| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II. By Luis Alvarez. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xiv, 318 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25301-8.)
Luis Alvarez brings a fresh perspective in viewing racial and cultural tensions on the home front during World War II as confrontations between dignity claimed and dignity denied.	1
Inspired by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, which invoked dignity as a core value in its struggle, Alvarez argues that dignity is also an insightful analytical tool for understanding the street fashion that flourished among youthful jazz enthusiasts for about a decade before the end of the war. For Alvarez, dignity "encompasses the variety of ways zoot suiters struggled to make sense of the world around them and navigate the poverty many of them faced on a daily basis. Their cultural practices, including choices in fashion, music, and dance, both claimed dignity and challenged the denial of their dignity by others in wartime society" (p. 8). Thus Alvarez sees the popularity of jazz culture among some working-class youth of color in the 1940s as an assertion of dignity and an integral part of the struggle for equality.	. . .

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