Tribal warfare.
That’s what sells.
How Can la música Be Dangerous?
Manolito
I’m young, but age isn’t everything
when it comes to experience playing island drums
that claimed my rhythmic fingers
almost from birth.
I’ve been performing ever since
I was thirteen, on the road all over Cuba,
then México City, Chicago, New York, Paris,
free to choose my jobs
because all the best orchestra leaders
want islanders born with congas, bongós,
and rumba drums
in our hands
and on our minds.
It makes me furious when Americans pretend
to be Cuban just so they can sell jazz-craze
music—Alvino Rey is really Alvin McBurney,
Alfredo Méndez is Alfred Mendelsohn,
Don Carlos is Lou Gold, and Chico Bullo
used to call himself Chick Bullock—
but the truth is nothing annoys me more
than lazy pronunciation, in newspapers
where rumba
is spelled rhumba,
the u rhyming with dull
instead of
cool.
If I didn’t have those sweet dance nights
with Marisela
to keep me from fleeing,
I’d be leaving L.A. right now,
headed for Memphis
or New Orleans.
No More Retorts
Reporter #1
Letters like that one from a foreign musician
should never again be printed
in the editorial section!
Who is he to say that I’m wrong
when I call it the “Spanish tinge”
instead of giving his people credit
for the syncopated four-beat rhythm
of Saint Louis blues?
I don’t care if Machito and his Afro-Cuban orchestra
were the first ones to introduce a certain kind
of tropical jazz craze
in these United States.
All I care about is my readers,
and most of them like a tame rhumba,
not that crazy, impossible-to-copy,
wild island
rumba.
June 3, 1943
Reporter #2
While my competitor argues
about musical influences,
real news almost escapes
the attention
of dance fools.
History starts with a dim-out,
not even a blackout, just lights that fade
while sailors and zooters
meet and clash
on the shadowy corner
of Euclid and Whittier.
6:00 p.m.
Sixteen navy men rush from a bus
on Sunset Boulevard, then strut north on Figueroa
toward the armory, but first they have to pass
Alpine, a street where zooters
curse them.
Around the same time, two sailors
leave the armory,
prowling toward Adobe Street,
and get cussed out
by girls—one man even claims
that a rude señorita
gives him a Nazi salute,
mocking
his U.S. uniform
as she calls him
a bullying
brute.
Now the only question in my mind is
do I take the angle that makes her seem
Asian-eyed and foreign, like the enemy
in Japan, or do I let her lead me
into the risky quagmire of accusations
about Nazi-style racial hatred
on the part
of otherwise dignified
all-American
sailors?
That Same Night
Reporter #3
8:00 p.m.
Fifty sailors burst
toward downtown!
Hidden weapons—makeshift,
not military.
Broom handles, weight-lifting dumbbells,
hammers, rocks, belt buckles, and even
the rougher parts
of palm tree fronds,
plucked up off the street
because they’re heavy enough
to do real harm,
with those saw-toothed edges
that are naturally
so sharp.
The mob of raging sailors goes boiling
along Figueroa
to Alpine,
followed by cars
packed with men
in uniform.
In a frenzy, they search for zooters,
but few can be found, because local kids
have been invited to a meeting with the police
to talk about forming a clubhouse, someplace
to keep teens off the streets, out of trouble—
a rec center where they can play basketball
or baseball. . . .
With no Mexican kids to beat up,
the military men just keep
roaming
hunting
like packs
of predators. . . .
Vicious
Ray
I didn’t go to that police rec center meeting
because I was doing what I always do, obediently
chaperoning my sisters.
Mostly we’re expected to stay safely at home,
except for my school and the owl sisters’ work,
but sometimes we stop along the way
to watch a movie at the Carmen Theater,
which seems so tame
compared with the wildness
of dance halls.
So while Marisela and Lorena are busy laughing
at cartoons, armed sailors barge in, switch on
the lights,
scout the aisles,
and choose me, grab me, drag me outside. . . .
The rest is a blur of fists, boots, baseball bats,
bruises, blood, and noise—my sisters’
terrified
SHRIEKS.
I used to spend my energy
trying to avoid getting beaten up
by guys from other neighborhoods.
I never imagined the worst BLOWS
to my JAW
CHEEK
CHEST
HEART
would come from strangers
who are just passing through MY city
on their way to faraway battles.
It’s useless trying to fight back
against so many; all I can do is curl
into a ball, protecting my head
with cupped hands, feeling
as helpless
as a turtle
on its back. . . .
Smoke
Lorena
Violence beyond belief.
Hatred without any explanation.
Stripped, all of them, boys even younger
than Ray, mere children, their clothes torn off,
slashed, piled in the aisles, and set aflame,
the dark cloth of wide zoot suits
burning,
barbaric
unimaginable
brutality
yet real,
so hideous,
this truth
la verdad.
I always thought girls were the only ones
who needed to be careful, but this is an attack
against boys, the same sailors we danced with
now trying to kill
my little brother.
Horrified
Marisela
Lying on the street in his white underwear,
poor Ray, unconscious and bleeding,
looks as fragile
as a baby bird.
Lorena and I rush to help him, bu
t the sailors
are still so dangerous, GLARING at us
and rolling those HARD weapons
around in their hands, the baseball bats
just as terrifying
as gun barrels.
Why don’t the police
put a stop to this OUTRAGE?
Ay Dios, the horror just goes on
and on. . . .
What about Manolito, where is he?
Oh, please, God, let him be SAFE. . . .
Knowing
Lorena
Suddenly I understand all the girls
who’ve been zooterinas
for so long,
dressed like rebels
to show that women
are strong.
Now, with Ray motionless and bleeding
right in front of me, and the sailors still acting
insane as they grab kids and hurl them
off streetcars
onto the pavement,
beating, stripping, humiliating boys
in front of us—sisters, girlfriends,
even mothers. . . .
Now, with all this madness raging around me,
I’m not calm or sensible.
I crave revenge,
knowing how desperate it feels to need
justice.
A Mess
Policeman #1
We haul broken-bone boys
from the movie theater
and streetcars
to that hospital
on Georgia Street.
No point arresting sailors,
even though they’re really acting crazy.
The penalty for military men who riot is death,
so why stir up complicated troubles
in wartime?
Our men in uniform deserve respect.
Don’t they?
I sure don’t want to be the first
law enforcement officer
photographed
handcuffing
a hero.
Mob Violence
Policeman #2
June 4.
Sailors plunge deep into East L.A.
This time they go after entire Mexican neighborhoods,
ordering twenty yellow cabs, then paying the taxi drivers
to carry them all the way to Boyle Heights,
where they attack cafés, restaurants, and theaters,
stripping the clothes off teenage boys, burning zoot suits,
until hysteria spreads
and grows like wildfire,
attracting soldiers and marines
all the way from San Diego to El Toro. . . .
It’s a real riot now, huge and out of control,
so we do the only thing we can think of,
rounding up the kids for their own protection.
I don’t know a single cop willing to arrest
military men in uniform.
Maybe it’s not fair, but hey, sometimes we
lose our tempers too.
June 5
Manolito
Main Street and 3rd.
The Aztec Recording Company.
A chance to make music, but I’m
the only one in a zoot suit. All the others
are composers, writers, and singers
from Texas and México, dressed
in street clothes.
When I spot sailors marching
arm in arm, like a horde of swarming
hornets, I guess what’s coming. It’s easy to imagine
how I’ll be viewed—negro, black, not just cubano
or a foreigner, definitely not just a musician.
Hunted.
That’s how it feels.
These men who danced to my drums
a few days ago, they’re predators now, prowling,
so eager to kill me. . . .
All I can do is run, trying to stay alive
in a hate-crazed time.
June 6
Ray
Those pinches locos didn’t actually set ME on fire
but my shape
contained inside my burning clothes
went up in FLAMES.
So now, in the hospital, I feel FORMLESS,
trying to figure out
how to make my arms
and legs
move
when they feel like wisps
of shrinking smoke.
Humiliation—it’s a SILENCE, not a sound.
Even with two languages, dos idiomas,
I can think of only one word to describe
this RAGE and SHAME.
Pelado. Peeled.
Those are the only scorched syllables
my tormented mind
can FIND.
The sailors might as well have sliced off
my SKIN
and set the FLESH
underneath
on FIRE.
Torture, that’s what this is,
the kind of treatment
no one’s ever supposed to suffer
in real life, only in horror movies
and nightmares.
June 7
Sailor #1
Tonight we’ll strike
every dark-skinned part of this city.
We’ve got civilians joining now,
enough men to swoop all over East L.A.
and Watts
at the same time. . . .
Mexicans, blacks—back home
in the South, I was taught to think of them
all
as the same
thing.
Dangerous.
That’s how I feel!
This fight will be good practice
for real
foreign
battlefields.
Listening to Teens
Reporter #1
They’re beating up colored kids in Watts now
along with the Mexicans.
Reporter #2
It’s a story, all right—that intellectual editor
of a small local paper
has organized a meeting of teenagers,
asking the East L.A. boys to make peace.
No revenge.
No retaliation.
“Isn’t this a free country?” one kid asks
at the meeting. “Can’t we wear the kind of clothes
that we like?” I find it both newsworthy
and sad
that he still thinks
this is about
suits
instead of skin.
12th and Central
Ray
Two hundred boys agree to go home
after the meeting.
Not me.
¡Órale!
Fifty of us head downtown to PROTECT
the people who live there.
Most of the guys wear drapes, but mine
are ashes
because this is hell,
el infierno,
that’s what I
SEE.
Sailors, soldiers, civilians,
all stripping and beating up MY friends
while cops arrest US, not them.
I’ll never forget.
No, not me.
For Their Own Protection
Policeman #1
Belts and boots bash faces.
Blood on the sidewalk.
Mothers trying to defend
teenage sons.
How was I supposed to know
there was a woman with a baby
right behind me?
I spun around in a circle and slammed
any face
I could find
with my nightstick.
Policeman #2
Reporters everywhere.
Cameras.
But we have our orders:
Arrest Mexican kids, not sailors, soldiers,
or U.S. Marines.
Policeman #3
Where’s the s
hore patrol?
Why hasn’t the navy shut those gates
at the armory?
How can the United States military
keep letting drunk recruits run wild,
ruining
this whole city?
11:30 p.m.
Sailor #1
Stripping a kid makes him look so small.
Lighting this match to burn zoot suits
makes me think of my bold granddaddy,
back in his good old KKK days, setting fires
on front lawns.
Sailor #2
Jazz dancing
race mixing
blues music
burn!
Sailor #3
I don’t know how I feel about any of this,
but I’ll figure it out tomorrow, because right now
all I need to do is fit in with this crowd, the mob.
As soon as we ship out overseas to the real war,
my life
will depend
on this crazy blaze
of brotherly bonds and memories, friendship.
Won’t it?
June 8
Mami
Last night I leaned
over the fence
and spat
in a rude
sailor’s face.
¡Bruto! I called him.
How dare he think of himself
as powerful and brave, when my firstborn,
Nicolás,
is the real
hero?
June 8
Lorena
Finally an official crackdown, ending
the worst of the violence. . . .
Shore leave has been canceled,
and Los Angeles is off-limits to all branches
of the military, even the coast guard.
Radio reporters keep saying “Zoot Suit Riots,”
but what happened here was military, not
civilian.
Why don’t they use the right words
and admit that local teens weren’t the ones
who went completely
insane?
Everyone needs to start saying
Sailor Riots, instead of blaming
boys like Ray.
June 8
Marisela
Will anyone EVER dance again?
How will I find Manolito el músico?
Is there life beyond this time of never-ending
uncertainty?
¡One of the most reassuring things about Spanish
is the way every thought can be SEEN in advance,