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The Pachuca Panic: Sexual and Cultural Battlegrounds in World War II Los Angeles
ELIZABETH R. ESCOBEDO
This article examines the communal, familial, and individual dilemmas created by the pachuca persona in World War II Los Angeles. Although reviled by Anglo reformers and Mexican parents alike, pachucas created an affirming vision of racialized womanhood that became a key marker of a new Mexican American female identity.
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ON 9 JUNE 1943, TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Amelia Venegas left her East Los Angeles home, baby in arms, to buy milk at a local market. Concerned by news of recent skirmishes between Anglo servicemen and Mexican American zoot suiters on city streets, the young mother impulsively grabbed a pair of brass knuckles found months earlier on a local sidewalk.1 With wartime emotions at heightened levels, a woman left alone while her navy husband fought overseas could never be too careful. |
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Yet for all of her precautions, trouble would soon befall Mrs. Venegas. As she and her baby witnessed police officers harassing a group of zoot suiters, Venegas felt a sense of injustice rise within her. Unable to contain her emotions, the Mexican American woman cursed the law enforcement officials for their hostile treatment of the young men. "They should leave the zoot suiters alone," Venegas later explained vehemently to reporters. Unmoved by her verbal denunciations, the officers immediately arrested Venegas for disturbing the peace and, upon finding the brass knuckles on her person, charged the young mother for carrying a concealed weapon.2 |
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As newspapers got wind of the story, the Venegas incident seemed to confirm the then widely-held belief that a Mexican American gang menace was overtaking Los Angeles. Venegas had never before been involved in criminal activity, yet the Los Angeles Times featured a photograph of her baring teeth and shaking a threatening fist at the camera. The press not only deemed Venegas a "pachuco" girl—a label suggesting gang affiliation—but her protests on behalf of zoot suiters—a much despised youth population—also made her a perfect target for a sensationalist media campaign.3 |
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Although a public relations nightmare for the young mother, the experience of Amelia Venegas illuminates much more than just an example of the press's inaccurate depictions of Mexican youths as dangerous wartime hoodlums. The Venegas story also sheds light on the changes taking place in the lives of Mexican American women in Los Angeles during World War II. Not simply victims of fanciful images created by the press to cause a stir, many second-generation Mexican American women did in fact adopt a new youth subculture that rejected both traditional Mexican and mainstream American culture. Known both as female "zoot suiters" and "pachucas," these young women blatantly rebelled against social conventions. They donned the controversial zoot suit or a modification of the drape attire—including the long fingertip coat, short skirts, exaggerated pompadours, and stark make-up—and kept company with male zoot suiters on city streets.4 |
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But more than just a fashion rebel, the wartime pachuca represented an important symbolic site on which debates regarding the changing social landscape of the war years unfolded. Using style and behavior as a way to challenge ideas of respectability and to assert a distinctive identity, pachucas defied mainstream notions of proper feminine decorum and endangered rigid, static definitions of Mexican femininity. As women's social roles broadened more generally in the wartime environment, and the Mexican family struggled to maintain a hold on its daughters and its culture, the pachuca came to represent a female figure whose dangerous sexuality demanded restraint. |
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