Blood on the Pavements
On Thursday evening, June 3, 1943, the Alpine Club—made up of youngsters of Mexican descent—held a meeting in a police substation in Los Angeles. Usually these meetings were held in a nearby public school but, since the school was closed, the boys had accepted the invitation of a police captain to meet in the substation. The principal business of the meeting, conducted in the presence of the police captain, consisted in a discussion of how gang-strife could best be avoided in the neighborhood. After the meeting had adjourned, the boys 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, not by a rival “gang” or “club,” but by hoodlum elements in the neighborhood. Of one thing the boys were sure: their assailants were not of Mexican descent.
Earlier the same evening a group of eleven sailors, on leave from their station in Los Angeles, were walking along the 1700 block on North Main Street in the center of one of the city’s worst slum areas. The surrounding neighborhood is predominantly Mexican. On one side of the street the dirty brick front of a large brewery hides from view a collection of ramshackle Mexican homes. The other side of the street consists of a series of small bars, boarded-up storefronts, and small shops. The area is well off the beaten paths and few servicemen found their way this far north on Main Street. As they were walking along the street, so they later stated, the sailors were set upon by a gang of Mexican boys. One of the sailors was badly hurt; the others suffered minor cuts and bruises. According to their story, the sailors were outnumbered about three to one.
When the attack was reported to the nearest substation, the police adopted a curious attitude. Instead of attempting to find and arrest the assailants, fourteen policemen remained at the station after their regular duty was over for the night. Then, under the command of a detective lieutenant, the “Vengeance Squad,” as they called themselves, set out “to clean up” the gang that had attacked the sailors. But—miracle of miracles!—when they arrived at the scene of the attack they could find no one to arrest—not a single Mexican—on their favorite charge of “suspicion of assault.” In itself this curious inability to find anyone to arrest—so strikingly at variance with what usually happened on raids of this sort—raises an inference that a larger strategy was involved. For the raid accomplished nothing except to get the names of the raiding officers in the newspapers and to whip up the anger of the community against the Mexican population, which may, perhaps, have been the reason for the raid. …
Thus began the so-called “Zoot Suit Race Riots” which were to last, in one form or another, for a week in Los Angeles.
1. The Taxicab Brigade
Taking the police raid as an official cue—a signal for action—about two hundred sailors decided to take the law into their own hands on the following night. Coming down into the center of Los Angeles from the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine (near the “Chinatown” area), they hired a fleet of twenty taxicabs. Once assembled, the “task force” proceeded to cruise straight through the center of town en route to the east side of Los Angeles where the bulk of the Mexicans reside. Soon the sailors in the lead-car sighted a Mexican boy in a zoot suit walking along the street. The “task force” immediately stopped and, in a few moments, the boy was lying on the pavement, badly beaten and bleeding. The sailors then piled back into the cabs and the caravan resumed its way until the next zoot-suiter was sighted, whereupon the same procedure was repeated. In these attacks, of course, the odds were pretty uneven: two hundred sailors to one Mexican boy. Four times this same treatment was meted out and four “gangsters”—two seventeen-year-old youngsters, one nineteen, and one twenty-three—were left lying on the pavements for the ambulances to pick up.
It is indeed curious that in a city like Los Angeles, which boasts that it has more police cars equipped with two-way radio than any other city in the world (Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1947), the police were apparently unable to intercept a caravan of twenty taxicabs, loaded with two hundred uniformed, yelling, bawdy sailors, as it cruised through the downtown and east-side sections of the city. At one point the police did happen to cross the trail of the caravan and the officers were apparently somewhat embarrassed over the meeting. For only nine of the sailors were taken into custody and the rest were permitted to continue on their merry way. No charges, however, were ever preferred against the nine.
Their evening’s entertainment over, the sailors returned to the foot of Chavez Ravine. There they were met by the police and the Shore Patrol. The Shore Patrol took seventeen of the sailors into custody and sent the rest up to the ravine to the Naval Armory. The petty officer who had led the expedition, and who was not among those arrested, gave the police a frank statement of things to come. “We’re out to do what the police have failed to do,” he said; “we’re going to clean up this situation. … Tonight [by then it was the morning of June fifth] the sailors may have the marines along.”1
The next day the Los Angeles press pushed the war news from the front page as it proceeded to play up the pavement war in Los Angeles in screaming headlines. “Wild Night in L.A.—Sailor Zooter Clash” was the headline in the Daily News. “Sailor Task Force Hits L.A. Zooters” bellowed the Herald-Express. A suburban newspaper gleefully reported that “zoot-suited roughnecks fled to cover before a task force of twenty taxicabs.” None of these stories, however, reported the slightest resistance, up to this point, on the part of the Mexicans.
True to their promise, the sailors were joined that night, June fifth, by scores of soldiers and marines. Squads of servicemen, arms linked, paraded through downtown Los Angeles four abreast, stopping anyone wearing zoot suits and ordering these individuals to put away their “drapes” by the following night or suffer the consequences. Aside from a few half-hearted admonitions, the police made no effort whatever to interfere with these heralds of disorder. However, twenty-seven Mexican boys, gathered on a street corner, were arrested and jailed that evening. While these boys were being booked “on suspicion” of various offenses, a mob of several hundred servicemen roamed the downtown section of a great city threatening members of the Mexican minority without hindrance or interference from the police, the Shore Patrol, or the Military Police.
On this same evening, a squad of sailors invaded a bar on the east side and carefully examined the clothes of the patrons. Two zoot-suit customers, drinking beer at a table, were peremptorily ordered to remove their clothes. One of them was beaten and his clothes were torn from his back when he refused to comply with the order. The other—they were both Mexicans—doffed his “drapes” which were promptly ripped to shreds. Similar occurrences in several parts of the city that evening were sufficiently alarming to have warranted some precautionary measures or to have justified an “out-of-bounds” order. All that the police officials did, however, was to call up some additional reserves and announce that any Mexicans involved in the rioting would be promptly arrested. That there had been no counterattacks by the Mexicans up to this point apparently did not enter into the police officers’ appraisal of the situation. One thing must be said for the Los Angeles police: it is above all consistent. When it is wrong, it is consistently wrong; when it makes a mistake, it will be repeated.
By the night of June sixth the police had worked out a simple formula for action. Knowing that wherever the sailors went there would be trouble, the police simply followed the sailors at a conveniently spaced interval. Six carloads of sailors cruised down Brooklyn Avenue that evening. At Ramona Boulevard, they stopped and beat up eight teenage Mexicans. Failing to find any Mexican zoot-suiters in a bar on Indiana Street, they were so annoyed that they proceeded to wreck the establishment. In due course, the police made a leisurely appearance at the scene of the wreckage but could find no one to arrest. Carefully following the sailors, the police arrested eleven boys who had been beaten up on Carmelita Street; six more victims were arrested a few blocks further on, seven at Ford Boulevard, six at Gifford Street—and so on straight through the Mexican east-side settlements. Behind them came the police, stopping at the same street corners “to mop up” by arresting the injured victims of the mob. By morning, some forty-four Mexican boys, all severely beaten, were under arrest.
2. Operation “Dixie”
The stage was now set for the really serious rioting of June seventh and eighth. Having featured the preliminary rioting as an offensive launched by sailors, soldiers, and marines, the press now whipped public opinion into a frenzy by dire warnings that Mexican zoot-suiters planned mass retaliations. To ensure a riot, the precise street corners were named at which retaliatory action was expected and the time of the anticipated action was carefully specified. In effect these stories announced a riot and invited public participation. “Zooters Planning to Attack More Servicemen,” headlined the Daily News; “Would jab broken bottlenecks in the faces of their victims, … Beating sailors’ brains out with hammers also on the program.” Concerned for the safety of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, the Herald-Express warned that “Zooters … would mass 500 strong.”
By way of explaining the action of the police throughout the subsequent rioting, it should be pointed out that, in June 1943, the police were on a bad spot. A man by the name of Beebe, arrested on a drunk charge, had been kicked to death in the Central Jail by police officers. Through the excellent work of an alert police commissioner, the case had finally been broken and, at the time of the riots, a police officer by the name of Compton Dixon was on trial in the courts. While charges of police brutality had been bandied about for years, this was the first time that a seemingly airtight case had been prepared. Shortly after the riots, a Hollywood police captain told a motion picture director that the police had touched off the riots “in order to give Dixie (Dixon) a break.” By staging a fake demonstration of the alleged necessity for harsh police methods, it was hoped that the jury would acquit Dixon. As a matter of fact, the jury did disagree and on July 2, 1943, the charges against Dixon were dismissed.
On Monday evening, June seventh, thousands of Angelenos, in response to twelve hours’ advance notice in the press, turned out for a mass lynching. Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot-suiter they could find. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ranged up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Street cars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked out of their seats, pushed into the streets, and beaten with sadistic frenzy. If the victims wore zoot suits, they were stripped of their clothing and left naked or half-naked on the streets, bleeding and bruised. Proceeding down Main Street from First to Twelfth, the mob stopped on the edge of the Negro district. Learning that the Negroes planned a warm reception for them, the mobsters turned back and marched through the Mexican east side spreading panic and terror.
Here is one of numerous eyewitness accounts written by Al Waxman, editor of The Eastside Journal:
At Twelfth and Central I came upon a scene that will long live in my memory. Police were swinging clubs and servicemen were fighting with civilians. Wholesale arrests were being made by the officers.
Four boys came out of a pool hall. They were wearing the zoot-suits that have become the symbol of a fighting flag. Police ordered them into arrest cars. One refused. He asked: “Why am I being arrested?” The police officer answered with three swift blows of the night-stick across the boy’s head and he went down. As he sprawled, he was kicked in the face. Police had difficulty loading his body into the vehicle because he was one-legged and wore a wooden limb. Maybe the officer didn’t know he was attacking a cripple.
At the next corner a Mexican mother cried out, “Don’t take my boy, he did nothing. He’s only fifteen years old. Don’t take him.” She was struck across the jaw with a night-stick and almost dropped the two and a half year old baby that was clinging in her arms. …
Rushing back to the east side to make sure that things were quiet here, I came upon a band of servicemen making a systematic tour of East First Street. They had just come out of a cocktail bar where four men were nursing bruises. Three autos loaded with Los Angeles policemen were on the scene but the soldiers were not molested. Farther down the street the men stopped a streetcar, forcing the motorman to open the door and proceeded to inspect the clothing of the male passengers. “We’re looking for zoot-suits to burn,” they shouted. Again the police did not interfere. …Half a block away … I pleaded with the men of the local police substation to put a stop to these activities. “It is a matter for the military police,” they said.
Throughout the night the Mexican communities were in the wildest possible turmoil. Scores of Mexican mothers were trying to locate their youngsters and several hundred Mexicans milled around each of the police substations and the Central Jail trying to get word of missing members of their families. Boys came into the police stations saying: “Charge me with vagrancy or anything, but don’t send me out there!” pointing to the streets where other boys, as young as twelve and thirteen years of age, were being beaten and stripped of their clothes. From affidavits which I helped prepare at the time, I should say that not more than half of the victims were actually wearing zoot-suits. A Negro defense worker, wearing a defense-plant identification badge on his workclothes, was taken from a street car and one of his eyes was gouged out with a knife. Huge half-page photographs, showing Mexican boys stripped of their clothes, cowering on the pavements, often bleeding profusely, surrounded by jeering mobs of men and women, appeared in all the Los Angeles newspapers. As Al Waxman most truthfully reported, blood had been “spilled on the streets of the city.”
At midnight on June seventh, the military authorities decided that the local police were completely unable or unwilling to handle the situation, despite the fact that a thousand reserve officers had been called up. The entire downtown area of Los Angeles was then declared “out of bounds” for military personnel. This order immediately slowed down the pace of the rioting. The moment the Military Police and Shore Patrol went into action, the rioting quieted down. On June eighth the city officials brought their heads up out of the sand, took a look around, and began issuing statements. The district attorney, Fred N. Howser, announced that the “situation is getting entirely out of hand,” while Mayor Fletcher Bowron thought that “sooner or later it will blow over.” The chief of police, taking a count of the Mexicans in jail, cheerfully proclaimed that “the situation has now cleared up.” All agreed, however, that it was quite “a situation.”
Unfortunately “the situation” had not cleared up; nor did it blow over. It began to spread to the suburbs where the rioting continued for two more days. When it finally stopped, the Eagle Rock Advertiser mournfully editorialized: “It is too bad the servicemen were called off before they were able to complete the job. … Most of the citizens of the city have been delighted with what has been going on.” County Supervisor Roger Jessup told the newsmen: “All that is needed to end lawlessness is more of the same action as is being exercised by the servicemen!” While the district attorney of Ventura, an outlying county, jumped on the bandwagon with a statement to the effect that “zoot suits are an open indication of subversive character.” This was also the opinion of the Los Angeles City Council which adopted a resolution making the wearing of zoot-suits a misdemeanor! On June eleventh, hundreds of handbills were distributed to students and posted on bulletin boards in a high school attended by many Negroes and Mexicans which read: “Big Sale. Second-Hand Zoot Suits. Slightly Damaged. Apply at Nearest U.S. Naval Station. While they last we have your Size.”
3. When The Devil Is Sick …
Egging on the mob to attack Mexicans in the most indiscriminate manner, the press developed a fine technique in reporting the riots. “44 Zooters Jailed in Attacks on Sailors” was the chief headline in the Daily News of June seventh; “Zoot Suit Chiefs Girding for War on Navy” was the headline in the same paper on the following day. The moralistic tone of this reporting is illustrated by a smug headline in the Los Angeles Times of June seventh: “Zoot Suiters Learn Lesson in Fight with Servicemen.” The riots, according to the same paper, were having “a cleansing effect.” An editorial in the Herald-Express said that the riots “promise to rid the community of … those zoot-suited miscreants.” While Mr. Manchester Boddy, in a signed editorial in the Daily News of June ninth, excitedly announced that “the time for temporizing is past. … The time has come to serve notice that the City of Los Angeles will no longer be terrorized by a relatively small handful of morons parading as zoot suit hoodlums. To delay action now means to court disaster later on.” As though there had been any “temporizing,” in this sense, for the prior two years!
But once the Navy had declared the downtown section of Los Angeles “out of bounds,” once the Mexican ambassador in Washington had addressed a formal inquiry to Secretary of State Hull, and once official Washington began to advise the local minions of the press of the utterly disastrous international effects of the riots, in short when the local press realized the consequences of its own lawless action, a great thunderous cry for “unity,” and “peace,” and “order” went forth. One after the other, the editors began to disclaim all responsibility for the riots which, two days before, had been hailed for their “salutary” and “cleansing” effect.
Thus on June eleventh the Los Angeles Times, in a pious mood, wrote that,
at the outset, zoot-suiters were limited to no specific race; they were Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Negro. The fact that later on their numbers seemed to be predominantly Latin was in itself no indictment of that race at all. No responsible person at any time condemned Latin-Americans as such.
Feeling a twinge of conscience, Mr. Boddy wrote that “only a ridiculously small percentage of the local Mexican population is involved in the so-called gang demonstrations. Every true Californian has an affection for his fellow citizens of Mexican ancestry that is as deep rooted as the Mexican culture that influences our way of living, our architecture, our music, our language, and even our food.” This belated discovery of the Spanish-Mexican cultural heritage of California was, needless to say, rather ironic in view of the fact that the ink was not yet dry on Mr. Boddy’s earlier editorial in which he had castigated the Mexican minority as “morons.” To appreciate the ironic aspects of “the situation,” the same newspapers that had been baiting Mexicans for nearly two years now began to extol them.2
As might have been expected, this post-mortem mood of penitence and contrition survived just long enough for some of the international repercussions of the riots to quiet down. Within a year, the press and the police were back in the same old groove. On July 16, 1944, the Los Angeles Times gave front-page prominence to a curious story under the heading: “Youthful Gang Secrets Exposed.” Indicating no source, identifying no spokesman, the story went on to say that “authorities of the Superior Court” had unearthed a dreadful “situation” among juvenile delinquents. Juveniles were using narcotics, marijuana, and smoking “reefers.” Compelled to accept drug addiction, “unwilling neophytes” were dragooned into committing robberies and other crimes. Young girls were tattooed with various “secret cabalistic symbols” of gang membership. The high pompadours affected by the cholitas, it was said, were used to conceal knives and other “weapons.” Two theories were advanced in the story by way of “explaining” the existence of these dangerous gangs: first, that “subversive groups” in Los Angeles had organized them; and, second, that “the gangs are the result of mollycoddling of racial groups.” In view of the record, one is moved to inquire, what mollycoddling? by the police? by the juvenile authorities? by the courts? Backing up the news story, an editorial appeared in the Times on July eighteenth entitled: “It’s Not a Nice Job But It Has to Be Done.” Lashing out at “any maudlin and misguided sympathy for the ‘poor juveniles,’” the editorial went on to say that “stern punishment is what is needed: stern and sure punishment. The police and the Sheriff’s men should be given every encouragement to go after these young gangsters” (emphasis mine).
Coincident with the appearance of the foregoing news story and editorial, the Juvenile Court of Los Angeles entered a most remarkable order in its minutes on July 31, 1944. The order outlined a plan by which Mexican wards of the Juvenile Court, over sixteen years of age, might be turned over to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad for a type of contract-employment. A form of contract, between the parents of the youngsters and the railroad, was attached to the order. The contract provided that the ward was to work “as a track laborer” at 58½¢ per hour; that $1.03 per day was to be deducted for board, $2.50 per month for dues in a hospital association, and 10¢ a day for laundry. It was also provided that one-half of the pay was to be turned over to the probation officers to be held in trust for the ward. That this order was specifically aimed at Mexican juveniles is clearly shown by the circumstance that the court, prior to approving the arrangement, had first secured its approval by a committee of “representative” leaders of the Mexican-American community.
4. The Strange Case of the Silk Panties
All of this, one will say—the Sleepy Lagoon case, the riots, etc.—belongs to the past. But does it? On the morning of July 21, 1946, a thirteen-year-old Mexican boy, Eugene Chavez Montenegro, Jr., was shot and killed by a deputy sheriff in Montebello Park on the east side of Los Angeles. The deputy sheriff later testified that he had been called to the area by reports of a prowler. On arriving at the scene, he had stationed himself near a window of the house in question and had played his flashlight on the window. A little later, he testified, “a man” lifted the screen on the window, crawled out, and ran past him. When the “man” failed to halt on order, he had shot him in the back. At the coroner’s inquest, the same deputy also testified that he had seen another officer remove a pair of “silk panties” from the dead boy’s pocket and that the boy was armed with “a Boy Scout’s knife.”
While incidents of this kind have been common occurrences in Los Angeles for twenty years, in this case the officers had shot the wrong boy. For it turned out that young Montenegro was an honor student at St. Alphonsus parochial school; that his parents were a highly respectable middle-class couple; and that the neighbors, Anglo-Americans as well as Mexicans, all testified that the boy had an excellent reputation. Accepting the officers’ version of the facts, it was still difficult to explain why they had made no effort to halt the boy, who was five feet three inches tall, when he ran directly past them within arms’ reach. Before the hearings were over, the “silk panties” story was exposed as a complete fake. Despite a gallant fight waged by Mr. and Mrs. Montenegro to vindicate the reputation of their son, nothing came of the investigation. “Raging Mother Attacks Deputy Who Slew Son” was the Daily News headline on the story of the investigation.
…On January 23, 1947 the attorney general of California ordered the removal of two police officers for the brutal beating of four Mexican nationals who, with eight hundred of their countrymen, had been brought to Oxnard to harvest the crops. … On March 30, 1946, a private detective killed Tiofilo Pelagio, a Mexican national, in a café argument. … On the same day affidavits were presented to the authorities that confessions from four Mexican boys, all minors, had been obtained by force and violence. … Esther Armenta, sixteen years of age, complained to her mother that she was being mistreated by Anglo-American classmates in a Los Angeles junior high school. “They would spit on her,” said Mrs. Catalina Armenta, the mother, “and call her a ‘dirty Mex.’ Esther would come home in tears and beg me to get her transferred.” A few weeks later the girl was in juvenile court charged with the use of “bad language.” She was then sent to the Ventura School for Girls, a so-called “correctional” institution. When Mrs. Armenta finally got permission to visit her daughter, in the presence of a matron, the girl had “black and blue marks on her arm” and complained that she had been whipped by one of the matrons. … On April 10, 1946, Mrs. Michael Gonzales complained to the Federation of Spanish-American Voters that her daughter had been placed in the Ventura School without her knowledge or consent and that when she had protested this action she had been threatened with deportation by an official of the juvenile court. … On the basis of a stack of affidavits, the San Fernando Valley Council on Race Relations charged on May 16, 1947 that the police had broken into Mexican homes without search warrants; that they had beaten, threatened, and intimidated Mexican juveniles; and that they were in the habit of making “wholesale roundups and arrests of Mexican-American boys without previous inquiry as to the arrested boys’ connection—if any—with the crime in question.” … In 1946 a prominent official of the Los Angeles schools told me that she had been horrified to discover that, in the Belvedere district, Mexican-American girls, stripped of their clothing, were forced to parade back and forth, in the presence of other girls in the “gym,” as a disciplinary measure …*
5. The Politics of Prejudice
I reported the zoot-suit riots in Los Angeles for PM and The New Republic and had a hand in some of the hectic events of that memorable week. Following the June seventh rioting, I chaired a meeting of a hundred or more citizens at which an emergency committee was formed to bring about, if possible, a return to sanity in Los Angeles. That same evening we communicated with Attorney General Robert W. Kenny in San Francisco by telephone and urged him to induce Governor Earl Warren to appoint an official committee of inquiry. The next day the governor appointed a committee of five which included four names from a panel which I had submitted. The fifth member was the governor’s own selection: Mr. Leo Carrillo. Mr. Carrillo, like the sheriff of Los Angeles, is a descendant of “an early California family.” The committee immediately assembled in Los Angeles where Mr. Kenny presented to them a proposed report, with findings and recommendations, which I had prepared at his request. With some modifications, this report was adopted by the committee and submitted to the governor. Out of the work of our emergency committee there finally emerged, after a year of negotiation, the present-day Council of Civic Unity.
Praising the report of the governor’s committee—which I had prepared—the Los Angeles Times devoted several harsh editorials to certain “reckless” individuals, myself included, who had suggested that “racial prejudice” might have had something to do with the riots! “When trouble arose,” said the Times in an editorial of June 15, 1943, “through the depredations of the young gangs attired in zoot-suits, it was their weird dress and not their race which resulted in difficulties. That is a simple truth which no amount of propaganda will change.” In the same editorial, the charges of unfairness which I had raised in connection with the Sleepy Lagoon case were branded as “distortions,” “wild charges,” and “inflammatory accusations” (charges later confirmed in minute detail by the District Court of Appeals).
When Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt innocently remarked in her column that the zoot-suit riots were “in the nature of race riots,” she was severely taken to task by the Times in an editorial of June eighteenth under the caption: “Mrs. Roosevelt Blindly Stirs Race Discord.” Even the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce felt compelled to reply to Mrs. Roosevelt. “These so-called ‘zoot-suit’ riots,” he said, “have never been and are not now in the nature of race riots. … At no time has the issue of race entered into consideration. … Instead of discriminating against Mexicans, California has always treated them with the utmost consideration.”3
The zoot-suit riots in Los Angeles were the spark that touched off a chain-reaction of riots across the country in midsummer 1943. Similar “zoot-suit” disturbances were reported in San Diego on June ninth; in Philadelphia on June tenth; in Chicago on June fifteenth; and in Evansville, Indiana, on June twenty-seventh. Between June sixteenth and August first, large-scale race riots occurred in Beaumont, Texas, in Detroit, and in Harlem. The Detroit riots of June 20–21 were the most disastrous riots in a quarter of a century. The swift, crazy violence of the Harlem riot resulted, in a few hours’ time, in property damage totaling nearly a million dollars. The rapid succession of these violent and destructive riots seriously interfered with the war effort and had the most adverse international repercussions. The spark that ignited these explosions occurred in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula, founded by Felipe de Neve in 1781, settled by Mexican pobladores.
None of these disturbances had more serious international consequences than the zoot-suit riots. On April 20, 1943, President Roosevelt had held his historic meeting with President Camacho on the soil of Mexico. At the time the riots occurred, Mexico was our ally in the war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Large-scale shipments of Mexican nationals had just begun to arrive in the United States to relieve the critical manpower shortage. “Our two countries,” President Roosevelt had said, “owe their independence to the fact that your ancestors and mine held the same truths to be worth fighting for and dying for. Hidalgo and Juárez were men of the same stamp as Washington and Jefferson.” President Camacho, replying to this toast, had said that “the negative memories” of the past were forgotten in the accord of today. And then in the largest city in the old Spanish borderland had come this explosion of hatred and prejudice against Spanish-speaking people.
In response to a request from the Mexican ambassador, Secretary of State Hull had asked Mayor Fletcher Bowron for an official explanation. With a perfectly straight face, the mayor replied that the riots were devoid of any element of prejudice against persons of Mexican descent! The same edition of the newspapers that carried this statement also carried another statement by the mayor under a headline which read: “Mayor Pledges 2-Fisted Action, No Wrist Slap”—a reference to police action contemplated against the Mexican minority. On June ninth Mr. Churchill Murray, local representative of the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, wired Mr. Rockefeller that the riots were “non-racial.” “The frequency of Mexican names among the victims,” he said, “was without actual significance.” If all this were true, asked Dan G. Acosta in a letter to the Los Angeles press, “Why are we consistently called hoodlums? Why is mob action encouraged by the newspapers? Why did the city police stand around saying very nonchalantly that they could not intervene and even hurrahed the soldiers for their ‘brave’ action? Not until these questions are answered, will the Mexican population feel at ease.”
What the riots did, of course, was to expose the rotten foundations upon which the City of Los Angeles had built a papier-mâché façade of “Inter-American Good Will” made up of fine-sounding Cinco de Mayo proclamations. During the riots, the press, the police, the officialdom, and the dominant control groups of Los Angeles were caught with the bombs of prejudice in their hands. One year before the riots occurred, they had been warned of the danger of an explosion. The riots were not an unexpected rupture in Anglo-Hispano relations but the logical end-product of a hundred years of neglect and discrimination.
The riots left a residue of resentment and hatred in the minds and hearts of thousands of young Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles. During the rioting, one Los Angeles newspaper had published a story to the effect that the cholitas and pachucas were merely cheap prostitutes, infected with venereal disease and addicted to the use of marijuana. Eighteen Mexican-American girls promptly replied in a letter which the metropolitan press refused to publish: “The girls in this meeting room consist of young girls who graduated from high school as honor students, of girls who are now working in defense plants because we want to help win the war, and of girls who have brothers, cousins, relatives and sweethearts in all branches of the American armed forces. We have not been able to have our side of the story told.” The letter, with a picture of the girls, was published in Al Waxman’s Eastside Journal on June 16, 1943. Still another group of Mexican-American girls—real pachucas these—bitterly protested the story in another letter which the metropolitan press did not publish. These girls insisted that they should be examined, as a group, by an officially appointed board of physicians so that they could prove that they were virgins. Long after the riots, I have seen Mexican-American boys pull creased and wrinkled newspaper clippings from their wallets and exhibit this slanderous story with the greatest indignation. Four years have now passed since the riots, but the blood has not yet been washed from the pavements of Los Angeles.
* For a detailed account of still another “incident,” see Justice for Salcido by Guy Endore, published by the Civil Rights Congress of Los Angeles, July 1948.