Catherine S. Ramírez. The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. xxvi + 229 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4303-5.
Reviewed by Emily E. Straus
Published on H-California (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Eileen V. Wallis (Cal Poly Pomona)
Gendering the Zoot Suit
We have all heard of the zoot suit, the suit consisting of high-waist pants and a long coat with wide lapels, popular with Latinos and African Americans in the 1930s and 40s. Beyond mere fashion, the clothing and the pachucos who sported it served as political and cultural symbols, both at the height of its popularity during World War II and when it was reclaimed during the Chicano movement of the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The meanings and uses of the zoot suit and pachucos have changed over time, redefined from being a symbol of un-Americanness to one of cultural pride. The vast majority of works, including those by academic historians, have focused on zoot-clad men.[1] Catherine S. Ramírez’s book The Woman in the Zoot Suit changes this focus by linking the World War II period with the Chicano movement of the latter part of the twentieth century. By doing so, she adds gender to the understanding of these periods. She argues that “la pachuca played a significant part in the articulation of U.S. nationalism and Chicano movement nationalism ... as constitutive other” (p. 9).
From the outset, Ramírez’s agenda is clear: to recover the pachuca, whom she rightfully points out has been ignored in history books and in cultural production. Using the lens of gender, she examines the heyday of the zoot suiters as well as the way those zoot suiters were used by the Chicano movement. To do so, Ramírez unearths the role of pachucas in World War II-era Los Angeles and examines what their historical and cultural absence has meant for our understanding of both American and Chicano nationalisms. Employing a gender analysis, Ramírez reveals much about the formation of each and challenges reigning conceptualizations and representations of Chicano history.
Ramírez’s focus on Los Angeles makes sense for it was the city in which zoot suits made an enduring mark on the national consciousness. During the World War II-era, the zoot suit and those who donned it shot onto the national stage because of two interrelated events: the Sleepy Lagoon incident of 1942 and Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. It was no coincidence that these events occurred in Los Angeles at that moment, because, as Ramirez reminds us, “the war brought Americans of different races and ethnicities into close proximity with one another in unprecedented ways on the street, battlefield, dance floor, and factory floor” (p. 2).
The Sleepy Lagoon incident and the Zoot Suit Riots have held a great significance for scholars within Chicano studies who have identified the World War II era as a turning point for Latinos. During World War II and the Chicano movement era, scholars, artists, and activists have asserted, the pachuco played a central role in developing nationalisms, first a sense of what was American and second a sense of what was Chicano. During the war many saw the zoot suit as a badge of “rebellion, difference, and even un-Americanism” (p. xiv). Ramírez asserts that in the midst of the Chicano movement, “el pachuco’s history was rewritten.... Chicano cultural workers transformed him into a (or the) father or son of la causa” (p. 111). The pachucos’ outsider status helped define American national identity and Chicano cultural nationalism. Ramírez puts the two in dialog and uses “one nationalism to relativize and to shed light on another” (p. xvi).
But, as Ramírez convincingly argues, both narratives overlook one key ingredient: gender. While scholars have managed to change the narrative of the two events from villianizing pachucos to highlighting the role of whites’ racism, Ramírez contends that pre- and post-movement scholars, activists, and artists have ignored the fact that the events were also sexist. She reinserts women into the narrative of the Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot Suit Riots and seeks to understand the meaning of women’s absence from the traditional narrative. In addition, she does not just focus on gender in regard to women as she also discusses the role that masculinity played in both narratives. During World War II, the mainstream and Spanish-language press maligned the pachucas either as too masculine or as malinches, traitors to their people. As outsiders, the pachucas and pachucos helped define the era’s norms. The Chicano movement marginalized the pachuca as an affront to the movement’s hetero-normative and patriarchal definition of la familia de la raza. In addition, Ramírez demonstrates how Chicana feminists reinterpreted pachucas in their own works.
Ramírez takes an interdisciplinary approach to build her argument. Trained in ethic studies, Ramírez skillfully employs literary theory (with particular emphasis on feminist and queer theories) to help analyze a wide variety of sources, from traditional historical sources, such as archival collections, trial transcripts, and newspaper accounts, to cultural products, such as poetry, paintings, and plays. In discussing the Chicano movement, she pays close attention to its cultural products, such as Luis Valdez’s 1979 play and subsequent 1981 film, Zoot Suit. The pages of The Woman in the Zoot Suit are filled with rich examples of pachucos and pachucas, in photographs, paintings, and other cultural productions. Ramírez analyzes not only the representations in those sources, but also their silences. Examining the testimony in the 1944 case People v. Zammora, the Sleepy Lagoon trial, she expertly reads the silences in women’s testimony. For example, she identifies witness Bertha Aguilar’s cultural and political resistance in refusing to answer questions that might have implicated her male friends.
Because these silences exist in many of the sources, Ramírez also conducted eleven oral histories with Mexican American women who came of age in Los Angeles during the zoot suit fad to “expose the breadth of pachuca identities” (p. 28). For example, one of her interviewees, Annie Rodríguez, recalled how her immigrant father forbade his four American-born daughters from dating pachucos or wearing any of their styles. Ramírez concludes that for parents, like Rodríguez’s, the zoot suit style “embodied not only a dissident femininity but a threatening, distinctly American identity as well” (p. 50). The meaning of the zoot suit extended beyond the clothes.
After completing her analysis of the development of these nationalisms, she uses her epilogue to bring her analysis to the present. In this section, Ramírez compares la pachuca to the post-9/11 Latina soldier. She notes that as during World War II Latinos continue to be viewed as a “menace” especially in discussions about immigration from Mexico, but that their roles as GIs also place them in a revered status. This thought-provoking closure to her book begs the reader to ask how much has changed in the building of American nationalism (and minorities role in that development) and how much has remained the same.
The Woman in the Zoot Suit will appeal to a number of audiences, including those interested in California, ethnic, American, cultural, and gender studies. Her masterful reinterpretation of the Sleepy Lagoon incident and the Zoot Suit Riots and her comparative analysis of the formation of nationalisms come together to make a significant intervention across diverse literatures. Furthermore, and not insignificantly, the relative brevity of Ramírez’s book (four chapters with introduction and epilogue) along with the ample use of illustrations make The Woman in the Zoot Suit accessible to many students. Ramírez hopes that this understanding of “the constructedness and malleability of national imaginaries” will remind us “of the importance of dissent and competing ideologies” (p. 148).
Note
[1]. Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988).
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Citation:
Emily E. Straus. Review of Ramírez, Catherine S., The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory.
H-California, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32735
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