the Transport Workers Union in New Orleans, from a college professor, from a group of men in Naval training, from soldiers convalescing in a Midwestern hospital, from a group of Negro youth, from Japanese Americans at Manzanar.”107 Growing international support of SLDC efforts was made patently clear in a telegram sent by the Latin American labor delegates in 1944 that proclaimed:
We, the undersigned Latin American Labor Delegates to the ILO Conference being held in Philadelphia, wish to express to you, the members of your committee and all those who have so generously supported its fine work, our gratitude and that of our peoples for what you have done on behalf of the twelve Mexican-America. [sic] Boys unjustly convicted of murder in the so-called Sleepy Lagoon Case. This case has been used by the Fifth Column in our countries to stir up “Anti-Yankee” sentiment in order to undermine hemisphere unity in the war against Fascism. The fact that your committee has not only fought to right a great injustice against these innocent boys but has also exposed the anti-war forces responsible for their conviction enables us to prove that the anti-Latin American prejudice which colored their trial is not shared by the majority of the people of your country. Our thanks and congratulations to you and to all who worked with you.108
The SLDC argued that their support came from “people all over the country, of every race and color, of every national origin of different political beliefs.”109 This rhetorical strategy—grounded in the specific linkage between fascism abroad and racism at home—broadcast a politics of antiracist interethnic alliance that was intricately connected to struggles for spatial entitlement in Los Angeles youth culture and political coalitions. The Committee also argued that its activities constituted a contribution to the furtherance of the Good Neighbor Policy. This belief finds support in the enthusiastic praise and commendation accorded the work of the Committee by many organizations and individuals in Mexico and throughout Central and South America.”110 Just as strategies of spatial entitlement sought to expand the sphere of politics by enacting new social relations in seemingly unexpected places, appeals to international supporters in a time of war attempted to expand the playing field for U.S. white supremacy—to subject it to withering critique from the global majority of non-white people whose aid the United States needed in the war against fascism.
This collective pressure to expand the scope and stakes of space by bringing outside pressure to bear upon city officials and law enforcement agencies responsible for the incarceration of these youth eventually led to a dismissal of the charges in 1945. It was a serious victory for coalitional politics. Yet the physical brutality, psychic damage, and other widespread racist consequences this had on Mexican Americans in Los Angeles would subsequently have a legacy of its own. Dismissal of charges was not necessarily a victory for the young women who were defendants in People v. Zamora. As Catherine Ramirez notes, some of these girls and young women “remained incarcerated and wards of the state long after their male companions were exonerated and released from prison.”111
When one considers the magnitude of change created by the activism of Bass and Moreno, as well as the lessons learned through both the failures and successes during their careers, the force of their impact upon the SLDC becomes more visible. Edward Escobar’s important study on race and police in Los Angeles distinguishes the SLDC from other organizations of its time, in part because its strategies made whites across the United States aware for the first time of discrimination against Mexican Americans in the Southwest. The SLDC’s mission was to reveal the ways in which Mexican Americans were systematically victimized by racial prejudice by arguing that the defendants were casualties of a biased criminal justice system.112 Escobar suggests, however, that the SLDC campaign “could only have a limited effect on the growing zoot suit hysteria in Los Angeles,” in part because their focus remained confined to publicizing the trial to raise funds for the defendants’ appeal and was not on “discussing generalized discrimination against Mexican Americans.”113 Escobar’s observation is accurate, if it is restricted to the effects of the SLDC’s main effort: to publish a pamphlet entitled “The Sleepy Lagoon Case.” But if one considers the number of communities represented by the members of the SLDC—and therefore the constellations of struggle that were affected—his conclusion becomes too narrow to account for the SLDC’s effect on future attempts at interracial solidarities. Moreover, examining the ways in which these respective communities engaged the project of countering anti-Mexican hysteria brings the power of the SLDC into sharper light. Its critical strategy was an important ideological weapon against the sharpening demarcations of race, class, and community that emerged in the 1940s, manifest in segregated social and residential spaces, the growth of privatized redevelopment, and the kind of urban renewal that prized white entitlement over economic and social inclusion. Activists knew they were in for a long and protracted struggle that would exact many costs on them. “When a person, an organization, even a newspaper gets the courage and fortitude that is going to require to put this old world into such condition that it will be a fit and happy abode for all the people,” Bass wrote in 1946, “they must first be prepared to have their heads cracked, their hopes frustrated, and their financial strength weakened.”114
The Tenney Commission, the California legislature’s equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee, denounced the SLDC as a Communist front organization, later reporting that its meetings were facilitated by “trained rabble-rousers [who] orated of [sic] police brutality against minority groups, of the unfair treatment of the Mexican and the Negro population and of racial discrimination and segregation.”115 As a direct result of Bass and Moreno’s work on the Sleepy Lagoon case, as well as other activities, Senator Tenney targeted both of them during Commission hearings. “Now [that] there was no more Sleepy Lagoon or Pachucos to blame,” Moreno reasoned, “politicians scrambled to find Communists.” Tenney further used the case and red baiting to support segregation, oppose miscegenation, and to divide the Mexican community in Southern California.116
Bass was defiant. In her acceptance speech for her nomination as vice-presidential candidate of the Progressive Party six years later, she declared, “I will continue to cry out against police brutality against any people, as I did in the infamous zoot suit riots . . . when I reached scared and badly beaten Negro and Mexican American boys . . . [N]or have I hesitated in the face of that most Un-American Un-American activities committee—and I am willing to face it again.”117 This was Bass’s second run for elected office. In 1945, she ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, hoping to represent the 45 percent African-American Seventh District. She lost this race, but she went on to run for Congress against future mayor Samuel Yorty in 1950. Regina Freer has pointed out that although Blacks held elected positions in Chicago and New York as early as the 1920s, Los Angeles did not elect its first Black city councilperson until the 1960s. This made Bass’s local runs for office remarkable and made her run for national office in 1952 all the more significant: she was the first Black woman to run for vice president. Freer writes:
At the Progressive Party’s national convention, Bass was nominated by Paul Robeson, with W. E. B. Du Bois seconding the nomination. The Progressive Party’s slogan in 1952—”win or lose, we win by raising the issues”—reflected Bass’s own orientation toward electoral politics as a forum (sometimes successful, sometimes marginalized) for political education.118
Far from being a departure from grassroots politics, Bass’ electoral political activism was an extension of the working-class politics that had previously been confined to areas outside the formal arena. It was an effort to expand the discursive space available for antiracist action.
Luisa Moreno faced more permanent personal consequences for her activism. In 1950, she was deported as a result of the Commission’s successful campaign to label her a “dangerous alien.”119 The FBI offered Moreno an opportunity to secure U.S. citizenship in exchange for testifying against Harry Bridges, an Australian-born International Longshoremen Labor Union leader who had been charged with
