Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. [Paperback]

Eduardo Obregón Pagán (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 26, 2006 | ISBN-10: 0807854948 | ISBN-13: 978-0807854945

The notorious 1942 "Sleepy Lagoon" murder trial in Los Angeles concluded with the conviction of seventeen young Mexican American men for the alleged gang slaying of fellow youth Jose Diaz. Just five months later, the so-called Zoot Suit Riot erupted, as white soldiers in the city attacked minority youths and burned their distinctive zoot suits. Eduardo Obregon Pagan here provides the first comprehensive social history of both the trial and the riot and argues that they resulted from a volatile mix of racial and social tensions that had long been simmering.

In reconstructing the lives of the murder victim and those accused of the crime, Pagan contends that neither the convictions (which were based on little hard evidence) nor the ensuing riot arose simply from anti-Mexican sentiment. He demonstrates instead that a variety of pre-existing stresses, including demographic pressures, anxiety about nascent youth culture, and the war effort all contributed to the social tension and the eruption of violence. Moreover, he recovers a multidimensional picture of Los Angeles during World War II that incorporates the complex intersections of music, fashion, violence, race relations, and neighborhood activism.

Drawing upon overlooked evidence, Pagan concludes by reconstructing the murder scene and proposes a compelling theory about what really happened the night of the murder.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] masterful volume. . . . One of the most comprehensive and authoritative accounts of both the Sleepy Lagoon murder and the subsequent trials and of the Zoot Suits riots of the early 1940s. . . . Succeeds admirably."
— Latin Americanist

"Smart, insightful and evocative."
— Australasian Journal of American Studies

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (September 26, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807854948
• ISBN-13: 978-0807854945
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #567,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful, nuanced study, June 1, 2004

By 

Jeremiah B. Axelrod (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Paperback)

This is perhaps the most sophisticated study of 1940s street-level Los Angeles working class culture to appear thus far.

Historiographically, Pagon's book fits firmly in the anti-conspiratorial tradition of Richard Hofstadter, offering very subtle community-oriented analyses of the 1940s LA "pachuco" hysteria where others have tended to see manipulating conspirators at work (blaming, for instance, Hearst's rather irresponsible newspapers, in one common scenario of the left that is dismissed rather perfuctorily here).

Pagon, unlike some reviewers of his book, tends to avoid assuming too much about the teenagers who lay at the heart of the Sleepy Lagoon case, preferring to make very cautious statements about them and their motivations. The 38th Street youths emerge here not as figments of some Sociological treatise or as political or ideological pawns, but as energetic, if somewhat clueless, actors on an urban stage that was clearly often quite daunting to them. As such, Pagon does not excuse delinquent behavior - rather, he simply refrains from assuming that the activity of Mexican American teenagers was criminal merely because sensationalist press accounts claimed it was. As is perfectly clear from Pagon's account, several of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants were clearly budding petty criminals of various stripes, but most were ordinary city kids living on the mean streets of wartime LA. (And to doubt that Los Angeles was a violently segregated city during this era of restrictive covenants and police brutality is simply willfully naive.)

Although the book fails to provide the sort of details about the youths' motivations and actions that one might wish from a novel, one must recall that this book is in reality a work of rigorously documented history, and in fact represents the most difficult and painstaking sort of social history to actually construct. There simply is not a great deal of written documentation about these immigrant working class kids at more than a half-century's remove. What Pagon has managed to put together is very admirable, and his writing style, despite a bit too much repetition, is wonderfully clear and free of obfuscating jargon. What we have here is a fine work of historical scholarship that reveals quite a bit both about the individual characters involved and about the larger political purposes to which their stories were put.

Oh, and the prologue and epilogue represent absolutely wonderful examples of gripping and compelling historical detective writing, including a very reasonable and balanced new theory about just who actually committed the notorious Sleepy Lagoon murder!

20 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A festival of jargon and contradictions., May 20, 2004

By 

Tony Rafael (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Paperback)

The only way to accept all the arguments that Pagan makes is to abandon critical thinking. First of all, the laborious language of the sociology department makes the book a hard slog. Sample: "The public construction of the Pachuco served as a way of allowing the middle-class reformers and other concerned citizens to identify and remove, in a discursive way, the sin from among them." What was the sin? Who knows. Pagan never really says.

When you crack the language code, you still have to deal with Pagan's contradictions. On the one hand, he states that young Hispanics were generally poor, lacked job opportunities and were barred from "public spaces." Then later in the book he says that thousands of these same young people were well-paid in the booming defense plants and were able to buy $150 Zoot suits (this at a time when you could buy a house for $3000), buy used cars and spend their free time in the dance halls and concert venues listening to Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway. So in Pagan's world, they were simultaneously poor but well paid and cut off from the mainstream but went to Benny Goodman concerts. And it was this conspicuous consumption on their part that angered the Anglos during war time constraints on resources. They were so poor, that they flaunted their wealth? The book is liberally sprinkled with this type of contradiction.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in this book is Pagan's pious language when he describes youth gang violence. Violence between Pachucos in "rival neighborhoods served to shape and construct their social identities and their sense of place. Although crime clearly had a negative impact on a community, in some important ways, it also serves as a positive social interaction." Your honor, when I shot Filero from Clanton street, I didn't really commit murder. I was just creating positive social interaction and constructing my social identity and sense of place. I plead not guilty.

The result of this academic language removes all moral weight from abhorent behavior. It excuses the violence and implies that there is no such thing as personal morality because individuals are nothing more, after all, than social constructs completely and totally at the mercy of larger cultural and economic forces. Or in the words of West Side Story, "Officer Krupke, I'm just a poor victim of society."

When you can justify murder, assault and organized criminal enterprises, as Pagan does, with the exculpatory language of academia, you're not helping anybody. You're just throwing rocket fuel on the fire.

Read this book if for no other reason than to see how supposedly well-educated intellectuals can't seem to wrap their finely tuned minds around the real world that real people live in.