The SLDC worked not only toward an appeal for those convicted but also to expose anti-Mexican discrimination in the Southwest. The constellations of historical struggle that informed the strategies of the SLDC also worked to produce something particularly significant: Black and Brown people’s articulation of rights to social membership and human dignity. Significantly, these articulations illumine the role of culture in both the oppression and the freedom of marginalized communities. The possibility of interethnic economic and political mobilization was rooted in evidence of shared oppression among the mixed working classes in California, and examples of its shared vision and legacy for this period abound. The activism I am describing is one link in a long chain of interethnic economic and political mobilization that these groups have shared.70
As a result of the development of the first substantial generation of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, identity politics in the barrio had undergone several changes. By the end of World War II there was a new sense of entitlement and national citizenship felt by a generation of American-born Mexicans who had served in the war, and who had seen their parents suffer from housing, educational, and hiring discrimination because of racist city or national policies. The SLDC began its work in the wake of the mass deportations of Mexicans in the 1930s. Like some of the other political and labor activism of this decade, the SLDC drew upon an increase in Chicano political activity that occurred just before its founding. George Sanchez has argued that this “upsurge . . . involved at its core an attempt by the children of the immigrant generation and those who had arrived in the United States as youngsters to integrate themselves into American society. . . . [I]t was the second-generation experience that shaped most profoundly the emergence of Mexican-American activism, linking workers’ rights to civil rights.” Furthermore, this kind of “labor and political activity often served as the greatest ‘Americanizing agent’ of the 1930s and early 1940s.”71
World War II marked a similar change in attitude about the role of African Americans as national citizens. Not unlike Chicanos, Black intellectuals and working people after the War “articulated and acted upon a suspicion about the relationship between World War II and white-supremacy widely held in their community.”72 To fight for democracy and freedom abroad was a battle that held particular irony for aggrieved minorities in the United States, where struggles to achieve the same goals seemed just as intense. In Los Angeles, it was significant that the city was transformed during this period by the immigration of over 70,000 African Americans between 1940 and 1946.73 It would be transformed again in the following decade, when more Blacks migrated to California than to any other state.74
In this context, women were central to the efforts linking workers’ rights to civil rights.75 Bass and Moreno encountered this historical moment attuned to the economic, migration, cultural, and political histories of their respective constituencies, each bringing with her a constellation of people, politics, places, and strategies of resistance garnered from decades of action and vision.
SONIC POLITICS OF TRANSFIGURATION
The politics of spatial entitlement enacted by the constellations of struggle in which Bass and Moreno participated had important sonic dimensions. Space, sound, and racial politics were powerfully intertwined with the music associated with this political moment and with zoot culture more specifically, which included Black, Brown, and Jewish working-class popular cultures. Zoot suit culture became a culmination of intersecting constellations of decades-long struggles over style, the body, and public space.
The zoot suit outfit became popular in ghetto and barrio spaces in part because of the physical intervention it made in physical places. Young men wearing pancake hats with feathers in them, large and long jackets with flowing lines, and pants with forty-two inches of fabric at the knees invaded public space; this clothing was also propelled by the stylized strut of the zoot suiter. Repression of the zoot suit came about because of the perceived threat to propriety and public order posed by the outfit’s effect on the private space of the body and the public space of the street.
SLDC activists mobilized an older generation of Black, Brown, and Jewish parents and community leaders into a symbolic alliance with a younger generation. By linking human rights to zoot suit culture, this alliance was undergirded by an intergenerational understanding of the ways that the federal government, court systems, and local police used Black and Brown cultural expressions as a means to justify oppression and containment (even though many older participants roundly denounced zoot suit culture). From this implicit understanding emerged powerful and unapologetic articulations of the link between zoot culture and the Mexican community. As the SLDC maintained in a press release:
It was not just these boys who were on trial. The Mexican people were being tried. And the trial took place not only in the courtroom but in the press with its barrage of lies against the “Mexican pachucos” and “zoot suiters,” and before the Grand Jury where a sheriff’s report characterizing the Mexican people as bloodthirsty wildcats was submitted. . . . Yes, these boys were convicted. So was the Mexican community. Neither is guilty. The blot against both must be removed.76
Zoot culture had deep roots in Black communities. The zoot suit was associated with Black urban youth in cities like Detroit, New York, and Chicago when it first appeared around 1940. The Autobiography of Malcolm X recounts the importance of X’s first zoot suit and suggests that the style had racial connotations as the preferred choice of hip black men and entertainers.77 In Los Angeles, Jewish, Black, Filipino, and primarily Mexican youth made the zoot suit popular.78 Garment fabrics were rationed during WWII; therefore, its purchase on the black market by makers of the zoot suit was considered treasonous. But it was the “calo” slang adopted by pachucos, the clean lines and flamboyant colors, the flaunting of expensive style on working-class bodies, and the culture of music that appealed to interracial audiences that infuriated many whites, who identified pachucos in LA as traitors and criminals.
A number of Black musical styles converged to create the sonic politics of zoot culture, what Robin Kelley calls “the wonderful collision and reconstitution of Kansas City big band blues, East Coast swing music, and the secular as well as religious sounds of the black South.”79 Jump blues evolved in the 1930s from Harlem bands like those of Cab Calloway and the Kansas City groups of Count Basie. It was pioneered by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five and pervaded both early rhythm and blues and doo-wop. Johnny Otis, a Greek American raised in an African-American Berkeley neighborhood was the person principally responsible for bringing jump blues to the East Side with his 1948 shows at Angelus Hall.80 Chicanos heard the difference between swing and jump blues, with its more raw “honking” saxophone sound and stronger drum beat, by hearing artists like Roy Milton, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, and Johnny Otis on the thriving ballroom circuit in East LA, downtown, and on Central Avenue. Jump saxists like Chuck Higgins (“Pachuko Hop,” 1953), Joe Houston, and Big Jay McNeely became the influences of 1950s honkers like Lil’ Bobby Rey and the Masked Phantom Band and Danny “Chuck Rio” Flores.
The same year that Johnny Otis played the Angelus Hall, one of the most popular bands in East LA was the Pachuco Boogie Boys, led by Raul Diaz and East San Francisco Bay transplant Don Tosti. Their 1948 hit “Pachuco Boogie” celebrated and publicized the street speech and style encoded in calo narratives, long a part of the pachuco and zoot suit style. This song in particular, but also songs by the Armenta Brothers and Lalo Guerrero, such as “Chucos Suaves” and “Marijuana Boogie,” made jump blues and honking popular in East LA. Indeed, a distinct sound, “Chicano honking,” emerged that combined jump blues and calo.
It is not just that the interactions between Mexicans and Blacks in music resembled the alliances created in the political coalitions led by Charlotta Bass and Luisa Moreno, but that music became a shared social space that enacted on the quotidian level of everyday life the parallels and affinities that flowed from the linked fate that Blacks and Mexicans suffered because of white supremacy. The aggressive festivity, celebratory self-activity, and collective