Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces

Blood on the Pavement

The Zoot Suit Riots have been exhaustively covered by historians, sociologists, journalists, psychologists, and anthropologists from various time periods, and though scenes in theaters such as RKO, Bijou, Carmen and Orpheum  appear in nearly every account that recalls that week of “rioting,” the significance and recurrence of this theatrical context has rarely been explored. During the Zoot Suit Riots, sailors strayed from official strategies of war, and designed and mobilized their own agendas of violence. Though they would be reprimanded by a Governor’s Citizens Committee and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly, and their own systems of authority privately, the damage they caused to the collective psyche and cultural memory of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles would be much more elusive and difficult to document. This section collects accounts from this significant event in Los Angeles’ Chicano history, focusing on what it means that these stories feature the movie theater as a backdrop.
 

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  1. Pachuco Goes to the Movies Veronica Paredes

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