of the Sleepy Lagoon case as an example of incipient fascism. Bass likened the LAPD’s response to Hitler’s race theories and harshly criticized the Sheriff’s Department for urging the Grand Jury to consider the “biological basis” for the criminal behavior of Mexican youth and their “desire to kill.”96 In a speech contending that police attacks historically targeted “minority communities—Mexican American and Negro”97—Moreno astutely identified the Grand Jury testimony as “a reflection of the general reactionary drive against organized labor and minority problems, [sowing] all sorts of division among the various racial, national, and religious groups among the workers.”98 In a statement that underscored the importance of leisure and recreational spaces in the cartography of white supremacy in Los Angeles, Moreno protested the harassment of youth who patronized mixed-race bars and clubs.99 Bass used her writings in the Eagle to change community understandings of this case and others during the war. In successive weeks, the newspaper carried two-inch headlines across page one, such as “TRIGGER-HAPPY COP FREED AFTER SLAYING YOUTH” and “POLICE BRUTALITY FLARES UP AGAIN.”100 Her efforts galvanized other journalists to make similar connections. Lynn Itagaki identifies the journalism of Chester Himes as emblematic of this line of argument, noting:
Referring to the Nazi storm troopers, [Chester Himes called] the servicemen who were instigating the riots a “reincarnation” or “continuation of the vigilantes, the uniformed Klansmen,” conflating the foreign enemy with American white supremacists. Himes satirizes the uneven Conflict between the servicemen and the Mexican Americans as a “great battle” which engaged the “combined forces of the United States navy, army, and marine corps” to defeat “a handful of youths with darker skins.” He decried the military’s apparent focus on fighting groups of citizens at home rather than concentrating their energies abroad.101
By deflecting blame onto white officials, Bass and Moreno rejected a divisive tactic long used by LA city officials, media, and moral pundits: to discredit workers and communities of color by assigning to them ideological and biological predispositions for “un-American” behavior.102 Bass and Moreno turned this argument on its head through a spatial remapping that associated white supremacy at home with fascism overseas.
In his journalism and editorial observations, Himes noticed that many Black Americans chose to look the other way as violence escalated. He admonished them publicly in his seminal 1943 article in The Crisis, warning “Perhaps you don’t know what it is all about. If you are a Negro, you should know. But if you are one of those Negroes who profess not to know (and no doubt there are plenty of you), I will be only too happy to inform you.”103 His critique was rooted in the highly visible coverage of the riots by mainstream press as both a Negro and a Mexican “problem.” Stuart Cosgrove recounts that in June of 1943:
the press singled out the arrests of Lewis D English, a 23-year-old black, charged with felony and carrying a “16-inch razor sharp butcher knife”; Frank H. Tellez, a 22-year-old Mexican held on vagrancy charges, and another Mexican, Luis “The Chief” Verdusco (27 years of age), allegedly the leader of the Los Angeles pachucos. . . . The arrests of English, Tellez and Verdusco seemed to confirm popular perceptions of the zoot suiters widely expressed for weeks prior to the riots. Firstly, that the zoot suit gangs were predominantly, but not exclusively, comprised of black and Mexican youths.104
The tremendous collective support for these youths by people from diverse communities was due in part to the discourses and practices of spatial entitlement that educated audience about the common condition of Black and Brown working-class youth. But it was also the result of the language crafted by the SLDC to create a common investment in their defense. In its first publication, the Committee declared itself an interethnic alliance:
Interest in the work of the Committee is grwoing[sic]. At the last meeting there were four additional unions represented by delegates, two additional Negro groups and one additional Jewish organization. These people are bringing fresh energy and new ideas. It is very encouraging to those of us who have been working with the Committee to know that we have only begun to gather around us the people who are friendly to our purpose . . . and who will do something about it.”105
In its publications over the next two years, the Committee expressed itself in antiracist language that highlighted trans-national, trans-communal, and trans-movement understandings of the links between imperialism and racism. In a preview of the international problems that domestic racism could provoke for foreign policy elites, Radio Berlin and Radio Tokyo broadcast the news of the conviction over shortwave radio to Latin America with reports that “implied that nowhere in the USA was there to be found a friend of the Mexican or Mexican American.”106 The SLDC published letters of support from the Latin American Labor Delegates (delegations from Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica were among the
