Eighty years ago this week, thousands of U.S. servicemen and civilians descended on downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding neighborhoods to hunt down young men wearing the big hats, bigger coats, and even bigger pants known as the zoot suit.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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Over the course of a week, these members of the Greatest Generation beat up and stripped down anyone who wore the style: Blacks, whites, Filipinos, but especially Mexican Americans, whom the press had demonized as pachucos (gangsters). The assaults happened after a year of fights between zooters and servicemen across Southern California, egged on by the Los Angeles Times and Hearst dailies.
The ensuing chaos made international headlines, sparked state and federal investigations, and has been remembered ever since as the Zoot Suit Riots.
Long seen as a low point in Mexican American history, the riots were reclaimed by Chicanos in the 1960s as an example of minorities facing off against an oppressive society. The current generation has commemorated those events with lowrider cruises, galas, and social media posts. Expect a slew of posts in the coming days, along with in-depth coverage by the local press, including the Times, where I’m a metro columnist and had a hand in shaping its anniversary coverage.
Public memory of the riots largely leans on the many academic books on the subject and Luis Valdez’s scintillating Zoot Suit play and film. But just as gripping are the following essays, studies, short stories, and dispatches written in the weeks, months, and years after the riots occurred. They capture the lead-up to the days of racist rage, what happened, and the aftermath but are rarely read today.
“Statistics”
The precursor to the riots was the so-called Sleepy Lagoon murder case. In 1942, the Los Angeles police rounded up hundreds of Mexican American men and women and put 22 young men on trial after Jose Diaz died from injuries sustained after an assault near the site of a party in modern-day Bell. One prosecution witness was L.A. County sheriff lieutenant Edward Duran Ayres, who wrote this three-page report, which theorized why Mexican American youth were supposedly prone to criminality. He considered poverty and racism but decided that the ultimate fault lay in their “Indian” blood, which carried the legacy of Aztec human sacrifice. “One cannot change the spots of a leopard,” Ayres infamously wrote. A jury found the Sleepy Lagoon defendants guilty of murder, although a state appellate court overturned the decision. But Ayres’s paper solidified for white Angelenos that Mexican American youth were to be feared.
“Zoot Suiters Learn Lesson in Fights with Servicemen”
The Times had long demonized Mexicans, but the paper took it to another level with its zoot-suiter coverage, breathlessly reporting on any purported pachuco attack after the Diaz murder and running opinion pieces and editorial cartoons ridiculing anyone who wore the baggy suits. During the riots, the newspaper ran photos of arrested and assaulted pachucos with snarky captions such as “Unconditional Surrender” and “Line Up for Booking.” That latter photo was accompanied by this June article, which began thusly: “Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights.” And it only got worse from there.
“Key Chains with No Keys”
The Chicago Defender, the nation’s premier Black newspaper, gave voice to the Black victims of the riots. Among its writers was legendary poet Langston Hughes, who devoted his June 19, 1943, column to the matter. While he assailed the bigotry of Los Angeles, he also directed his ire at “the better class of Negroes and Mexicans” who had dismissed zoot-suiters as a “disgrace to the race.… So you see, nice colored people, it would have been worth your while to start caring about the zoot-suiters a long time ago—before the mob starts tearing off your clothes, too.”
“Mrs. Roosevelt Blindly Stirs Race Discord”
In a June 16, 1943, press conference covered by the Associated Press, Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that anti-Mexican sentiments sparked the riots, stating, “For a long time, I’ve worried about the attitude toward Mexicans in California and the states along the border.” That led to a laughably petty editorial by theTimes, which accused the first lady of trying to create “a vicious international racial antagonism without a foundation,” claimed her remark bore “an amazing similarity to the Communist Party line propaganda,” and then tried to absolve itself of any role it might have played in the riots. “We have paid homage and honor to the Californians of Mexican descent among us,” the editorial whined. “We like Mexicans and we think they like us.” Talk about getting triggered.
“California: Zoot-Suit War”
Time magazine was hardly a liberal publication during World War II, but even it decried the blatant bigotry that fueled the Zoot Suit Riots. In this June 21, 1943, dispatch, the magazine described attackers as a “Panzer division,” claimed that law enforcement “seemed complaisant [sic]” in the mayhem, and summed up the entire fiasco as “a shameful example of what happens to wartime emotions without wartime discipline.”
“Zoot Riots Are Race Riots”
Writing in the NAACP magazine the Crisis a month after the riots, Chester B. Himes lambasted the military leaders who let servicemen preparing to ship off to fight the Axis powers rampage through Los Angeles, suggesting they had chosen Black and brown bodies “as the ideal place in which to give white southerners leave.” Himes, who would go on to become a cult crime novelist, alternated his outrage with bitter humor: “What could make the white people more happy than to see their uniformed sons sapping up some dark-skinned people? It proved beyond all doubt the bravery of white servicemen, their gallantry.”
“In the Flow of Time”
First appearing in the liberal publication Common Ground in 1948, the piece by author Beatrice Griffith fictionalized the Zoot Suit Riots in a gripping narrative informed by the insights and lingo of the Mexican American youth she’d helped as a social worker during those years. This short story was the opening chapter in Griffith’s American Me, a brilliant collection of fiction and nonfiction about Mexican Americans in Los Angeles during the 1940s, which I wrote about for Alta Journal last year.
“Pachuco Folk Heroes—They Were First to Be Different”
One of the reasons Times columnist Ruben Salazar was so brilliant was that he was attuned to what youth culture was thinking and feeling. Nearly 30 years after the riots, he was among the first mainstream voices to realize that the Chicano generation had transformed the pachucos of the Zoot Suit Riots from victims to warriors. “Pachuchos are becoming folk heroes because they were rebels,” Salazar wrote on July 17, 1970. “And sensitive people need to understand rebellion because they know it is not created in a vacuum. There’s always a reason for rebellion.”•
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
