"Zoot Suit and the
politics of identity"
The 1982 film/musical Zoot
Suit visually opens with the sign of "Hollywoodland." Immediately
it paints the Chicano landscape of the 1940s - a mixture of mystery and
reality, fantasy and fact, fear and desire. It recalls the commercialization
of their culture in the landscape of greater Los Angeles and California.
It conjures the creation of those hegemonic ideals delivered by the movies
and popular culture - the ideals that shape the guidelines for success
and happiness. Gliding the camera onto the Earl Carroll Theatre, where
a neon woman's face and large mural of El Pachuco sit largely on the roof,
the pan recreates the images of romanticism and pain in the formation
of the Mexican American identity. Polished cars with license plates reading
"ZOOTER" belong to wealthy Latinos who proudly adorn them with
emblems of the "38th Street Car Club." These symbols of affluence
and style slip into the seats of the theatre where the Pachuco meets them
with an opening number in a dance hall celebrating the zoot suit's creation
of mythical and real identities. As the song ends, El Pachuco rips through
the newspaper backdrop to the applause of the entertained, multicultural
Musically, he delivers his lines, "Ladies and Gentleman, the moment
you are about to see is a construct of fact and fantasy. But relax, weigh
the facts and enjoy the pretense. Our pachuco realities will only make
sense if you grasp their stylization." El Pachuco will act as the
film's narrator, snapping the quick change of scene as the narration twists
and unfolds on itself in the barrio during World War II. The Mexican American
community faced anxiety and fear in the face of this war but they did
not face it alone. Just as they were not completely isolated in the barrio,
the symbolic interaction and negotiation of meaning was created in the
fight for physical and psychological space of their community; and, it
was this constant antagonism that founded the need to represent this moment
in art. On the stage and on the silver screen, this recreation of pain
and pleasure was met with both praise and scorn. In decoding its contribution
to the understanding of the factors that went into identities of Mexican
Americans, pachucos, adolescents and all victims of a society in conflict,
the viewer can understand the facts and the fantasy that build its warring
interpretations. Why did this musical find such success in its Los Angeles
venues but never translated well to the Broadway scene? The myth of zoot
suit never belonged to pachucos alone yet the film never found an audience
outside the memories of pachucos past. This paper attempts to understand
the complexities of symbols that go into constructing self within the
film and how these symbols succeed or fail to resonate with the viewer
then and now. We will look at the symbols of style, war, race, language,
music and economic success to pick apart each fabric that weaves the identities
of the characters represented on Zoot Suit's stage and in its audience.
By recognizing the whole of the drapes by the symbols of its accessories,
it may be possible to understand the acts of negotiation that make up
The history of Chicano theatre
that led up to the creation of Zoot Suit began in the sixteenth century
with the performance of religious dramas as a means of educating natives
first in Mexico and then throughout the Spanish colonies. Fast-forward
to the nineteenth century and many acting companies would travel to the
Southwest from Mexico and Spain to flourish professionally until eradicated
by the advent of radio and television. In 1965, Mexican American theatre
was revived again by El Teatro Campesino, a new company connected to the
farmworker's Union with an initial mission to expose the injustices in
the fields (Huerta, 69) and, in 1967, left the Union to broaden their
scope in order to include the variety of political, social and cultural
issues pertinent to Chicanos in the United States (Ramírez, 194).
The form of El Teatro's agit-prop theater took on was the acto, short
one-act scenes that would highlight a certain issue through improvisation
and then give a solution towards its injustices. Soon, Valdez began to
introduce more cultural elements to the theater through the style of mitos
so that in the combination of actos and mitos they could distinguish themselves
through a rejection of the Western proscenium stage and present theatre
"one through the eyes of man: the other through the eyes of God"
(Ramírez, 194). Together, combined with the corrido, or ballad
in which the story is told in musical form, the beginning ingredients
were arranged towards the evolution of the film Zoot Suit which would
contain elements of all these styles in a large, popularized performance.
While all these early performances were created specifically for La Raza,
after a decade of taking their work around to colleges and international
festivals, Valdez began to see the potential to reach a broader audience.
Also, Valdez began to recognize that his style was evolving away from
the politics of many Chicano theater organizations as he developed his
mito connections believing that a Chicano must return to his/her indigenous
roots while critics believed that we must learn from political analyses
of the Chicano's condition and not look to the spiritual as a solution
Soon Valdez made the decision to create a professionally produced play
and so, in 1978, Zoot Suit was produced by both El Teatro Campesino and
the Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles, commissioned by Gordon Davidson
for the Mark Taper Forum. Davidson originally wanted the play to be endemic
to Los Angeles and since Valdez had long been fascinated by the so-called
"zoot-suit riots" of the 1940s, he began to write a drama set
to music to capture that moment along with the preceding Sleepy Lagoon
Murder Trial. First produced as a work-in-progress during the CTG Mark
Taper Forum "New Theatre for Now" series, its ten-day run sold
out in two days. The play then started the new season in August of 1978
with a six-week run but it was also extended and moved to a larger venue
after selling out in record time (Huerta, 74). After eight months, the
Shuberts picked up the option for the play in New York and Zoot Suit opened
in the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway on March 25, 1979. Opening night,
however, was met with overwhelming negative reviews by critics. It closed
in April 29th, after 17 performances at an $800,000 loss (Davis, 125).
Believing that the play had cinematic qualities to it, and because of
the inability to afford the cost of touring such a large production, Valdez
and Universal filmed Zoot Suit in 1981 on a modest budget of only $2.5
million believing the audience was out there and, in Universal's studio
executive Ned Tanen's hope, would break into the Hispanic market through
the feel of attending an evening's performance of the stage play.
The drama's narrative revolves around the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial but
Zoot Suit is not entirely built on facts. Rather, the characters are loosely
built composites of the real 38th Street Gang that became entangled in
the World War II system of chaotic and circus-like structures of legal,
governmental and media institutions. Twenty-two Chicano youths were arrested
after the unexplainable murder of José Diaz on August 2, 1942 near
the popular barrio swimming hole, the "Sleepy Lagoon." Twelve
of them were sentenced to San Quentin before being release on appeal in
October1944 -- three found guilt of first-degree murder and nine for second-degree
murder. The East Los Angeles community created the Sleepy Lagoon Defense
Committee to appeal the conviction based on the absurdities and injustices
that occurred throughout the mass trial. As a result of the tensions and
anti-Mexican sentiment created from the trial, squirmishes and fights
broke out beginning in June 1943 between military soldiers stationed in
the city and the barrio youth (Ramírez, 196). The play, instead
of becoming a docu-drama, focuses on the social relations and symbolic
historical events around the trial and the riots. The main character Henry
Reyna (built on the real leader of the 38th Street Gang, Henry Leyva)
interacts with his environment and his psyche, the narrator El Pachuco,
to build a myriad of symbolic meanings about the identity of a Chicano
at this moment in time. For Valdez," Henry is the core of the piece
and he was very difficult to trace. I knew I didn't want too deal with
the whole story from the outside looking in: I wanted to take the audience
inside and then look out" (Barrios, 163).
The Pachuco Image
Who does the Pachuco image
style belong to? Does it only belong to the young or the old? Or does
it belong to black, white or the Latino culture? When Edward James Olmos
appears on stage, fully adorned in his black and red zoot suit, the most
striking idiosyncrasy is his age. With his machisimo mustache and leathered
skin, we seem to be peeking into the "Pachuco Future" ghost
of Henry Reyna's subconscious. Most pachucos and zoot suiters were young
men, not the weathered soul embodied by Olmos. Is this older man a future
that Reyna hopes to become or is doomed to become? Is The Pachuco a static
figure of criminality or does this apparition of the future point to the
socialization that racializing pachucos can lead to? Here we can begin
looking at the style of the pachuco as more than the peacock feathers
of Mexican American males. It is the active negotiation of identity that
takes the normalized markers of success such as clothes and accessories
and makes them their own. It is not simply an appropriation of the costumes
of the rich, rather it is an invention of a new class that both accepts
and rejects race, wealth and style. This is a concept that Stuart Ewen
and others would call the "democratizing of wealth" where minorities
either reproduce the images and styles of the dominant hegemony in order
to gain respect or else produce an alternative to the dominant as a site
of subversion (Ewen 1998). Most likely, the zoot suit is a combination
In his examination of Zoot-Suit Culture and the Black Press, Bruce Tyler
looked at the ways in which zoot suit culture formed in the media's consciousness
and how these images from the outside conflict with the expression created
from the inside, an "invented tradition" by the youth:
Several reasons were basic for youths wearing Zoot-Suits. Some were declaring
their independence from parents, society and their social and cultural
norms. For others, it was a spontaneous youth movement. Some youths adopted
it as the proper costume for jitterbugging on the dance floor. A very
small minority used it as a cover for crime and gang activity. (21)
He goes on to quote Horace R. Clayton as understanding this culture to
have a "Bigger Thomas" mentality that links youth criminality
among blacks as a result of anti-social behavior brought on by racial
discrimination and segregation which restricts opportunities for employment
and social mobility.
His essay examines the culture primarily within the scopes of its black
origins in Harlem "considered by some the Zoot-Suit capital."
Harlem, just a few subway stops from Broadway, should have been the perfect
audience for a musical recognizing its historical style embraced by many
prominent figures in their youth such as Malcolm X. But how often do the
steep prices of a Broadway ticket lure black audiences south of 125th
Street? Reinforcing the economic segregation of Broadway theatre reinforces
the racial ties to the diversity of the house seats -- something that
may not have been deeply considered by Luis Valdez until he realized that
there was a large audience for the play but not necessarily within the
theatre genre since not only were ticket prices steep, the amount of money
needed for touring such a large production created new discussions on
how to develop the play into something more accessible. (Barrios, 160)
Though connected by a style and therefore by a certain facet of identity,
these two coasts of marginalized minorities would continue to be alienated
in art and in history.
Tyler's essay also brings up a symbolic point of the racialization of
the zoot suiters -- the inevitable tie between the style and the criminality
of the racialized youth who dons the baggy pants with the tapered cuffs
and puffy shoulder long coats. Here it may be important to understand
that while the zoot suiter and the pachuco are not the same person, they
are both linked together by the ideological values of those in the center.
R.G. Davis and Betty Diamond reinforce these deeply rooted beliefs in
failing to understand what zoot suit culture brought symbolically to the
youths in order to break down the socially constructed barriers to upward
mobility. They write, "The pachuco is also presented as a defender
of Chicano pride and culture, as a rebel. He is meant to be seen, as we
are repeatedly told, as the 'homefront warrior.' But to what end? The
only value he articulates is that he 'takes no shit from anyone.' True,
the pachuco possesses a rebelliousness, but it is totally without direction,
it is a blind lashing out." (128) How is this rebelliousness blind,
when the style and the role of pachuco constantly recognizes their status
as "other" and in direct opposition to those who racially and
economically segregate them from a relative affluence? Those who wore
the zoot suits often wore them in leisure contexts - while lindy hopping
in Harlem or jitterbugging in Los Angeles. They were never a type of gang
uniform and the style never implied a violent motive. Zoot suiters most
often were not affiliated with gangs or violence and it even exploded
into mainstream style when worn by figures such as Frank Sinatra. But,
again, when embraced by the pachuco culture as their style, the symbolic
construction of the fabric's shape takes on whole new meaning that encourages
the oppression of those who do not fit a hegemonic ideal.
The genesis of the zoot suit style remains unclear, some say that it was
a derived from Clark Gable's character Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind
while others say it originated among African Americans in Harlem. All
these moments point to the fact that its beginnings do not indicated a
racialized originary moment, rather the appropriation of the style by
youth culture began to be named by the center as "other." The
reaction to the youth wearing these clothes shows how then the zoot suit
began to take on a symbolic presence in the minds of a war torn country
during World War II - leading to bans on the wearing of the zoot suit
by government officials who justified their actions by calling for a rationing
of cloth. The recreation of the moment in history during the late 1970s
and early 1980s points to the continuous failure by society to break down
the source of their anxieties about difference and embrace the style of
Sailors versus Pachucos
To further understand how this
identity suggests subversion, rebellion or whatever form of counterhegemonic
motive one would like to deconstruct or celebrate, it is important to
look at the country during the time of the Sleepy Lagoon case and the
"zoot suit riots." Mauricio Mazón best outlines the symbolic
significance that overshadows the tangible effects of the "riots"
in the 1940s. The nation was at war but without any sort of real enemy
to face on their soil. Tensions and anxiety ran high for the many groups
that composed Los Angeles, from the youth to the adults, the whites, the
Latinos, the Japanese (who were already facing very real attacks on their
identity), the sailors, the press, the pachucos, the barrio citizens.
In particular, the barrio faced its own sort of warfare as each group
that lived within the defined boundaries lived with their own pressures
from fear. Mazón likened this symbolic response to difference as
a creation of what Victor Turner would call communitas, "Communitas
identifies the group's release from the formal structures of society.
To an important extent the concept of communitas represents the externalized
form of the internal experiences of a group. Communitas generates a plethora
of images and symbols and lacks the cognitive qualities associated with
structured relationships." (Mazón, 18) One way this collapse
of structure would manifest itself was in the actual Sleepy Lagoon trial
that will be discussed soon. But surrounding that specific moment were
the palpable racial tensions that shifted to the Mexican Americans of
Los Angeles after the Japanese were put into internment camps.
But the isolation of war in the barrio was not exclusive to Mexican American
adults or even to simply Mexican Americans. Parallels can be drawn between
the experiences of the zoot suiters, the adults and the sailors that would
surface in different ways. The young members of the barrio community would
form a new order in the customs and norms of the jitterbug and zoot suit
culture. As for the adults, as Mazón articulates, "Where the
adolescents found structure in clothes, music, and dances, the adults
(along with many youths) found similar outlet in bond drives, patriotic
rallies, volunteer organizations, etc." (13) Servicemen went through
similar transitions during boot camp where an extreme form of control
and order forced them to be initiated through haircuts, uniforms and military
drills. These different categories of transition and change to new roles
during the war time era came together and moved apart in a variety of
ways. None of these roles were mutually exclusive. For instance, in the
film, Henry Reyna was one day away from becoming the serviceman. The servicemen
often entered the zoot suit dance halls to join the women and immerse
themselves into a new form of structure.
When all these anxieties and role confusions finally came to head during
the "riots," the actions committed by the opposing parties did
not result in massively violent consequences. As Mazón argues,
the symbolic annihilation of identity reigned supreme as sailors stripped
the zoot suiters of their clothes and cut their hair, very much the same
way they had been stripped of their individualism during boot camp. The
adult population of Los Angeles, who saw in the Chicano youth another
form of wartime enemy, even further encouraged these actions. As Raul
Homero Villa says in Barrio Logos, "
these offensive actions
by 'our boys' were inspired and supported by the conjoined effects of
ideological and repressive urban state apparatuses, as the military vigilantes
were lauded by the press and largely left to their actions by observing
police and sheriff's departments officers." (70) All under pressure
from a lack of structure and a desire for order, the community of Los
Angeles staged symbolic moments of stripping and rebirth to grasp a hold
on the tangible signifiers of clothing in order to understand the intangible
creation of meaning in their lives of constant fear, anxiety and powerlessness.
The film grapples with this moment in a rush of magical realism that constructs
symbols and meaning not always tangible to the average viewer. If the
film was made in an effort to bring some sort of access to a mass audience,
the codes introduced into many parts of the film were often beyond their
reach. Many of these symbolic codes were derived from the mythical world,
as developed from the mito genre of theatre. The sailors do not attack
the real characters - they attack the symbolic Pachuco figure. They strip
the identity before hurting the biological being underneath the style.
What is left of the Pachuco is a man simply clad in a loincloth. Even
many analytic viewers of the film failed to grasp the underlying meanings
created through the Pachuco's new appearance. Even those who halfway understand
the symbolism seek to simplify and undermine its representation in order
to gain control over their own ambiguities over the religious undertones.
Davis and Diamond write, "The loin cloth is supposed to represent,
if you know Campesino's mitos, the Indian under the clothes of the city
dude. The image is barely understood by those of us who know, giggled
at by Chicanos in the Los Angeles audience, and viewed as melodramatic
and confusing in New York City. Thus the confused politics produces confused
art." (129, my emphasis) While it is true that many viewers will
not recognize the significance of both the loin cloth and the Pachuco's
zoot suit's original colors (black and red as both the colors of the UFT
and of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca, the god of sorcery and prophecy), the
presence of being "stripped bare only to reemerge nobly" (Ramírez,
198) poignantly draws the viewer in as the Pachuco slowly and proudly
backs into the dark, deep recesses of the stage and the pachuco's inner
Language Use in Zoot Suit
Much of the play's symbolic
use of language had the intentions of universality so it was not surprising
that Valdez may have expected a warm reception on Broadway. Perhaps, thinking
that it would appeal to both Anglos and the large Latina population in
New York City, the film contains much use of Spanglish. Its use and meanings
attempt to include both English and Spanish speaking audiences into the
symbolic creation of a culture that is both specific and universally suggestive
of a minoritarian subject's subversive action against hegemonic ideals.
Yet, in the process, Zoot Suit alienates both viewers. For the Spanish
speakers, it alienates those Spanish speakers who do not understand the
specificities of pachuco and Chicano language. It also alienates a majority
of Spanish speakers who believe that only a "pure" Spanish fully
celebrates their culture. For the English speaking viewers, they feel
symbolically alienated from the parts of the play conveyed only in Spanish
without translation as if they were simply allowed to peek into the culture
without being invited into the joint creation of meaning.
For those Spanish speakers who view Spanglish as "tainted" language,
Arlene Dávila looks at its avoidance in mainstream culture as an
attempt to promote "'cultural citizenship' whereby the maintenance
and protection of Spanish are construed as central to the Latinas' right
and entitlement to maintain their culture in the United States."
(Dávila, 165) However, its use also acts to subvert the hegemony
that created this need for protection in the first place. The use of a
"pure" Spanish emphasizes the values of mobility that come only
with regard to certain class, education and background at the expense
of representing language in its everyday use. Some believe that the use
of Spanglish forces the viewer to accept the existence and even celebrate
the culture of all that use it including the educated, the artistic, the
upper class as well as the under class and assimilated Latinas. Dominant,
Western based, nationalist readings of language that is creolized or mixed,
however, view this as a decay of the nation's language and culture in
effect creating hierarchies and marginalizing those who speak these languages
(Dávila, 254). "Zoot Suit" attempts to deconstruct these
hierarchies by celebrating the breadth of expression afforded those who
speak Spanglish. Unfortunately, this type of Spanglish does not often
translate well to non-California Latinas who do not understand the idioms
of pachucos such as órale!
For the English viewers, they are witnessing a pachuco language. Its creation
has much to do with the celebration of in-group identity and solidarity
at the expense of outsiders' comprehension. However, the way Valdez chooses
to incorporate Spanish and pachuco elements in the dialogue serves to
symbolically uphold these values while keeping the language use to a level
where nothing much is lost to the English speaking viewers. An analysis
by Laura Martin finds that almost no passages in the film are entirely
in Spanish (1998). A vast majority of Spanish is found in single, popular
Spanish words such as raza, muchacho and familia. Other words that have
Chicano origin are simple words such as carnal (pal) or chale (enough)
whose meaning adds cultural and texture to the text but are not necessary
to the comprehension of the narrative. In fact, only two entire Spanish
phrases are used without translation during the whole film and neither
of them is essential to the plot. In one, for instance, the tough pachuca
Bertha says to Henry's new girlfriend, the timid Della Barrios, "She
doesn't know the difference between being cool and being culo (butt)."
This example shows the way pachuco slang and usage reflect a sort of sparring
and jargon that give the language an edge of subversion.
Finally, Martin makes the claim that Zoot Suit is not a "bilingual"
play but instead a "bicultural" one. Its intentions are to create
an environment where difference is celebrated and recognized but not in
its entirely exclusive element. Had this effect been carried out successfully,
we not only would have seen the popularity the play received in its Los
Angeles venue but its themes should have ran well with New Yorkers - a
multicultural urban setting where issues of assimilation and success are
met by countless citizens everyday. The movie, however, shows that the
specificities of the pachuco language and culture are not ones that can
easily transcend into a universal language of plurality and so the audience
unfamiliar with this culture is left comprehensive to the plot but alienated
to its message and its spirit. Unfortunately, the members could never
grasp the pachuco's stylizations in language.
Musical Swing Themes
And as with language, the
music and the rhythm of the play carry their meanings throughout the lyrics
of the song. The bilingualism of these lyrics, in particular, show certain
affect characteristics that point to a social attitude towards the linguistic
codes used by the pachucos and Mexican Americans in general. As Martin
mentions, the opening number's form is not commonly held throughout the
song as it is the only truly bilingual piece of the whole movie. The first
verse is in English and the second verse is in Spanish. And although one
is not a translation of the other, the words of the songs reflect the
stylizations of the zoot suit and their popularities within the dance
halls and pachuco hang outs of Los Angeles in the 1940s. Written by the
star of the film and the brother of Luis Valdez, the songs of Daniel Valdez,
however, do set the symbolic tone of how language will be used throughout
the film. The song itself is a site where the different languages clash
and negotiate for space within the overall composition and together they
paint the symbols of what the zoot suit means for the youth culture. These
symbols are neither solely celebratory nor cynical - they are both. But
as Martin points out, the rest of the songs will show language correlating
with a specific mood or emotion. Those songs in English such as "Handball"
and "Marijuana Boogie" express a cynicism and frustration within
the Anglo institutions of law and prison. However, the songs sung in Spanish
create a festival atmosphere that focuses on pride and cultural solidarity.
As with the bilingual usage in the film's dialogue, the Spanish again
serves its symbolic purpose of uplifting cultural specifity while viewing
English as the language of hegemony and oppression. But when the two languages
meet at the start of the play, you see how their interaction creates the
real form of the Chicano's identity - a combination of influences that
reacts and works within an oppressive framework of institutions but still
finds agency in the assertion of their own cultural heritage and beliefs.
This agency can also be found in the musical styles that connect the poetry
of Zoot Suit's cultural image. This swing music adds the influences of
salsa and traditional Mexican folk rhythms. As Daniel Valdez puts it,
"I don't think you can invoke the zoot suit without leaving the music
in, because it's really part of what was coming out of the '40s. Without
it, I don't think the film would have gotten that flamboyant look."
When looking at the development of swing, you must first recognize its
jazz roots in the African American culture. But as Amiri Baraka describes
in his book Blue People, the white commercial appropriation of jazz created
a homogenized displacement of a once diverse genre. What Daniel Valdez
creates in the film, however, reappropriates the swing style to include
its original moments of agency by adding new meanings and new styles such
as those of salsa and folk music. This, in turn, reverses the static effects
of simply popular swing tunes into the force that Nathaniel Mackey describes
in his essay "Other: From Noun to Verb." Though he wrote about
the artistry of black artists such as poet/scholar Kamau Brathwaite and
bebop jazz artist Thelonious Monk, these same principles can be applied
to the Latino creation of sound that moves its style from passivity and
"othered" to action, creation and "othering":
Such othering practices implicitly react against and reflect critically
upon the different sort of othering to which their practitioners, denied
agency in a society by which they are designated other, have been subjected.
The black speaker, writer or musician whose practice privileges variation
subjects the fixed equations that underwrite that denial (including the
idea of fixity itself) to an alternative. (Mackey, 267).
The word "black" here, in the context of Zoot Suit can be effectively
substituted by pachuco or Chicano or any other minority that utilizes
the power creativity can have on the creation of meaning.
Relationship with Press
Both the pachucos of the 1940s
and the plays and film that would derive from their cultural wake had
to endure misrepresentations and cruelties from the popular print media.
In the 1940s, this came in the form of newspaper articles glorifying the
acts of violence committed against the zoot suiters of Los Angeles and
the constant criminalization and racialization of the Mexican Americans.
Douglas Daniels, for The Journal of Negro History, examined the Los Angeles
phenomena in terms of how these events shook up the normative ideas of
racism as a black/white binary. By looking at a content analysis of local
newspapers in 1942, he noticed that newspapers stopped using the term
"Mexican" to report crimes involving people with Spanish surnames
in certain sections of the city. So as not to jeopardize President Roosevelt's
Good Neighbor Policy in the Americas, they resorted to a new expression
which everyone understood referred to Mexican-Americans. They filled Southern
California newspapers with headlines about "zoot-suit gangsters,"
or "zoot-suit fracas," and similar expressions:
In the northern, southern, and eastern United States as well, identification
of criminals and suspects as Negroes, the failure to identify whites as
such, and frequent reporting of petty crimes involving blacks, served
the same end. A minority group was presented as inherently criminal, while
those employers, landlords, merchants, loan sharks, and servicemen who
preyed upon them were accorded the respect reserved for heroes. (123)
In turn these naming devices
would have a profoundly racist effect in targeting the Mexican American
community as a scapegoat for World War II anxieties and these built associations
with the community would outlive the war into decades to come. In the
film and play, the entire press is represented in a single character who
provokes and agitates the pachucos throughout the entire film. Also, the
play incorporates a "living newspaper" style in which large
headlines and front pages serve as much of the backdrop emphasizing their
prominence and intrusion into the pachucos' daily lives.
To further add to the animosity between these two worlds, the negative
reviews of the play on Broadway were largely responsible for the show's
failure. In New York City, reviews often make or break a production and
the word of mouth was not powerful enough to negate the harmful effects
the critics had on ticket sales. The film was met with the same cynicism
by the popular press. Vincent Canby of the New York Times refers to it
as a "a holy mess of a movie, full of earnest, serious intentions
and virtually no achievements." (1982, 10) Interestingly, Canby misinterprets
the play's intentional overblown feel and understands the pachuco's demise
as being attributed entirely to the press and its lord in San Simeon.
He fails to understand the symbolic makeup of the press as interacting
with all of Los Angeles' institutions and its collective social psyche.
Also interesting to note, is the only source of praise for the entire
film rests on Tyne Daly as both actor and character of Alice Bloomfield,
the white woman who helped secure the release of the boys from San Quentin.
He writes, "She is flesh and blood. The others are marionettes."
I think there is little more to be said about the ironic symbolism of
this statement about a film that attempts to bring real injustice to flesh
and blood and free from the puppet master of white hegemonic ideals.
As José Muñoz
writes, "the story of 'otherness' is one tainted by a mandate to
'perform' for the amusement of the dominant power bloc
subject is always encouraged to perform, especially when human and civil
rights diminish." (Muñoz, 1999, 187, original emphasis) In
the introduction to this paper, I sought out to look for what problems
inherit in the play caused its ultimate failure on Broadway. I looked
in the wrong place. The symbols and norms that create the success or failure
of any Broadway production occur in the minds of those facing the proscenium
stage. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the play did so well in
its Los Angeles venues when, to leave its home field, means to face a
audience that wants to deny its ontology a history or a future. As Muñoz
later writes, "Thus, performing beyond the channels of liveness and
entering larger historical narratives seems especially important."
(188) This is exactly what Zoot Suit attempts to do. So its value cannot
be measured in its monetary success but rather in the deconstruction of
the tropes of criminalization, poverty and anti-American stereotypes that
have guided popular thinking for the entirety of their interaction with
the dominant Anglo blocs of power. Valdez attempts to give his people
a history throughout the entire performance. His own disconnection with
the larger organizations of Latina theatre resulted from their rejection
of his use of mythical symbols in his work. But he acknowledges that the
Chicano's identity ultimately depends on the recognition of historical
life beyond the current political moment. Just as Spanglish represents
for the Chicano an embrace of the past and the present, so do the stylizations
of the pachuco reflect a minoritarian subject's negotiation with the "lack"
imposed upon them through the eyes of those elites in power.
The symbols of the play were also not the Chicano's to share alone. When
conjuring a period of American wartime, it is important to understand
the parallels of identity shaping through fear and anxiety that shaped
all of society's members. Unfortunately, these meanings kept missing each
other in space as Valdez's attempts at universalizing his content ultimately
convoluted these greater parallels through his mired attempt at meshing
it with a culture prided in its specificity and cultural solidarity. The
pachucos never wanted to be understood. Their clothes, their music, the
jargon were all specifically celebrated as sites of contestation with
the outside world that rejected their inclusion. Yet suddenly, the pachuco
spirit was wrested away from its curmudgeon-like past and held up as a
display of subversion and cultural pride. While Chicano audiences appreciate
this move, larger audiences disconnect immediately and focus on the alienation
they feel from the characters on stage.
Much of this alienation comes from a narrative, a history and a performance
of identity stuck in the liminal. The viewer faces characters trying to
understand their role as citizens made enemies in their homeland. They
deal with life as Americans whose Mexican background makes them "different."
The push and pull of commercialism and culture trap and constrain movement
in the ideological realm of Los Angeles. These tensions are not easy ones
to grapple with nor do they provide simple entertainment for a Broadway
audience. They require mental action - transcendence from normative ideals
constructed for the success of any Broadway show. The performance on stage
is the grandiose hyperbole of these negotiations within the mind of the
pachuco, the contemporary Chicano and the audience member alien to both
groups but connected within the larger social stage. The failure to for
these groups to meet in the liminal and celebrate Zoot Suit's creation
highlights the continuous friction between entertainment and cultural
meaning and the rigid categorizations people place on both. Viewing Zoot
Suit as an effective cultural event requires a blur of space and time
to break former boundaries in order to imagine new worlds of meaning.
Stepping into the zoot stylizations would be the first step in realizing
a past, present and future for Latina popular performance on Broadway.
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