| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Eduardo Obregón Pagán. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A.. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 313. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

Eduardo Obregón Pagán has written a powerful study of ethnic working-class youth culture during the 1940s. Using a celebrated murder trial in Los Angeles in 1942—the murder at Sleepy Lagoon—and the zoot suit riots of 1943, Pagán explores the interaction of Mexican-American youths with the larger Anglo-American culture. Following the trends in many areas of what might be previously called the history of the oppressed, Pagán strives to avoid portraying the Mexican Americans as victims. Instead he wants us to view them as agents who molded their own popular culture out of elements of their own choosing, which included jazz and the zoot suit. Some of these Mexican Americans also adhered to a violent code of ethics and rejected a personal commitment to World War II. As Pagán explains, he finds the cause of the trial and riot in a "multivalent theory that looks at competing social tensions deriving from demographic pressure, city planning, racism, segregation, and an incipient street-level insurgency" against what Tomás Almaguer called "the master narrative of white supremacy" (p. 10).

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