| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edward J. Escobar. Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945. (Latinos in American Society and Culture, number 7.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 358. Cloth $45.00, paper $17.95.

War mobilization and the competition among workers for housing, transportation, and recreation led to rapid economic and social changes in cities like Detroit, Mobile, and Los Angeles. The highly tense race relations in these war production centers led to an outbreak of civil disorder in the summer of 1943. The racial conflict that erupted in Los Angeles became known as the zoot suit riots. The riots aggravated antagonism between Anglos and Mexicans and undermined the latter's faith in the police. Like other racial minorities, Mexican Americans became convinced that they could not depend on the police for protection. This study by Edward J. Escobar is one of only a handful of books that discuss relations between police and racial minorities during the decades before World War II. Escobar's primary focus is on recounting the main events in the 1943 Los Angeles zoot suit riots. 1

At the start of World War II, Los Angeles had the worst slums on the West Coast, and this appalling urban experience took a huge toll on Mexican-American youth. A Selective Service investigation showed that illiteracy, poverty, and poor health due to dismal living conditions were listed for almost all of the Mexican Americans rejected by the army or discharged after their induction into the military. One form of protest against the rampant discrimination was waged by the pachucos, the zoot suit-wearing Mexican-American youth. According to Escobar, the yearlong campaign of sensationalism by the local press against the pachucos was to blame for the zoot riots. . . .

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