Zoot Suit Research Articles

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of “Illegal” Immigrant

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of “Illegal” Immigrant

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant

Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant

La Pastorela

La Pastorela

An axiomatic design theory for design of apparel products

An apparel product has a unique feature other than other products in that apparel product design must consider three categories of design requirements, namely function (governed by natural sciences), comfort (governed by ergonomics), and pleasure (governed by aesthetics and psychology). This paper proposes a general design theory for apparel products. The theory is based on Axiomatic Design Theory (ADT), which is for the functional aspect of products, particularly by adapting ADT to apparel product design, to which all the aspects (function, comfort, pleasure) need to be considered. The proposed theory is thus called the Axiomatic Design Theory For Apparel (ADT-FA). The ADT-FA has two axioms. Axiom 1 (apparel) concerns coupling in the design requirement, and Axiom 2 (apparel) concerns redundancy in the design parameter. The proposed theory is preliminarily validated with the Zoot suit, which is well known in the community of apparel design. The work opens an avenue for more validations in future.

A Browner Shade of Noir: Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit as Decolonial Noir

A Browner Shade of Noir: Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit as Decolonial Noir

Early Identity, Environment, and Experience

Josefina Fierro de Bright served as a political and social activist in the 1930s and 1940s through her participation in the Mexican Defense Committee, El Congreso (the National Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples), and the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, as well as her important efforts to end the violent attacks on ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles during the Zoot Suit Riots. Fierro participated in organizations focused on human, civil, women’s, and labor rights. She contributed to a cross-cultural “politics of opposition” determined to create a world where true equality might flourish. She used American nationalist and transnationalist approaches. In the United States, Fierro networked with activists, celebrities, and political leaders who supported many of the same causes that she did. Her transnational approach materialized in the form of collaboration with the Mexican consulate, which also sought to secure the human rights of ethnic Mexicans living in the United States during a time of strong anti-Mexican sentiment. In order to understand why and how Fierro emerged as a leader willing to challenge the racism undergirding the segregation and mistreatment of ethnic Mexicans in California in the 1930s and 1940s, this study examines her family’s history of social activism, the fluid sociocultural environment of an American Left in which women played central roles, and her bold and charismatic leadership style.

Embodying the Background

In the summer of 1943, race riots stirred waves of violence across several US cities, the largest taking place in Detroit, Harlem, and Los Angeles. During wartime, patriotic anger was aimed not only outward at the Axis powers, but also inward at US citizens. This article focuses on Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots, exploring how in a surprising number of accounts of the alleged riot, movie theaters serve as backgrounds alongside white, Mexican American, African American, and Asian American women, who appear as minor, nameless characters. Finding instances in work from Beatrice Griffith and Carey McWilliams, in fiction from Fernando Alegría and Chester Himes, and in the canonical Chicano films Zoot Suit (1981) and American Me (1992), the article traces the supporting roles women and movie theaters serve in these diverse narratives, and how both come to visually and discursively represent dangerous wartime boundaries.

Representing Perpetrators

Representing Perpetrators

Pachuquísmo: La Mezcla Brings Pachuca Culture Forward

PachuquísmoLa Mezcla Brings Pachuca Culture Forward Vanessa Sanchez (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Dancers Kirsten Millan, Vanessa Sanchez, Sandy Vasquez, and Emmeline Gonzalez-Beban, (left to right). From Pachuquísmo, 2020. Photograph by Beth LaBerge, KQED Arts. As a Chicana-Native choreographer and dancer, my work is inspired by history, tradition, and our collective experiences. I believe that movement and rhythm not only work to challenge white supremacy, inequalities, and generations of colonization, but can also bring us together to collectively thrive and tell our stories. Since childhood, I have always felt connected to and inspired by the stories, style, and fuerza—the pachuquísmo— of the young Mexican American Pachucas and Pachucos of the 1940s, who not only rebelled against mainstream white U.S. culture but challenged the conservative traditions of their Mexican families. Rather than staying in the shadows of Los Angeles, Pachucas and Pachucos made sure they were seen by styling themselves with big hair and donning the large zoot suit inspired by the African American jazz scene. This grassroots cultural movement led by Black and brown youth grew more visible and popular over time, and mainstream society did not approve. For ten days in June of 1943, white servicemen roamed the streets of downtown Los Angeles, attacking Mexican American youth, cutting their pants, and shearing their hair. In what has come to be called the Zoot Suit Riots, servicemen and civilians—aided and abetted by the Los Angeles Police—began entering Mexican neighborhoods to seek out anyone who fit the bill. As I learned more about these violent events in books, plays, and films, I couldn’t help but wonder, “ . . . y las Pachucas?” Over the years, popular media has explored and discussed these events at length, but rarely do we find [End Page 51] any reference to the young Mexican American women and teens whose lives were also impacted during this time. Our performance, Pachuquísmo, is a full-length, percussive dance theater production that tells the story of the female youth, or Pachucas, during the Zoot Suit Riot era through dance, music, and video. Performed by my dance company La Mezcla, this all-women-of-color cast brings together tap dance, Mexican zapateado, Son Jarocho (from Veracruz, Mexico), and live jazz music to challenge the misogyny and systemic racism that continue to plague our community. The photographs on the following pages reimagine the Pachucas and their pachuquísmo past and present, who took up space, refused to be silenced by traditional gender roles, wore their cultura on their sleeve, and used their style, voices, and rhythm to challenge systemic racism and police brutality. This work, inspired by the poderosas who came before, brings the stories of these women to the forefront, where they should have been all along. [End Page 52] Click for larger view View full resolution Vanessa Sanchez in Pachuquísmo. Photograph by Beth LaBerge, KQED Arts. [End Page 53] Click for larger view View full resolution Dancers Sandy Vazquez, Emmeline Gonzalez-Beban, Vanessa Sanchez, and Kirsten Millan, and musicians Mónica María Fimbrez and Elena de Troya (above, left to right). Photographs by Beth LaBerge, KQED Arts. [End Page 54] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 55] Click for larger view View full resolution Mónica María Fimbrez and Elena de Troya (above, left to right), and Emmeline Gonzalez-Beban, Sandy Vazquez, and Vanessa Sanchez (facing page, left to right). Photographs by Beth LaBerge, KQED Arts. [End Page 56] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 57] Vanessa Sanchez vanessa sanchez is a Chicana dancer, choreographer, and educator who focuses on community arts and traditional dance forms to emphasize voices and experiences of Latina, Chicana, and Indigenous womxn and youth. Based in San Francisco, she is a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow and the founding artistic director of La Mezcla, a rhythmic ensemble that explores history and collective resistance through tap dance, Mexican zapateado, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Her all-female tap dance and Son Jarocho production Pachuquísmo, the recipient of the Isadora Duncan Special Achievement Award for Outstanding Production, will tour nationally in 2022. She is currently...

Stereotyping Chicanos in Ethnic Theatre: A Study of Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit

This paper investigates ethnic theatre in general, and Chicano theatre in particular, with a particular reference to Luis Valdez's famous play Zoot Suit. This paper is divided into two main parts. The first part tends to be an introductory theoretical one. It begins by surveying the history and development of the ethnic and Chicano theatres in the United States examining their impact on society. This part, also, highlights the remarkable role of Luis Valdez as the father of the Chicano theatre. The second part of the paper provides a comprehensive analysis of Valdez's Zoot Suit in order to find out how Chicanos are stereotyped in the play

The Brilliant Rebel, Rebelling Against Everything: The Nonfictional Writings of Langston Hughes

ABSTRACT Langston Hughes's nonfictional writings of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s were far less polemical than his more radical writings of the 1930s, but they nevertheless reveal a consistent trajectory of political engagement and demonstrate his commitment to writing as a social and socially purposeful act. Whether he is protesting the dearth of opportunities for African American writers in movies and television, the brutality against people of color during the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, or the indignities of racial segregation, Hughes also retained in his nonfictional writings some of the same traits that first endeared him to readers in the 1920s: clear, unaffected language; imagery that vividly depicted the lifestyles and concerns of common, working-class people; subtle, witty, yet sharply pointed commentary on racism and prejudice; and, finally, a generosity of spirit that encompassed all people, a true sense of wonder at the infinite varieties and possibilities of humanity.

Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez

Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez

Outside Theatre: Alliances That Shape Mexico by Stuart A. Day

Reviewed by: Outside Theatre: Alliances That Shape Mexico by Stuart A. Day Christina Baker Day, Stuart A. Outside Theatre: Alliances That Shape Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2017. 223 pp. Outside Theatre: Alliances That Shape Mexico is an impressive recent contribution to contemporary Mexican theater. Recounting "but it was a trip to Medellín, Colombia, that shook me from my cynical view that the social power of art is [End Page 699] passé at best" (158), Day evokes connections between the violent Escobar-run era of Colombia's history with what some call Mexico's current "Narco State." Inspired by the efforts that re-invigorated Medellín, Day hopes that Mexican theater actors, producers, and dramaturges can transform the nation beyond the performance space. To do this, he suggests that outside the space and time of theater production is where the action happens, but for these changes to be long-lasting and successful, they require allies. For Day, these allies and alliances take the form of scholar-practitioners in the United States, students on both sides of the border, public figures (politicians and stars alike), and, of course, spectators. The book is comprised of five chapters that critically and thoughtfully examine a series of theater pieces, productions, and reception. While almost all of the pieces were staged during the twenty-first century, the chapters follow a broad chronological development that reflects Mexico's tenuous relationship with its past, something that seems to be ever-present in contemporary memory. Moreover, all five chapters weave together an impressive and ambitious series of references that capture Day's deep knowledge of Mexico's cultural idiosyncrasies, sinister cartographies, historical figures, and contemporary debates. The first chapter explores a 2002 staging of the piece, 1822: El año que fuimos imperio, by Flavio González Mello. The overarching theme situates the sacred image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in dialogue with the figure of the clown, or jester, and politicians. Day seamlessly describes the way Mello's piece, set in nineteenth-century Mexico, revives the figure of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier "who sought a more egalitarian, pre-Columbian origin for the apparition of the Virgin" (35), but with a humorous twist, a la Brozo the Creepy Clown, contemporary television personality (33). He also draws parallels between moments of political transition from General Iturbide to Mexico's first president, Guadalupe Victoria, and another foundational moment, the 2000 election of PAN candidate, Vicente Fox. Tackling the topic of the Virgin as an example of continued colonialism, racism, and conservatism in contemporary Mexico, Day points out that humor has always been a valuable tool for holding public officials accountable for erasures, what he refers to as the theatricality of politics. Chapter two continues to interrogate politics as performance in Federico Gamboa's piece La venganza de la gleba (1905), which tells of rich hacienda owners living in Paris grappling with illegitimacy, inevitable love, and social class. Inspired by a political cartoon from the late nineteenth century proclaiming, "Ya te conozco mascarita," Day reads the mask Gamboa donned throughout the Porfiriato in conjunction with James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Gamboa's departures from the naturalism of Émile Zola, as Day suggests, reveal his struggles to fit the mask he wore; Gamboa constantly negotiated Catholicism and uncertainty of the economic inequality of the Porfiriato. Day proposes that this piece "held a mirror up to a Mexican audience of 1905" while also interrogating Gamboa's position of complicit power (77). At first glance, this step back in historical time seems out of sync, yet Day forges connections between the fall of Porfirio Díaz in relation to the fall and rise of the modern Mexican PRI. [End Page 700] The final chapters of the book examine negotiating boundaries in and out of theater, abuses on the US/Mexican border, and the role of academics to inspire change. Chapter three considers the 2010 Mexico City staging of the seminal Chicano theater piece, Zoot Suit, in relation to the controversial passing of Arizona immigration law SB1070. Day outlines the complex overlapping spaces, outside agitators, and chronologies that bridge the Sleepy Lagoon murders of the 1940s, as...

Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots by Margarita Engle

Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots by Margarita Engle

The revolution in our pants: Hipsters, race and American fashion

Abstract This article explores the contemporary jogger pant by looking back to the mid-twentieth-century coding of hipness through material consumption, racial mastery and urbanity, primarily through Malcolm X’s musing on zoot suits, but also attending to adjacent literary texts: Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem ‘We Real Cool’ and Norman Mailer’s essay ‘The white negro: Superficial reflections on the hipster’. It finally returns to the present day to read the contemporary jogger alongside the midcentury zoot suit, gesturing to ways in which hipster appropriation is both problematic, because it assumes as authentic cultural products of whiteness that actually borrow from blackness, and full of potential, because in even quietly citing its borrowing of black and feminine forms, it may serve to destabilize white masculinity.

Immigrant Education and Race: Alternative Approaches to “Americanization” in Los Angeles, 1910–1940

This article explores citizenship's multiple meanings in Los Angeles by describing five different types of Americanization, or immigrant education, in the city of angels from 1910 to 1940. The federal racialization of access to citizenship influenced these alternative approaches to Americanization at a local level. In the context of Supreme Court rulings and federal laws that made it difficult for immigrants of color to naturalize in the United States during the Progressive Era, Anglo officials in the school district and settlement houses developed an English-only curriculum that benefited only European immigrants. In response to such restrictions, Mexican and Japanese educators in turn developed programs that showed how learning Spanish and Japanese made their children loyal Americans worthy of citizenship. In the decades before internment and the Zoot Suit Riots, language instruction was one of the few vehicles that allowed Mexican and Japanese Angelinos the opportunity to take control of their Americanization experiences despite the racialized constraints they faced.

The Danger of a Singular Fashion: Studies of Race, Fashion, and Beauty in American Studies

The Danger of a Singular Fashion:Studies of Race, Fashion, and Beauty in American Studies Anita Mannur (bio) Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging. By Minh-Ha T. Pham. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 272 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race. By Sean Metzger. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 300 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $32.00 (paper). Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture. By Vanita Reddy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016. 261 pages. $84.50 (cloth). $32.95 (paper). Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. By Tanisha C. Ford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 256 pages. $29.95 (cloth). In a 2014 article for Elle magazine, "Why Can't Smart Women Love Fashion?," the celebrated Nigerian feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes how her relationship with fashion and dress changed upon moving to the United States. Prior to her move, clothing and hair occupied less-overdetermined positions for Adichie, and it was only on entering the world of the West that she began to notice an uneasy correlation between "dressing up" and presumed intelligence. Simply put, smart women placed less of a premium on dressing well and chose more austere and even unfashionable clothing to legitimize their positions. She writes, "I had learned a lesson about Western culture: Women who wanted to be taken seriously were supposed to substantiate their seriousness with a studied indifference to appearance. For serious women writers in particular, it was better not to dress well at all, and if you did, then it was best to pretend that you had not put much thought [End Page 411] into it. If you spoke of fashion, it had to be either with apology or with the slightest of sneers."1 Adichie has spoken and written extensively about race, fashion, and beauty, both in her fiction and in the popular press. Central to her thinking about these seemingly inconsequential issues is the notion that discourse around fashion, style, and beauty not only is gendered but has deep implications for how we understand social justice, racial formation, and class structuring. Moreover, the meanings of clothing are radically malleable and context specific. Place, embodiment, race, gender, and the sociopolitical environment can alter the meaning of clothing and fashion such that everyday sartorial choices for people of color are inherently political. In seeming contradistinction to this point is one that the fashion historian Kathy Peiss makes in Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style. The zoot suit became politicized in the 1940s. Worn by Mexican and Filipino American men, the luxuriously large-cut suits became a source of racialized hate among white servicemen who viewed the donning of purportedly excessive amounts of cloth during a time of wartime ration as unpatriotic, fueling the Zoot Suit Riots. Referring to Robin Kelley's reading of Malcolm X donning the zoot suit as highly political, Peiss asks what makes his use of the zoot suit a direct political statement. For Kelley, "while the suit itself was not meant as a direct political statement. … the social context in which it was created and worn renders it so." Peiss continues, "the context may in fact be our contemporary politics and culture, particularly on the left—a romantic view of rebellion and pushback 'from below' not through formal politics or organization but through quotidian culture."2 For Peiss, it is often critics' own contemporary theorizations that ascribe meanings to fashion as resistance. Yet it is also evident that the meaning of "resistance" itself is somewhat vague. Is it necessarily the case that fashion as resistance emerges through formal channels of organization? Probably not. Certainly this is what these new books on race, fashion, and beauty suggests. Beauty and fashion are embodied practices that are produced within particular networks of sociocultural power. At the same time, the aesthetic practices of fashion cannot be separated from the material conditions through which fashion, clothing, and beauty are produced and through which agential narratives of resistance might emerge. With an impressive temporal span ranging from the nineteenth century into the contemporary moment...

"Don't Teach These Plays!": Latina/o Theatre and the Termination of the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies Program

"Don't Teach These Plays!":Latina/o Theatre and the Termination of the Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies Program Jimmy A. Noriega (bio) The second decade of the twenty-first century began with a series of milestones that signaled a major turning point for Latina/o theatre. In April 2010 Luis Valdez's classic Zoot Suit opened at the Compañía Nacional de Teatro in Mexico City, and the Association of Theatre Journalists honored it as the Best Mexican Musical of the year, making it the first time a non-Mexican play was given the award. John Leguizamo performed his one-man show Ghetto Klown at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway from March to July 2011; it received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards and was eventually filmed for television. In 2012 Quiara Alegría Hudes became the first Latina to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful, which went on to become one of the most produced plays of the 2013–14 season. And in May 2012 eight theatre practitioners met in Washington, D.C., to set in motion the process that would lead to the founding of the Latina/o Theatre Commons, which in fall 2013 would hold its historic National Convening in Boston. It was during this period of noteworthy progress and acclaim that a number of Latina/o playwrights were thrust into the national spotlight in a way they did not anticipate. In January 2012 several books were removed from the classrooms of Tucson, Arizona, as a result of Arizona House Bill 2281. This legislation, passed in May 2010, targeted ethnic studies in the schools and led to the dismantling of the Tucson Unified School District's (TUSD) Mexican American Studies (MAS) program. The elimination led to what many called a "banning" of the books that were previously part of the curriculum and classrooms of the district. Among the many such titles, three books were collections of Latina/o theatrical texts: Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992); Culture Clash: Life, Death, and Revolutionary Comedy (1998); and Puro Teatro: A Latina Anthology (2000). Puro Teatro, edited by Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, consists of five full-length plays, three one-acts, four texts for performance pieces, and a series of testimonios by an array of Latinas working in the theatre. In their introduction to the collection, the editors assert that "[a]ccessibility to these plays and circulation of them in a variety of different venues will benefit communities, students at all levels of their education and their teachers, actors and actresses looking for material, and theaters at the community, regional, and national level" (xiv). Despite its well-intended aims, the anthology—created for social, cultural, and artistic empowerment—was deemed unsuitable and outlawed in Tucson classrooms. The legislation not only prevented accessibility and circulation of these works in the schools, but also emphasized the precarity of Latina cultural expression in the US today. Although perhaps it was not intentional, more Latina-written plays were censored than those by Latino men. This ban on Latina theatrical texts is even more egregious, given the lack of production opportunities for female playwrights in general (Evans). In many ways the banning of these plays in the Tucson schools became an extension of the erasure that Latinas face in season calendars and production budgets in theatres across the nation. [End Page 37] With this in mind, this essay aims to explore the ways in which HB 2281 further marginalized Latina/o theatrical texts in the US educational landscape. In the first part I will briefly outline the history and debate surrounding the legislation, focusing on the methods used to target Latina/o theory, pedagogy, and cultural production. The remainder of the essay discusses two banned texts from the Puro Teatro anthology as case studies by which to teach and understand the events: Silviana Wood's And Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him? (2000), and Elaine Romero's The Fat-Free Chicana and the Snow Cap Queen (1995). Although both plays predate the events of HB 2281, they speak to a history of racist pedagogy and acts...

Zoot Suit: Latino/a youth inclusion and exclusion on Texas stages

ABSTRACTThough Latino/as currently comprise the majority of Texas public school students, Latino/a bodies and stories are underrepresented and excluded in school theatre programs throughout the state. In 2011, the Texas Education Agency reported that Hispanic students accounted for 50.2 percent of the state’s 4.9 million children enrolled in public schools, including pre-kindergarten and early childhood education. However, the theatre produced in school theatre programs representing Latino stories and characters is staggeringly disproportionate to the number of Latino youth attending Texas public schools. In May 2014, Edinburg North High School, the one school from the Rio Grande Valley included in the state meet, presented their production of Zoot Suit at the competition, which takes place annually on the University of Texas at Austin campus. This article explores Latino/a youth inclusion and exclusion and how the inclusion of this production of Zoot Suit has opened the door to more Latino stories being noticed, valued, and told throughout the Rio Grande Valley and the state of Texas.