Subversive Style in Wartime Los Angeles: Explaining the Zoot Suit Riots

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: The Zoot Suit Riots happened in Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, consisting of about one week of fighting between the local zoot-suiters—a mainly Mexican-American group of young people—and servicemen training at the Naval Reserve Armory Center. The first chapter of this paper demonstrates that two existing theories of racial violence—ethnic competition theory and deprivation theory—are not able to adequately explain why wartime Los Angeles erupted into violence upon racial lines, thus demonstrating the need for further study. The second chapter provides a comparison between San Diego and Los Angeles and highlights important infrastructural differences that allowed San Diego—a city with similar demographic characteristics and military intrusion into local Mexican-American neighborhoods—to avoid racial violence. The third and last substantive chapter delves a little bit further into the local context of Los Angeles and the Chavez Ravine neighborhood in particular in order to understand the aspects of zoot-suiters—rather than simply Mexican-Americans—and servicemen—rather than the whites of Los Angeles—that made them antagonistic towards each other.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 15, 2016

Author	Nussbaum, Matthew
Primary advisor	Olzak, Susan
Primary advisor	McAdam, Douglas
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation

Subject	Zoot Suit Riots
Subject	Center for International Security and Cooperation
Subject	Stanford University
Subject	racial deprivation theory
Subject	ethnic competition theory
Subject	segregation
Subject	race riots
Subject	Mexican-American
Subject	military
Subject	World War II
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/pw041wb3363

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Nussbaum, Matthew. (2016). Subversive Style in Wartime Los Angeles: Explaining the Zoot Suit Riots. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/pw041wb3363

Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses

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