Museum of Resistance and Resilience

Racial Tensions and the Zoot Suit Riots

Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, WWII catalyzed xenophobia, and zoot suit wearers were viewed as WWII draft dodgers, even though there were high numbers of Mexican Americans in the military and most zoot suit wearers were also too young to serve. On May 31, 1943, a conflict between servicemen and Mexican American youths led to the beating of a US sailor; consequently, in retaliation, on June 3rd, 50 soldiers marched through downtown LA and attacked anyone wearing a zoot suit. In the days after, the heavily racially charged atmosphere resulted in a multitude of full-scale riots: mobs of servicemen attacked Latinos and African Americans, some who were not even wearing zoot suits, stripping them of their clothes and leaving them half naked and bloody on the ground, while police watched and only arrested the victims of these crimes (Andrews, 2015). While the exact cause of these riots are unclear, they were most definitely spurred on by the political climate: immigrant crime wave fears and stereotypes against Mexican Americans, believing that all are in gangs and all are inherently violent (O’Shaughnessy, 2017).

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