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• 1 media/map-of-progress_navigation-test-lowres.jpg media/map-of-progress_navigation-test-lowres.jpg 2015-05-28T18:30:44-07:00 Blood on the Pavement: Carmen 15 plain 2015-09-22T00:45:14-07:00 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."
   
• 1 2015-05-28T18:45:47-07:00 Ejected Spectator: Challenging Representations II 9 plain 2015-06-28T14:48:03-07:00 Among the expansive number of sociological and fictional accounts that portray the events of the Zoot Suit Riots from the 1940s and 50s, Alegría’s story stands out not only in its aim to “humanize” the pachuco, but also in formally experimenting with contrasting the “pachuco’s” lived experiences and representations of the pachuco. In her book American Me, Beatrice Griffith uses a similar approach of alternating between the official record captured in newspaper accounts and her own speculative retellings of the events (which were based on interviews conducted as part of her research as a social worker). Published five years after the Zoot Suit Riots, this work predates the publication of Alegría’s short story. Griffith weaves together sociological, fictional, economic and historical accounts to portray the experiences of Mexican Americans during the 1930s and 1940s in Los Angeles. Her narrative alternates between sociological analysis and adaptations of interviews with her research subjects. Theorist and writer Antonio Viego has described the book, and presumably this approach, as both “corny and compelling” (138). Perhaps this is true for Viego’s reframing of Latino studies through Lacanian psychoanalysis, and vice versa – but for its formal experimentation in engaging with this generation’s history and sociological context, it is quite innovative for its time – attempting to preserve aspects of Mexican American youth culture largely dismissed in mainstream accounts.
  
  While Griffith’s project does depict the Zoot Suit Riots in some detail, Alegría’s short story raises questions more pertinent to this study. “¿A qué lado de la cortina?” is unique in how evocatively it conjures the complicated relationship a Mexican American teenager might have with American popular culture in 1943. Alegría describes the centrality of American popular culture in Pancho’s everyday life, from the American war film he watches to his notions of what being Gary Cooper or living in the suburbs must be like, complete with Tarzan stories on the radio and an Oldsmobile waiting in the driveway. Alegría’s portrait of Pancho reveals a network of subjective experiences in the individual and collective violence launched during the riots, but it also demonstrates the conflicting mechanisms of identification and disidentification with Hollywood narratives that mark acts of cinematic spectatorship during this period. As Pancho watches Gary Cooper struggle with his desire for Ginger Rogers on-screen, he is able to nibble on the neck of his own blonde-haired, blue-eyed starlet in Nancy. It is explained that Nancy is drawn to Pancho’s “brown and silky skin,” and while his projection of Ginger Rogers onto Nancy is obvious, the story also reveals how Nancy, as a young girl, played with dolls “dressed as bullfighters, drawn with long lashes.” Both Pancho and Nancy are filled with desires influenced by popular cultural representations. The movie theater is therefore an ideal place to dramatize their desires, dreams, and their sudden transformation into terror.
   
  In Alegría’s story, the scene of entertainment is moved from inside the movie theater outward to the city street and sidewalk. In this story, instead of being cast in a role similar to the one Gary Cooper plays in the film he and Nancy watch on their date, Pancho is cast as the villain who offends wartime jingoism. Within this narrative, spread across the newspaper front pages in 1943, racist logics prevail and Pancho becomes an object of ridicule and abuse.

  “Spectators sat on the rooftops of automobiles and on stopped streetcars. Like joyous exhalations, photographic flashes erupted from the middle of a crowd…The crowd let out a howl of satisfaction. Old women now rubbed shoulders with the sailors and tried to get to the first row, when the undergarments began to be destroyed.”