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Blood on the Pavement: Carmen

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On Thursday, June 3, 1943, the first day of the Zoot Suit Riots, sailors entered the Carmen Theater, “turned on the house lights and roamed the aisles looking for young men in zoot suits” (Pagán 170). Reports about the Zoot Suit Riot in Los Angeles repeatedly return to the setting of the movie theater, and in particular to the Carmen Theater for the start of the incident. Reliably, Eduardo Obregón Pagán’s thoroughly researched monograph Murder at Sleepy Lagoon  includes the location of the Carmen Theater in the recounting of one of the riot’s initial attacks. In this study Pagán weaves a compelling social history and provides a great deal of research about the Sleepy Lagoon case, the mass arrests, ensuing trials, and press coverage in 1942-43 that had influence on the Los Angeles race riot. In detailing the start, Pagán describes the initial encounters that would result in a five-day race riot. A group of sailors stationed at the Naval Training School, not finding civilians they had a scuffle with earlier in the day, attacked any young men resembling the persons they had previously encountered. Even though boys of only twelve and thirteen years of age were reportedly found in the theater at the time, the sailors nonetheless dragged the young men out onto Alpine Street. Then in the public view of the street, sailors stripped and beat their targets. Some reports suggest the sailors went as far as burning the offensive zoot suits removed during the struggle (170). If the Carmen Theater provided a modicum of protection and anonymity for racialized subjects at this time, their forced ejection during the riots onto the city’s streets reveals the tenuousness of the theater’s safety as a public space. The relationship between the social dynamics of the theater and the street is addressed in later sections of this project.
 
The attack at Carmen Theater on the first day of rioting, and at subsequent theaters in the days that followed, can be found in a great deal of reports about the incident. Turning to primary sources, the initial scenes were not extensively covered in contemporary news coverage, though that would dramatically change the week after rioting had begun. Carmen Theater shows up in published accounts of what happened with the Zoot Suit Riots, and its entangled expositions about second generation Mexican American youth. Beatrice Griffith’s American Me (originally published in 1948) considers the socio-economic conditions of Mexican American life in the interwar period. The book begins with a thorough review of pachuco/a culture and the Zoot Suit Riots, based on newspaper accounts, interviews, community reports and bulletins. Griffith relies on secondhand accounts, as she describes in setting up the project that “the stories are the children’s own stories, told to me by them” (x). In the more authoritative section about the event (Griffith switches between the “children’s own stories” and this style throughout the book), she references the location without citation, stating that on June 3, while searching for the “Alpine Pachucos,” sailors “stormed into the Carmen Theater, roamed up and down the aisles pulling boys from their seats, tearing clothes, [and] battering heads” (21).
 
Carmen Theater is also specifically mentioned in sources which have become key texts about Mexican American heritage. Like Griffith’s sociological exploration, these sources place the riots in a wider historical context, therefore only briefly describing the riots though the incident is significant in describing the challenges and clashes faced by second generation Mexican Americans in the 1940s. In the canonical Chicano Studies text book Occupied America, first published in 1972, Rodolfo Acuña ambitiously covers the history of Chicanos/as from Mesoamerican civilizations to the present-day period (a vantage point which obviously varies depending on which of the eight editions is consulted). Acuña recites a narrative that becomes familiar in researching the riot: “sailors went on a rampage — they broke into the Carmen Theater, tore zoot suits off customers, and beat up the youths. Police arrested the victims” (204). In describing the event, Acuña uses the phrase “sailor riots,” careful to use a label that shifts attention away from the wardrobe of the victims and toward the sailors most noted for acting out violently during the riots. Calling the event’s very name into question, Acuña develops a method for talking about the attack from “A Radical View of the 20th Century Chicano."
 

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  1. Pachuco Goes to the Movies Veronica Paredes

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