Catherine S. Ramírez . The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory . Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press . 2009 . Pp. xxvi, 229. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

Abstract

A short skirt, fishnet stockings or bobby socks, a tight v-neck sweater, a fingertip-length boxy jacket, heavy eye makeup and dark lipstick, hair teased and piled into a high bouffant: these were the signature fashion elements of the young Mexican American women who participated in the zoot suit subculture in Los Angeles in the World War II era. These women were just as daring and dissident as their brothers, with whom they shared both a style politics and the disapproval of white society. However, the women, sometimes called pachucas, remained largely invisible and unintelligible in comparison to their male, pachuco counterparts. Police, white servicemen, newspapers, and the courts cast male zoot suiters as unpatriotic, criminal delinquents during the Sleepy Lagoon incident of 1942 and the zoot suit riots of 1943; Chicano nationalists reinterpreted them as icons of resistance during the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In an innovative twist on an old question, Catherine S. Ramírez asks, “Where were the pachucas?” By this, she means to investigate both the subculture of the historical subjects and the role of the iconic representation—la Pachuca—as it figured into World War II nationalism as well as later, insurgent Chicano nationalist and Chicana feminist reinterpretations. The result is a fresh interdisciplinary history that tells us as much about nationalisms, gender, race, and culture from 1942 to the present as it does about young women who embraced a defiant public style.