Zoot to Boot: The Zoot Suit as Both Costume and Symbol

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.Zoot youths, dressed in exaggerated coats and flamboyant attire, were attacked on a Los Angeles, California street on May 31, 1943. The aggressors, primarily sailors, descended upon the boys out for a night on the town, beat them, stripped them of their suits, and burned the costumes in the streets. The naked and bruised youths were left alone as the mob dissipated until the police began to round the youths up as hoodlums and juvenile deviants. 1Over the past several years, historical work has focused on Los Angeles’s Hispanic community, especially during the 1940s and the later Chicano movement. The Zoot Suit Riot and the Sleepy Lagoon murder, a lesser-known but equally important event, have received a great deal of attention from a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars. They have given the suit a preeminent role in analysis of the Chicano movement. 2 Some scholars have studied the event and the signature suit through a psychological lens, 3 while others have approached the events and their symbols using traditional methodologies. 4 In addition, scholars have striven to identify the unique and powerful racial politics that accompanied the suit. 5 Beyond studies of 1940s American society, especially the Mexican-American community, examinations of the zoot suit appear in discussions of jazz and leisure 6 and in cultural studies that explore such concepts as cultural capital, memory, and identity. 7 These latter scholars argue that the suit itself and its use merit attention.This essay examines the discourses of popular memory, cultural capital, symbol construction, and Chicano community. It explores who determines meaning, and why. It shows how values ascribed to the suit by minority groups as well as those accepted by majority constructed discourses of community. While the former group embraced the unique fashion as a symbol of belonging Language: en