The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

Two events in wartime Los Angeles thrust young Mexican American zoot suiters into the media spotlight. In the Sleepy Lagoon incident, a man was murdered during a mass brawl in August 1942. Twenty-two young men, all but one of Mexican descent, were tried and convicted of the crime. In the Zoot Suit Riots of June 1943, white servicemen attacked young zoot suiters, particularly Mexican Americans, throughout Los Angeles. The Chicano movement of the 1960s–1980s cast these events as key moments in the political awakening of Mexican Americans and pachucos as exemplars of Chicano identity, resistance, and style. While pachucas and other Mexican American women figured in the two incidents, they were barely acknowledged in later Chicano movement narratives. Catherine S. Ramírez draws on interviews she conducted with Mexican American women who came of age in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as she recovers the neglected stories of pachucas. Investigating their relative absence in scholarly and artistic works, she argues that both wartime U.S. culture and the Chicano movement rejected pachucas because they threatened traditional gender roles. Ramírez reveals how pachucas challenged dominant notions of Mexican American and Chicano identity, how feminists have reinterpreted la pachuca, and how attention to an overlooked figure can disclose much about history making, nationalism, and resistant identities.

• From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front
• From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
• The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
• Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
• Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s
• Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century
• A Life In The Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition
• Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory
• American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (American Political Thought (University Press of Kansas))
• The Zoot Suit Riots: The History of the Racial Attacks in Los Angeles during World War II