Zoot Suit Riots Timeline
1930s
The population in Los Angeles grows to one million by 1930. The flow of Mexican refugees drops precipitously as the Revolution ends and as the state begins to deport thousands. Dust Bowl migrants settle into the segregated communities of Los Angeles and many white working-class families begin to mix with Mexican Americans. African Americans of the Great Migration settle around Central Avenue and Los Angeles becomes a mecca for jazz artists like Coleman Hawkins, T-Bone Walker, and Zoot Sims. Nationally-renowned musicians like Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw, and Cab Calloway include Los Angeles in their tours and white, Black, Latino, and Asian youth thrill to jazz culture.
1940s
The number of immigrants from Mexico dramatically rises again and an estimated 250,000 "Mexicans" (including Mexican Americans) live in Los Angeles. Most of them are poor and part of the working class. Although Mexicans are classified as "white" for census purposes, their reception in Los Angeles is closer to that of African Americans. Their military enlistment rates are high.
1940
The Naval Reserve Armory is built on part of the mostly Mexican-American area of Chavez Ravine.
1941
December 7: Japanese naval and air forces attack Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. President Roosevelt will ask Congress to declare war on Japan the following day, and on Germany by December 11.
1942
February 19: U.S. Army soldiers begin enforcing Executive Order 9066, the presidential decree evacuating all Japanese nationals and U.S. citizens of Japanese descent from the West Coast. In Los Angeles, Little Tokyo disappears and thousands of Japanese-American citizens are deported out of the city.
June 12: Nineteen-year-old Frank Torres is ambushed and shot to death outside a track meet at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The ensuing chaos results in a near riot. The event provokes growing concern that wartime juvenile delinquency is out of control. Newspapers begin to feature stories about Mexican boy gangs. July 27: Los Angeles policemen try to break up a craps game at the c1880s
The railroads arrive in Los Angeles. They launch an era of growth and expansion; the population doubles in a decade.
1890–1910
By 1910, the population of Los Angeles stands at 100,000. The largest groups of immigrants come from Germany, Canada, and England. The Mexican immigrant population is around 800, almost equal to that of Italians, Russians, and Swedes.
1910–1920
As Mexico plunges into a decade of revolution, the population of refugees from Mexico swells to over 21,000 by 1920. Mexicans become the largest immigrant group in Los Angeles.
1920s
The aggressive marketing of California real estate creates large enclaves of white, middle-class, conservative Midwesterners in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Nativism and support for the Ku Klux Klan is strong in certain areas of greater Los Angeles. Mexican-American neighborhoods located downtown are destroyed for the expansion of civic areas, including the new Civic Center. orner of Pomeroy and Mark Streets in Boyle Heights. The largely Mexican-American crowd swarms the police and fights back. The incident provokes growing concerns that the Los Angeles Police Department, reduced by the wartime draft, is incapable of insuring order.
August 1–2: A fight breaks out between kids from the 38th Street and Downey neighborhoods near a reservoir on the Williams Ranch, nicknamed the "Sleepy Lagoon" after a popular song. Hank Leyvas is among those who are beaten, and Leyvas, reinforced by friends from 38th Street, return to the scene to seek retribution. While looking for the Downey boys, the group comes upon a party at the nearby Delgadillo home. After a fight breaks out between the 38th Street youth and the Delgadillo party, some young women from 38th Street find party guest José Díaz lying on the ground, bruised, bleeding, and unconscious. The fight breaks up once police are called. Díaz is rushed to the hospital, where he dies soon afterward.
August 3: The Evening Herald & Express brings its coverage of Mexican boy gangs to the front page for the first time. The "Sleepy Lagoon" murder is the cover page story.
August 4: The Los Angeles Times prints a front-page story about the police dragnet that follows the murder. Six hundred people are brought in for questioning and the Firestone sub-station is filled with teen boys and girls, predominantly Mexican American, suspected of involvement in the murder at the Williams Ranch. Lorena Encinas, who will later be imprisoned for not cooperating, refuses to speak to police, fearful that doing so will implicate her younger brother, Louis.
October 13: A criminal case, People v. Zammora goes to trial. The largest mass trial in California history includes as defendants 17 of the 22 boys indicted. Five of the boys' families are able to afford separate trials. Louis Encinas escapes indictment altogether. The Honorable Charles W. Fricke—also known as "San Quentin Fricke" because he has sent more convicts to San Quentin than any other California judge—presides over the trial. Tenacious defense lawyer George Shibley is among the seven lawyers representing the 17 defendants. The young women who were detained along with the defendants refuse to testify during the trial—and many pay the price, ending up in a notorious girls reformatory without benefit of trial or jury.
Late October: Labor organizer LaRue McCormick founds The Citizens' Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth and appeals to the Congress of Spanish-Speaking People and other Mexican-American civic and cultural organizations for help.
December: The Los Angeles tabloid Sensation publishes an exposé on Mexican gangs authored by Clem Peoples, Chief of the Criminal Division of the Sheriff's Office. The tabloid sells more than 10,000 copies.
December 31: According to policemen, "a drunken Pachuco" shoots and kills a policeman at a North Main Street café. Around this time, military personnel and young civilians clash in the streets once each week, on average.
1943
January 12: People v. Zammora ends. Five of the 17 defendants in the case (Andrew Acosta, Eugene Carpio, Victor Segobia, Benny Alvarez, and Joe Valenzuela) are found guilty of assault and sentenced to six months to one year in jail, road camp, or the county farm. Nine are found guilty of second degree murder (Ysmael Parra, Manuel Reyes, Victor Thompson, Henry Ynostroza, Gus Zamora, Manuel Delgado, John Matuz, Jack Melendez, and Angel Padilla) and sentenced to five years to life. And three are found guilty of first degree murder (Henry Leyvas, Jose "Chepe" Ruiz, and Robert Telles) and sentenced to life imprisonment. The 12 found guilty of murder are sent to San Quentin State Prison. In separate trials secured by their parents, five of the 22 indicted are acquitted: Joe Carpio, Richard Gastelum, Edward Grandpre, Ruben Pena, and Daniel Verdugo.
Spring: Clashes between servicemen and Mexican-American youth occur up to two to three times per day.
May: The Venice Riot. High-school boys at the Aragon Ballroom complain that "Zoots" have taken over the beachfront. Soldiers appear at the ballroom claiming a sailor has been stabbed. An estimated crowd of 500 sailors and civilians attack Mexican-American young people as they exit the dance. The fighting continues until 2 a.m. The police arrest Mexican-American youth "for their own protection."
May 31: Twelve sailors and soldiers clash violently with Mexican-American boys near downtown. Seaman Second Class Joe Dacy Coleman, U.S.N., is badly wounded.
June 3: Approximately 50 sailors leave the Naval Reserve Armory with concealed weapons to avenge the attack on Coleman. They target the neighborhoods near the Armory and attack anyone they can find wearing zoot suits—giving birth to the name "Zoot Suit Riots".
June 4: Rioting servicemen conduct "search and destroy" raids on Mexican Americans in the downtown area—whether their victims are wearing zoot suits or not. The servicemen employ twenty taxis to look for zoot suiters.
June 5: The rioting continues with attacks on all “pachuco-looking" males. A group of musicians leaving the Aztec Recording Company on Third and Main Streets are attacked. Attorney Manuel Ruíz and other Mexican-American professionals meet with City officials. Carey McWilliams calls California Attorney General Robert Kenny to encourage Governor Earl Warren to appoint an investigatory commission.
June 6: The rioting escalates and spreads into East Los Angeles. Kenny meets with McWilliams regarding the investigation and creates the McGucken Committee. Chaired by the Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles, Joseph T. McGucken, the committee blames the press for its irresponsible tone and the police for overreacting to the riot.
June 7: The worst of the rioting violence occurs as soldiers, sailors, and marines from as far away as San Diego travel to Los Angeles to join in the fighting. Taxi drivers offer free rides to servicemen and civilians to the riot areas. Approximately 5,000 civilians and military men gather downtown. The riot spreads into the predominantly African-American section of Watts.
June 8: Senior military officials bring the riot under control by declaring Los Angeles off-limits to all sailors, soldiers, and marines. The Shore Patrol is under orders to arrest any disorderly personnel. The Los Angeles City Council passes a resolution banning the wearing of zoot suits in public, punishable by a 50-day jail term.
June 9: Sporadic confrontations continue, but not at nearly the same intensity.
June 18: An editorial in the Los Angeles Times reacts strongly to Eleanor Roosevelt's referring to the riot as a "race riot."
November: Ben Margolis, Jr., representing the Sleepy Lagoon defendants, delivers a 508-page appeal brief to the Second District Court of Appeals. November 4: The Citizens' Committee for the Defense of Mexican-American Youth is reorganized as the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. Carey McWilliams becomes the national chair and Alice Greenfield McGrath becomes the executive secretary of the new organization.
1944
May 15: The Sleepy Lagoon appeal begins in the Second District Court of Appeals. Margolis makes oral arguments.
June: The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee begins selling Guy Endore's The Sleepy Lagoon Mystery to raise funds. More than 25,000 copies are sold within three months.
August 18: Manny Delgado, the first defendant released on parole, goes to work for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee.
October 2: The Second District Court of Appeals overturns the Sleepy Lagoon verdicts and Judge Clement Nye dismisses the case. Hank Leyvas and the others are released with their records cleared.
1945
January 1: The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee officially disbands.
1971
Hank Leyvas dies of a heart attack.
1972
Louis Encinas commits suicide after a failed bank robbery. Article by Carey McWilliams: The Zoot Suit Riots (Written in 1943)
On the evening of Thursday, June 3, the Alpine Club—a group made up of youngsters of Mexican descent—held a meeting in a police substation in Los Angeles. They met in the police station, at the invitation of an officer, because of the circumstance that the nearby public school happened to be closed. With a police officer present, they met to discuss their problems, foremost of which, at this meeting, was the urgent question of how best to preserve the peace in their locality. At the conclusion of the meeting, they were taken in squad cars to the street corner nearest the neighborhood in which most of them lived. The squad cars were scarcely out of sight when the boys were assaulted. Thus began the recent weekend race riots in Los Angeles.
On the following nights of June 4, 5, and 6, various attacks were made upon so called "zootsuiters" in Los Angeles. These attacks reached a fine frenzy on Monday evening, June 7, when a mob of a thousand or more soldiers and sailors, with some civilians, set out to round up all zootsuiters within reach. The mob pushed its way into every important downtown motion picture theater, ranged up and down the aisles, and grabbed Mexicans out of their seats. Mexicans and a few Negroes were taken into the streets, beaten, kicked around, their clothing torn. Mobs ranged the length of Main Street in downtown Los Angeles (a distance of some ten or twelve blocks), got as far into the Negro section as Twelfth and Central (just on the edge of the district), and then turned back through the Mexican sections on the east side. Zootsuiters, so called, were attacked in the streets, in the theaters, in the bars; streetcars were stopped and searched for Mexicans; and boys as young as twelve and thirteen years of age were beaten. Perhaps not more than half the victims were actually wearing zoot suits. In several cases on Main Street, in downtown Los Angeles, Mexicans were stripped of their clothes and left lying naked on the pavements (front page pictures of these victims were gleefully displayed in such sedate sheets as the Los Angeles Times). During all of this uproar, both regular and special police were observed in the streets, outside the theaters, and, in some cases, they were even noted going ahead of the mob. That there was going to be trouble on Main Street on Monday night was known throughout the community for at least twenty-four hours in advance. Crowds collected there, in fact, in anticipation of the fracas. On the following nights the same type of rioting occurred on a smaller scale in Los Angeles, with similar disturbances in Pasadena, Long Beach, and San Diego.
Immediate responsibility for the outbreak of the riots must be placed upon the Los Angeles press and the Los Angeles police. For more than a year now, the press (and particularly the Hearst press) has been building up antiMexican sentiment in Los Angeles. Using the familiar Harlem crimewave technique, the press has headlined every case in which a Mexican has been arrested, featured photographs of Mexicans dressed in zoot suits, checked back over the criminal records to "prove" that there has been an increase in Mexican "crime," and constantly needled the police to make more arrests. This campaign reached such a pitch, during the Sleepy Lagoon case in August 1942, that the OWI [Office of War Information] sent a representative to Los Angeles to reason with the publishers. The press was most obliging: it dropped the word "Mexican" and began to feature "zoot suit." The constant repetition of the phrase "zoot suit," coupled with Mexican names and pictures of Mexicans, had the effect of convincing the public that all Mexicans were zootsuiters and all zootsuiters were criminals; ergo, all Mexicans were criminals. On Sunday night and Monday morning (June 6 and 7), stories appeared in the press warning that an armed mob of five hundred zootsuiters was going to engage in acts of retaliation Monday night (thus ensuring a good turnout for the show that evening).
At the time of the Sleepy Lagoon case last year, the police launched a campaign, which coincided perfectly with the newspaper campaign, against "Mexican crime." Almost on the eve of a speech by Vice President Wallace in Los Angeles on the good neighbor policy, police arrested more than three hundred Mexican youngsters in what the Los Angeles Times referred to as "the biggest roundup since prohibition days." At about this time, Captain Ayres of the sheriff's office submitted a report to the grand jury in which he characterized the Mexican as being "biologically" predisposed toward criminal behavior. For more than a year this campaign of police terrorization has continued. Prowl cars have been cruising through the Mexican section constantly, youngsters have been ordered off the streets and "frisked" whenever two or more have been found together, and persistent complaints of police brutality have issued from both the Mexican and the Negro communities. There are, of course, some fine officers on the force—men who know and understand the problem. To some extent, also, the police have been goaded into the use of repressive measures by the press and by the race baiting of some local officials. The manner in which the problem of the Japanese evacuees has been kept before the public, for example, has had a tendency to make people race conscious. Nor have some local officials yet changed their attitudes. "Mayor Pledges Two Fisted Action. No Wrist Slap," read a headline in the Los Angeles Examiner (June 10). At the same time, the attitude of certain military officials has also been rather shocking.
The "official version" of the riots, adopted by all the major newspapers, is now as follows: the soldiers and sailors acted in self defense, and most emphatically, there was no element of race prejudice involved ("ZootSuit Gangsters Plan War on Navy”—headline, the Los Angeles Daily News, June 8, 1943). This theory is desperately repeated, despite the fact that only Mexicans and Negroes were singled out for attack. As for prejudice against Mexicans—from whom we acquired so many elements of our “culture"—why, the very suggestion of such a thought would seem to be abhorrent to the post riot conscience of every publisher in Los Angeles. In fact, the fanciest journalistic double talk that I have seen in the Los Angeles press during a residence of twenty one years appeared in the editorials of June 11.
Several facts need to be rather dogmatically asserted: 1. There are no "zootsuit" gangs in Los Angeles in the criminal sense of the word "gang." The pachuco "gangs" are loosely organized neighborhood or geographical groups; they are not tied together into an "organization." Many of them are, in effect, nothing more than boys' clubs without a clubhouse. 2. Juvenile delinquency has increased in Los Angeles since the war, but while delinquency among Mexican youth has risen as part of this general situation, it has actually increased less than that of other ethnic groups and less than the citywide average for all groups. 3. Much of the miscellaneous crime that the newspapers have been shouting about has been committed, not by youngsters, but by men. 4. While individual Mexicans may, in a few cases, have attacked soldiers and sailors (and, incidentally, the reverse of this proposition is true), it is merely the craziest nonsense to suggest that the soldiers and sailors were driven to mob violence in self defense. 5. It should be kept in mind that about 98 percent of Mexican youth in Los Angeles is American-raised, American-educated. Like most second-generation immigrant groups, they have their special problems. But their actual record for law observance is, all things considered, exceptionally good.
While the riots have now subsided (business has been complaining about the cancellation of military leaves), the situation itself has not been corrected. In the absence of a full and open investigation, the public has been left with the general impression (a) that the soldiers and sailors acted in self defense; and (b) that, all things considered, the riots were "wholesome" and had a "good effect." Resentment of the riots in the Mexican and Negro communities has reached an intensity and bitterness that could not be exaggerated. While Governor Warren promptly appointed an investigating committee, it is painfully apparent that the committee intends to "report" and not to investigate. . . .
It requires no imagination to appreciate the consequences of these riots. According to the United Press (June 11 ), "Radio Tokyo yesterday seized upon the Los Angeles disorders." The exploitation of the riots by Axis propagandists, however, is only part of the story. One township alone, on the east side of Los Angeles, has provided twenty seven hundred men of Mexican descent who are now serving in the armed forces. These men have families living on the east side. If space permitted, I should like to quote what a young army sergeant—of Mexican descent—said to me recently about the riots. “It would make excellent copy”. Zoot Suit Riots Primary Sources
This document contains articles from the following sources: ● Bulletin in Dance Hall (Source 1) ● Recruiting Political Cartoon (Source 2) ● World War II Leaders Political Cartoon (Source 3) ● Zoot Suit Style Political Cartoon (Source 4) ● Zoot Cat (Source 5) ● Simplicity Pattern (Source 6) ● Casualty Photograph (Source 7) ● Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1943 (Source A) ● New York Times, June 7, 1943 (Source B) ● Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1943 (Source C) ● La Opinion June 9, 1943 (Spanish language newspaper from LA) (Source D) ● New York Times, June 10, 1943 (Source E) ● Excelsior, June 10, 1943 (Spanish language paper from Mexico City) (Source F) ● New York Times, June 11, 1943 (two articles) (Source G) ● New York Times, June 13, 1943 (Source H) ● New York Times, June 14, 1943 (Source I) ● Time Magazine, June 21, 1943 (Source J) ● Official Memoranda (3) (Source K)