Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Main Menu Introduction Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Introduction, Start Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Histories Concealed Histories Concealed landing page Projecting 1943 Sense of Pachuca Broadway as Background Splash page for Broadway as Background / Background as Broadway Photo Essay: Marquee Stories Intro to photo essay: Marquee Stories Prototypes Exploring project prototypes Portfolio Ejected Spectators and Inactive Users: Locating Multimodal Historiography In Repurposed Media Spaces

Individual Frames of Reference

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The recurrence of movie theaters in these detailed descriptions, connecting racial discrimination to the riot, suggests the significance of the movie theater as a public space which left Mexican American and Black patrons vulnerable to violence. Accounts that focus on the stories of specific individuals function to: 1) garner sympathetic identification for a group vilified at the time by the mainstream press, the police force, and brutal groups of sailors and civilians; and 2) demonstrate how embedded the young people attacked were in sites of American entertainment and popular culture. For example the Time article uses this strategy, describing the experience of one young man:

Scores of cars loaded with soldiers and sailors poured into the area. Soon after dark a mob formed, surged down Broadway, crashed into the Orpheum Theater, went down the aisles shouting for pachucos to stand up. In the balcony the mob found 17-year-old Enrico Herrera, sitting with his girl. He and others were dragged downstairs to the street; the citizenry pushed back to give them room while he was beaten and stripped naked. The crowd howled. When the sailors had finished, the police dutifully edged up, took Herrera to the hospital.

Historian George Sánchez, decades later, in 1993, also puts a name to one individual in the canonical Becoming Mexican American:

On June 7, 1943, he [high school senior, Pedro García] went to see a movie at the RKO Theater on Hill Street, as he and many other Mexican American young people like him had done on countless Saturday nights. He had taken an aisle seat and was enjoying the picture when a group of Anglo American servicemen burst into the theater looking for Mexican ‘zoot suiters.’ They grabbed Pedro, dragging him outside the theater and into the street (267).

Many accounts of the riot’s most violent day, June 7, feature all of downtown’s movie theaters as the backdrop. They also begin by privileging the individual as an entry point into the chaos of the attacks. For one more example, in The Power of Zoot Luis Alvarez synthesizes deep historical research and oral histories to explore aspects around the history of the zoot suit that have largely been ignored, including aspects of the riots obscured by focusing only on Mexican American men as victims of the riot. While Alvarez’s historiographic interventions will be explored in a later section, he too begins a chapter on the Zoot Suit Riots with a specific name attached to a familiar story, this time coming from an oral history interview:

…Vicente Morales carefully dressed in one of his tailor-made zoot suits for a night on the town. The young Mexican American teenager planned to dance the night away with his girlfriend to the jazzy sounds of the Lionel Hampton Band at the Orpheum Theater. Midway through the show, however, Morales was accosted by a group of white sailors who, without provocation, began shoving him and screaming obscenity-laced insults. (155)

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