The Mexican American woman zoot suiter, or pachuca, often wore a
V-neck sweater or a long, broad-shouldered coat, a knee-length
pleated skirt, fishnet stockings or bobby socks, platform heels or
saddle shoes, dark lipstick, and a bouffant. Or she donned the same
style of zoot suit that her male counterparts wore. With their
striking attire, pachucos and pachucas represented a new generation
of Mexican American youth, which arrived on the public scene in the
1940s. Yet while pachucos have often been the subject of
literature, visual art, and scholarship, "The Woman in the Zoot
Suit" is the first book focused on pachucas.
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.
Ramirez 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. Ramirez 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.
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