Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
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a “great battle” which engaged the “combined forces of the United States navy, army, and marine corps” to defeat “a handful of youths with darker skins.” He decried the military’s apparent focus on fighting groups of citizens at home rather than concentrating their energies abroad.101
By deflecting blame onto white officials, Bass and Moreno rejected a divisive tactic long used by LA city officials, media, and moral pundits: to discredit workers and communities of color by assigning to them ideological and biological predispositions for “un-American” behavior.102 Bass and Moreno turned this argument on its head through a spatial remapping that associated white supremacy at home with fascism overseas.
In his journalism and editorial observations, Himes noticed that many Black Americans chose to look the other way as violence escalated. He admonished them publicly in his seminal 1943 article in The Crisis, warning “Perhaps you don’t know what it is all about. If you are a Negro, you should know. But if you are one of those Negroes who profess not to know (and no doubt there are plenty of you), I will be only too happy to inform you.”103 His critique was rooted in the highly visible coverage of the riots by mainstream press as both a Negro and a Mexican “problem.” Stuart Cosgrove recounts that in June of 1943:
the press singled out the arrests of Lewis D English, a 23-year-old black, charged with felony and carrying a “16-inch razor sharp butcher knife”; Frank H. Tellez, a 22-year-old Mexican held on vagrancy charges, and another Mexican, Luis “The Chief” Verdusco (27 years of age), allegedly the leader of the Los Angeles pachucos. . . . The arrests of English, Tellez and Verdusco seemed to confirm popular perceptions of the zoot suiters widely expressed for weeks prior to the riots. Firstly, that the zoot suit gangs were predominantly, but not exclusively, comprised of black and Mexican youths.104
The tremendous collective support for these youths by people from diverse communities was due in part to the discourses and practices of spatial entitlement that educated audience about the common condition of Black and Brown working-class youth. But it was also the result of the language crafted by the SLDC to create a common investment in their defense. In its first publication, the Committee declared itself an interethnic alliance:
Interest in the work of the Committee is grwoing[sic]. At the last meeting there were four additional unions represented by delegates, two additional Negro groups and one additional Jewish organization. These people are bringing fresh energy and new ideas. It is very encouraging to those of us who have been working with the Committee to know that we have only begun to gather around us the people who are friendly to our purpose . . . and who will do something about it.”105
In its publications over the next two years, the Committee expressed itself in antiracist language that highlighted trans-national, trans-communal, and trans-movement understandings of the links between imperialism and racism. In a preview of the international problems that domestic racism could provoke for foreign policy elites, Radio Berlin and Radio Tokyo broadcast the news of the conviction over shortwave radio to Latin America with reports that “implied that nowhere in the USA was there to be found a friend of the Mexican or Mexican American.”106 The SLDC published letters of support from the Latin American Labor Delegates (delegations from Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Colombia, and Costa Rica were among the signatories) and petitions from various groups that were “indicative of every national descent . . . from the Transport Workers Union in New Orleans, from a college professor, from a group of men in Naval training, from soldiers convalescing in a Midwestern hospital, from a group of Negro youth, from Japanese Americans at Manzanar.”107 Growing international support of SLDC efforts was made patently clear in a telegram sent by the Latin American labor delegates in 1944 that proclaimed:
We, the undersigned Latin American Labor Delegates to the ILO Conference being held in Philadelphia, wish to express to you, the members of your committee and all those who have so generously supported its fine work, our gratitude and that of our peoples for what you have done on behalf of the twelve Mexican-America. [sic] Boys unjustly convicted of murder in the so-called Sleepy Lagoon Case. This case has been used by the Fifth Column in our countries to stir up “Anti-Yankee” sentiment in order to undermine hemisphere unity in the war against Fascism. The fact that your committee has not only fought to right a great injustice against these innocent boys but has also exposed the anti-war forces responsible for their conviction enables us to prove that the anti-Latin American prejudice which colored their trial is not shared by the majority of the people of your country. Our thanks and congratulations to you and to all who worked with you.108
The SLDC argued that their support came from “people all over the country, of every race and color, of every national origin of different political beliefs.”109 This rhetorical strategy—grounded in the specific linkage between fascism abroad and racism at home—broadcast a politics of antiracist interethnic alliance that was intricately connected to struggles for spatial entitlement in Los Angeles youth culture and political coalitions. The Committee also argued that its activities constituted a contribution to the furtherance of the Good Neighbor Policy. This belief finds support in the enthusiastic praise and commendation accorded the work of the Committee by many organizations and individuals in Mexico and throughout Central and South America.”110 Just as strategies of spatial entitlement sought to expand the sphere of politics by enacting new social relations in seemingly unexpected places, appeals to international supporters in a time of war attempted to expand the playing field for U.S. white supremacy—to subject it to withering critique from the global majority of non-white people whose aid the United States needed in the war against fascism.
This collective pressure to expand the scope and stakes of space by bringing outside pressure to bear upon city officials and law enforcement agencies responsible for the incarceration of these youth eventually led to a dismissal of the charges in 1945. It was a serious victory for coalitional politics. Yet the physical brutality, psychic damage, and other widespread racist consequences this had on Mexican Americans in Los Angeles would subsequently have a legacy of its own. Dismissal of charges was not necessarily a victory for the young women who were defendants in People v. Zamora. As Catherine Ramirez notes, some of these girls and young women “remained incarcerated and wards of the state long after their male companions were exonerated and released from prison.”111
When one considers the magnitude of change created by the activism of Bass and Moreno, as well as the lessons learned through both the failures and successes during their careers, the force of their impact upon the SLDC becomes more visible. Edward Escobar’s important study on race and police in Los Angeles distinguishes the SLDC from other organizations of its time, in part because its strategies made whites across the United States aware for the first time of discrimination against Mexican Americans in the Southwest. The SLDC’s mission was to reveal the ways in which Mexican Americans were systematically victimized by racial prejudice by arguing that the defendants were casualties of a biased criminal justice system.112 Escobar suggests, however, that the SLDC campaign “could only have a limited effect on the growing zoot suit hysteria in Los Angeles,” in part because their focus remained confined to publicizing the trial to raise funds for the defendants’ appeal and was not on “discussing generalized discrimination against Mexican Americans.”113 Escobar’s observation is accurate, if it is restricted to the effects of the SLDC’s main effort: to publish a pamphlet entitled “The Sleepy Lagoon Case.” But if one considers the number of communities represented by the members of the SLDC—and therefore the constellations of struggle that were affected—his conclusion becomes too narrow to account for the SLDC’s effect on future attempts at interracial solidarities. Moreover, examining the ways in which these respective communities engaged the project of countering anti-Mexican hysteria brings the power of the SLDC into sharper light. Its critical strategy was an important ideological weapon against the sharpening demarcations of race, class, and community that emerged in the 1940s, manifest in segregated social and residential spaces, the growth of privatized redevelopment, and the kind of urban renewal that prized white entitlement over economic and social inclusion. Activists knew they were in for a long and protracted struggle that would exact many costs on them. “When a person, an organization, even a newspaper gets the courage and fortitude that is going