Constellations of Struggle Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Legacy for Ethnic Studies Gaye Theresa Johnson Charlotta Bass was ecstatic. In early 1949, as editor of the most enduring black newspaper in Los Angeles, she was invited to attend the Women’s Asiatic Conference in Peking. “It never dawned on me,” she wrote, “that I would ever have the opportunity even to consider a visit to that part of the world” (Bass 1960, 156). From the time Bass began editing the California Eagle in 1912, her writings and activism made black Los Angeles relevant both to local communities of color and to international organizations. As a member of the sponsoring committee for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, she campaigned forcefully against the racial brutalities inflicted upon Mexican American zoot suiters during the summer of 1943. Activist Alice McGrath recalled that the California Eagle was “one of the first papers to recognize and publicize the racist and discriminatory nature” of the Sleepy Lagoon case (1987), doing so even before La Opinión, the city’s Spanish-language daily. When Bass arrived at the airport for her trip to China, she was detained. In an organized effort, U.S. officials delayed the processing of her paperwork for so long that she missed her flight. After a night’s wrestle with sleep, I awoke the next morning . with a renewed determination to make the California Eagle a bigger and better newspaper . and as I settled down to the production of the next issue . I whispered to it, “I can’t go to China, but you can. And you will tell the people how disappointed I was.” (Bass 1960, 157) Efforts to build interethnic identification and solidarity are often accompanied by disappointment. Devastating consequences have resulted Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33:1 Spring 2008 © University of California Regents 155 Johnson at times from lapses in inter-community cooperation, but more often from organized efforts to undermine solidarity among aggrieved groups. Moreover, those efforts have been accompanied by divisive discourse, by language that measures the histories of interethnic struggles by their shortcomings rather than their successes. Understanding the legacy of Afro-Chicano coalitional politics in Los Angeles is one way to counter that disappointment: strategies deployed in the mutual activism of these communities can change the story that we tell ourselves about our history and our future. This essay examines the wartime activism of two women: Luisa Moreno and Charlotta Bass. It reveals interracial and antiracist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and important insights into the infra-politics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color. I choose these two women in part because of a particular, and what I consider a “mutual,” moment in struggle: their participation in the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (SLDC) in 1943. This participation, I argue, was one aspect of the activism of Bass and Moreno that generated new political sensibilities and alternative identities among the women and men in their respective racial/ethnic communities during World War II. Moreover, the plural, egalitarian, democratic, and intercultural “America” envisioned and enacted by these women, and by the artists, intellectu- als, and activists in their communities, makes the intersection between their particular political histories—and larger historical developments— particularly meaningful. Like Bass, Luisa Moreno was among the most visible women in labor and civil rights activism in the United States from the 1930s to 1950. The Guatemalan-born Moreno was a powerful force in the Los Angeles Chicano community beginning in 1935. Also like Bass, Moreno focused her activism on the efforts of one community but kept a steady emphasis on the common oppressions suffered by Chicano, African American, and Jewish communities in Los Angeles and San Diego. It may seem strange to examine Bass and Moreno together. No archived correspondence or anecdotal record of their interactions exists, even though they were active on the same committee and in the same communities at the same time. But it is important to consider them in a common framework GAYE THERESA JOHNSON , an assistant professor of black studies and Chicana/o studies at UC Santa Barbara, has published essays on Afro-Chicano culture, race and space in Los Angeles, and the Mexican influence on jazz in the borderlands. She is completing a manuscript titled “The Future Has a Past: Politics, Music and Memory in Afro-Chicano Los Angeles.” 156 Constellations of Struggle of World War II-era interracial, antiracist struggle for two reasons. First, Bass’s and Moreno’s work on the SLDC is representative of the grassroots mobilizations among black and Chicano communities during that period: it reveals a cultural world of unity and division. In neighborhoods on the west, south, and east sides of Los Angeles, blacks and Chicanos have shared more than histories of racism and segregation, of economic discrimination and immigrant exclusion, of brutality and inequality. Mutual struggles waged in response to institutional and social repression have created both moments and movements in which African Americans and Chicanos in Los Angeles have unmasked power imbalances, sought recognition, and forged solidarities by embracing the strategies, cultures, and politics of each other’s experiences. Second, studying these women together reveals a critical moment not visible when we study them individually, a moment in which the communities and struggles they respectively represented entered into the same “constellation” of struggle. My notion of “constellation” embraces an array of activities, histories, and identities that each woman symbolically brought with her to the SLDC. Similarly, the concept suggests the mobil- ity of many parts, as well as the ability to re-form around different nuclei. The constellations of struggle that informed the SLDC in turn produced a cross-racial and inter-community “inheritance” that we can draw upon in our own critical moment. When we examine this inheritance in compara- tive perspective, a critical moment is revealed, one that underscores the importance of understanding the potential of coalitional politics even when the gains are not immediate or do not appear radical. While the SLDC was not the most radical (or successful) coalition of the 1940s, the antiracist legacy left by its members and their communities provides important les- sons about both the histories and the future of interracial struggle among Mexican American, African American, and Anglo working-class people in Los Angeles. Moreover, it can reveal the kind of radical antiracist and egalitarian cultural politics that helped nurture and sustain working-class alliances, intellectual advances, and cultural practices that blurred the boundaries of hegemonic categories of race. These politics have resulted in critical interethnic challenges to structures of dominance in Los Angeles, making this story relevant to the history of diverse urban political cultures in every American city. 157 Johnson The SLDC and Coalitional Politics The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was formed in Los Angeles in 1943 by an interracial coalition of labor leaders, journalists, and community activists. Co-chaired by Luisa Moreno, labor organizer Bert Corona, and writer/activist Cary McWilliams, it included among its members Charlotta Bass, labor organizer Josefina Fierro de Bright, and Congress of Industrial Organizations activist Alice McGrath. For two years the SLDC fought for the release of several Chicanos convicted of murder by an all-white jury in the heavily publicized case of People v. Zammora. The case began when the body of José Diaz, a twenty-two-year-old farmworker, was found at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir in southeast Los Angeles. Twenty-two Chicanos were originally charged with criminal conspiracy in the death. Diaz had been seen leaving a neighbor’s birthday party early on the morning of August 2, 1942, in the company of two young men, but they were never questioned during the investigation or the ensuing trial. Instead, Los Angeles police used Díaz’s murder to launch a widespread attack on Mexican American youth, whom they perceived as unruly. Six hundred Chicanos were arrested, and the press consistently referred to Díaz and his assailants as gang members. Moreover, presiding judge Charles W. Fricke routinely allowed prosecution attorneys to make racist remarks about Mexicans during the trial. At the end of the trial, three of the defendants were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, nine were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to five years to life, five were convicted of assault and released for time served, and five were acquitted. Taken together, the judgments constituted the largest mass con- viction in California history. The defendants began serving their sentences in January 1943 (Acuña 1988, 112; Escobar 1999; Pagán 2003).1 During the trial, labor activist La Rue McCormick established an ad-hoc committee to publicize the events surrounding the case. After the defendants were sentenced, the committee reorganized as the SLDC. Carey McWilliams recalled, I wanted to make it clear that the committee would have to be broadened, because there was no way of raising the money that was needed with that committee; it was too narrow. You’d have to have some labor people on it, some prominent Jewish businessmen,