August 1942
In the county of Los Angeles, a 22 year-old-man named José Gallardo Díaz was found stabbed and unconscious with a head injury near a quarry days before his scheduled deployment to join the military and fight in World War II. The local papers dubbed this event: "The Sleepy Lagoon Murder," shortly after Díaz died from his wounds in an LA county hospital. Before José Díaz died, a scapegoat for violence in LA was almost always persons of color, namely people of Mexican descent. The local press frequently compared Mexican-American youth to perceived enemies abroad (such as the Germans and Japanese) by purposely placing them in side-by-side columns in newspapers with headlines detailing crime, disorder, and chaos. To be Mexican-American was to be the "enemy-within" according to the media of the time. Jose Díaz's death proved to be a catalyst for further hysteria, hate, and discrimination against an already marginalized group of people. The LAPD arrested 22 Mexican-American youths as suspects of Díaz's murder, the press sensationalizing them as 'thugs'.
During the trial for the Sleepy Lagoon Murder, the Lieutenant of the LAPD, Sheriff Edward D. Ayres, testified that those of Mexican heritage (especially of indigenous ancestry) were more prone to violence against authority figures, suggesting criminality was an inherent trait of Mexican biology:
"The Mexican Indian is mostly Indian — and that is the element which migrated to the United States in such large numbers and looks upon leniency by authorities as an evidence of weakness or fear, or else he considers that he was able to outsmart the authorities.”
—Los Angeles Lieutenant Sheriff Edward D. Ayres.
That August, an all white jury convicted 17 of the 22 of the "Sleepy Lagoon Murder" suspects guilty of murder and assault. This mass incarceration happened in spite of a lack of clear evidence for all convictions. The arrests led to the creation of activist groups and appeal movements that eventually overturned the case in 1944. This trial is considered to have fueled the tension leading up to the infamous "Zoot Suit Riots" of 1943.
Zoot Suits were, "a popular multiracial youth subculture that flourished in the 1940s, especially in Los Angeles and New York. Built around a style of dress, jazz music, dancing, and a kind of jive talk (a pachuco dialect called caló in Los Angeles), this subculture was an assertion of ethnic autonomy and dignity in a society that routinely dehumanized them. "--City of LA-Office of Historic Resources (2015). In response to the presence of Chicano/Pachuco culture becoming embraced and ever-present, the press labeled zoot suiters as menaces and anti-American, even citing the use of the suits fabric as "wasteful" and "unpatriotic" during wartime rationing.
In June of 1943, ten days of violence engulfed Los Angeles as white civilians and white military personnel in the thousands searched and targeted anyone wearing zoot suits. The suit-wearers were assaulted and beaten, the brutality both neglected and condoned by white policeman. Some of them had their suits ripped and torn from their bodies. At the end of the riots, Los Angeles was temporarily declared off-limits to servicemen. A total of 150 people were severely injured and more than 500 Mexican Americans were arrested. The courts charged zoot-suiters who had been stripped naked with disturbing the peace, indecency, and vagrancy. It is clear that marginalization and hate of people of color in Los Angeles goes far beyond instances like Rodney King and The Watts Riots. Like Rodney King and the African American male, the media depicted Mexican American youth and wearers of zoot suits as menaces to society and more prone to violent crime to justify a system of institutional racism against them. Similarly, both zoot-suiters and African Americans served in the military during World War II and received less than equal treatment at home than their white counterparts. Today, Mexican Americans make up 42 percent of California's prison population while African Americans make up 29 percent.
-- Katie Laughlin
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