Zoot Suit Riots

The word “riot” here is really a misnomer. This conflict wasn’t so much about property damage as it was about attacking people. It also wasn’t really about the zoot suits – although they had come to symbolize A LOT in Los Angeles when this happened. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. We are so excited that we are about
to set out on our very first tour. In augusten,
we will be in Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina, Summerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn,
New York, and Washington, d C. Then in October eighteen,
we will be in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon, and Los

(00:20):
Angeles and San Francisco, California. We're hoping that this will
go really well and we can come to other cities
and places that don't end in the World Coast sometime
maybe next year. You can find out more information and
get the links to buy tickets at missed in History
dot com, slash tour That's missed in History dot com

(00:42):
slash tour. Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly trying
for the last I don't even know how many months

(01:03):
I've had this note on my podcast shortlist that had
in all capital letters the word June followed by zoot
suit riots. But you may notice it is not June
right now. It's a little after June. It's fine, Yeah,
I mean, unless you're listening to podcasts much later than
they come out, and in somehow June of nineteen. So

(01:24):
we're recording this in July. It'll be August before it
comes out. I dropped that ball on this thing that
I had a note to myself to do for months
and months. But because the zoot Suit riots happened seventy
five years ago this past June, and because we got
a bunch of listener requests for it, and because I
answered a lot of those requests by saying that I

(01:45):
was doing it in June of I'm going to do
it now, a couple of months late. As is often
the case when we talk about riots on the show,
the name of this one is really a misnomer. It
didn't have a lot of the traits that people think
of when you a riot. There was not really much
property damage. It was more about attacking people, and it

(02:07):
also wasn't really about the zoot suits, although zoot suits
had come to symbolize a lot in Los Angeles and
in other parts of the United States when this happened.
So today we're going to talk about some context of
the Mexican community in Los Angeles and the nineteen forties,
as well as a murder that became a major precursor
to this mass violence. And then we will talk about

(02:30):
the violence itself. Okay, So to start it off, we're
gonna talk about Spain actively colonizing what's now California starting
in the late seventeenth century, and the region was under
Spanish control until the end of the Mexican War of
Independence in eighteen twenty one, at which point it became
a part of Mexico. After the Mexican American War ended

(02:51):
in eighteen forty eight, Mexico seeded a huge swath of
land in the southwest to the United States, including what
would become California. California became the thirty first state on
September nine, eighteen fifty. We talked more about the history
of immigration between Mexico and the United States and our
episode on the Brissero program, So we're not going to

(03:14):
walk through all of that again today. But the border
between these two nations wasn't particularly regulated until the nineteen teens.
There were several waves of immigration from Mexico to the
United States, including refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution which started
in nineteen ten. So by the nineteen forties, when the
zoot Suit riots took place. The Mexican community in the

(03:37):
southwestern United States included immigrants as well as people of
Mexican ancestry whose families had been there since way before
the state of California even existed. In Los Angeles and
other cities, the Mexican population overwhelmingly lived in tight knit
communities known as barrios, from the Spanish word for neighborhood,
and these neighborhoods evolved through a range of social and

(04:00):
economic conditions, as well as discriminatory housing policies and employment
and lending practices. Basically, the same policies that enforced segregation
of black residents in other parts of the country enforced
segregation of Mexican and other Hispanic and Latino residents in
the American Southwest. The barrios in Los Angeles included really

(04:22):
densely populated urban neighborhoods, as well as jabez Ravine, which
had been home to a predominantly Mexican population going back
into the middle of the eighteen hundreds. Because of its
steep terrain, parts of the jabez Ravine were almost rural.
Poverty was widespread in these neighborhoods. The housing was frequently
substandard and overcrowded, and often managed by predatory landlords. While

(04:46):
the Anglo community tended to view the barrios as slums
or eyesores, the people who were actually living there had
extremely tight knit relationships with one another. There was a
simultaneous mix of intense neighborhood and cultural pride and social
and economic isolation from the rest of the city. That
wasn't necessarily the case for the young people living in

(05:07):
the barrios, though. In the nineteen forties. Young people in
the barrios were predominantly the children of Mexican immigrants who
had been born in the United States and were citizens,
and many of them felt like outsiders both within and
outside of their neighborhoods. They were being educated in English
speaking American schools, and a lot of them wanted to

(05:28):
experience life outside the barrio, or even leave the barrio.
This really put them at odds with their parents, who
tended to be traditional and conservative. These second generation Mexican
Americans were also subject to huge pressure to assimilate with
Anglo life from outside the barrio, and huge pressure to
maintain a strong sense of Mexican cultural identity from within

(05:51):
it and outside of their neighborhoods. They faced discrimination because
of their ethnicity, and sometimes outright exclusion from the types
of activity that would otherwise be completely typical for a teenager.
Economic hardship, social isolation, exclusion from recreation and social activities
in a sense of being an outsider are all factors

(06:12):
that are cited as reasons why young people join gangs,
and this happened in California in the nineteen thirties and
forties as well, although we should make it really clear
that a lot of the gangs in question were more
like tight knit neighborhood clicks than criminal organizations. Rivalries between
young people from different barrios could become really intense, though.

(06:32):
I mean, there was definitely crime, and there definitely work
criminal organizations, but overwhelmingly crimes were being committed by adults,
not by adolescents. And the panic that we're about to
talk about was about this nefarious specter of violent criminal
teens and that that was really not what was going on.

(06:55):
As Tracy just alluded to. In the media, these Mexican
American youth were portrayed as violent and incorrigible delinquents. This
became even more true in August of nineteen forty two,
following a murder at a reservoir known as Sleepy Lagoon.
Mexican youth used Sleepy Lagoon as a swimming hole because
they weren't allowed to use the public swimming pools, and

(07:16):
on August first, nineteen forty two, a fight broke out
after a party near the reservoir and twenty two year
old jose I Diaz was beaten and left for dead.
Diaz had recently enlisted in the U. S Army and
it was his last weekend before he was scheduled to leave.
He died not long after reaching the hospital. In response

(07:36):
to this murder, law enforcement rounded up roughly six hundred
people in a citywide dragnet. Most of them were Mexican
American and most of them were teenagers. Ultimately, twenty two
teens and young men from the thirty eight Street neighborhood
were arrested on murder charges, and seventeen of them were indicted.

(07:56):
They were between the ages of fourteen and twenty two,
and they were side in the largest mass trial in
California history. This trial was a huge miscarriage of justice.
The judge Charles Williams. Freaky was known as Sam Quentin
Freaky because of how often he sentenced people to prison
there and during the trial he consistently sided with the prosecution.

(08:20):
The prosecution was making the case that the defendants were
a violent street gang, and to that end, the judge
refused to allow them to get clean clothes or have
their hair cut, because their clothing, their hair, and their
disheveled appearance was evidence of their gang status. We're going
to get more into clothing in a bit, but just no.
They basically kept them in a state that would keep

(08:42):
the public mindset completely confirmed that they were everything horrible.
These people were saying, yeah, even if when they originally
were arrested they had been wearing neatly attired clothing, they
were in these same clothes for the length of these proceedings,
so they just came more and more disheveled. The defense

(09:02):
also had seventeen different defendants to deal with, and the
judge continually ruled that their attempts to confer with their
clients were disruptive. The defendants were ultimately seated in two
rows facing the jury, physically separated from their attorneys. Some
of the defendants also really did not take this trial seriously.
Some of them had never even met the victim and

(09:25):
seemed to just assume that they were definitely going to
be acquitted because clearly they were not involved. That meant
that an all white jury was constantly face to face
with a bunch of teenagers, some of whom were chatting
with each other and rolling their eyes and generally acting
like teenagers who weren't really being supervised in the courtroom.

(09:47):
The trial lasted until January of nineteen forty three. In
the end, five of the defendants were acquitted. The rest
were found guilty of a number of crimes and sentenced
to between six months and life in prison, depending on
the charge. During these proceedings, girls and young women from
the thirty Street neighborhood had also been called to testify

(10:09):
and to participate in the investigation, but they refused to cooperate. Afterward,
they were taken from their parents custody, made wards the state,
and placed in a reform school called Ventura School for Girls,
and they remained there until they were legally adults. This
trial and the news reporting that surrounded it, continued to

(10:29):
inflame tensions between the Mexican and Anglo communities in Los Angeles.
News reports described the kids from the thirty A Street
gang as a violent gang, and the whole incident was
used as evidence that Mexican use were inherently criminal and dangerous.
Mexican US gangs were blamed for all kinds of crime
and social ills. The idea of a dangerous Mexican criminal

(10:52):
element spread among the Anglo population. Rather than doing anything
about the social and economic conditions and the brios, lawmakers
and media instead used these young people as evidence of
a nefarious criminal element that needed to be dealt with,
and Mexican American youth, who already felt like outsiders, spelt

(11:13):
even more targeted by an obviously unfair legal and law
enforcement system. After two years of advocacy by the Sleepy
Lagoon Defense Committee, these convictions were overturned on appeal in
nine four, although the charges were never formally cleared. The
appellate court found a number of problems with that original trial,

(11:34):
from inadmissible evidence being admitted, to inadequate defense representation, to
the judge's treatment of the most vocal of the defense attorneys. Today,
the murder of Jose A Diaz is still officially unsolved.
Most of the young men who had been convicted of
his murder were still in prison when the zoo Suit
Riots happened. We're going to get into the riots, and

(11:56):
before that, into the zoot suits after a sponsor break.
The zoot Suit Riots were named for a style of
clothing that was popular among Mexican American youth in Los
Angeles in the nineteen thirties and forties. The etymology of
zoot suit is a little unclear. You'll see a lot

(12:18):
of different places of like this is the where the
term zoot suit comes from, and they all kind of
contradict each other. It's also unclear exactly who made the
first one. But these suits grew out of jazz culture
in African American communities. In other parts of the United States,
they were really popular amongst swing dancers because the cut
and the volume of the fabric really accentuated the dancing.

(12:39):
Zoot Suits became popular among minority communities all across the
United States. Whichever minority community was living in a particular
place was probably also wearing zoot suits. Even though we
are talking about Mexican Americans in this episode, these suits
were culturally very important in these other communities. They are
part of a lot of literature and essays from the

(13:00):
nineteen thirties and forties, especially by Hispanic and black writers.
Among Mexican Americans, zoot suits were one part of a
counterculture movement known as Patuco. Patuco incorporated zoot suits along
with music and dance and an inventive sling called calo,
which combines Spanish, English, and jazz inspired words, as well

(13:22):
as words from other influences. Zoot Suits were the most
recognizable hallmark of the Pachuco man. These are suits with
high waisted pants, suspenders, and very wide legs that then
are pegged at the ankle. The corresponding coats are very
long and have exaggerated broad shoulders. Men usually wore them
with a coordinating pork pie hat and a distinctive watch chain.

(13:46):
Some Pachucas are women in this culture, wore full zoot
suits with the pants. Others paired them with short skirts,
big hair, and bright makeup, regardless of which she was doing, though,
women who dressed this way were pushing gender norms. Wearing
the pants was thought of as too masculine, but the
short skirts and the loud makeup were regarded as too

(14:08):
aggressively feminine and too sexual. To both Anglos and the
Mexican parents of these youths, Pachuco wasn't a culture. It
was just another word for punk or thug. Mexican parents
worried that their children were going to quote become pachucos,
and among Anglos, part of the response to this culture
might be summed up as how dare you zoos? Suits

(14:31):
were expensive, and news reporting about the style tended to
hype up the cost. But Chucos took great care in
their appearance. They walked with a swagger, and they took
pride in being able to dance and going out and
having a good time. So from Anglos there was this
whole element of how dare you spend so much on
a suit when you should be living in poverty? How

(14:52):
dare you walk with that swagger when you live in
a slum. Caesar Chavez, who co founded the National farm
Workers Association with the Laura Sueta, described it this way.
Quote we were a minority group of a minority group,
so in a way we were challenging cops by being
with two or three friends and dressing sharp. But in
those days, I was prepared for any sacrifice to be

(15:14):
able to dress the way I wanted to dress. I
thought it looked sharp and meat and it was the style.
And to circle back around to the Sleepy Lagoon murder case,
the defendants were part of a culture that valued dressing
well and taking care of their clothing and appearance. But again,
if you recall, they were forced to wear the same,
increasingly shabby clothes for the duration of their trial. So

(15:37):
for Patuco's this one outfit, the zoot suit had a
whole lot of adolescent rebelliousness and community pride and Mexican
American culture all rolled up into it, and in the
nineteen forties, wearing one became an overtly political act. In
another way as well, during World War Two, fabric was
tightly rationed, and zoot suits used a lot of fabric.

(16:00):
The Wartime Productions Board limited the use of wool in
March of ninety two, and it banned a number of
extra flourishes on clothing that required more fabric, including cuffs, pleats,
pocket flaps, and vests. Zoot Suits were pretty much all
extra fabric. Having made one, I will wholly endorse this fact.

(16:22):
They take up a lot of yardage um and at
first tailor's got around this by making zoot suits out
of other fabrics besides wool, but in October of nineteen
forty two, the WPB specifically banned those as well. It
wasn't illegal to wear a zoot suit, but it was
illegal to make them, although bootleg tailors continued to do

(16:43):
it anyway. The City of Los Angeles also debated banning
the wearing of zoot suits that year, but ultimately did not.
By nineteen forty three, zoot suits were very closely associated
with crime and with juvenile delinquency. We talked before the
break about the widespread media coverage of Mexican youth portraying

(17:04):
them as incorrigible criminals. Tied to that stereotype was the
clothing that they were wearing. Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's
Good Neighbor Policy, which was meant to improve American relationships
with Latin America, news outlets in some cities stopped using
the word Mexican and crime reporting. Instead, they were writing

(17:24):
things like zoot suited thugs, which everyone read as basically
a Mexican gangster in a zoot suit. This use of
language didn't really do anything to shield Mexicans from the
perception that they were criminals, and it did reinforce the
connection between zoot suits and crime. On June twod ninety three,
an article in The l A Times called the zoot

(17:46):
suit quote a uniform of delinquency. Calls to police were
common just because someone in a zoot suit was inherently suspicious. Simultaneously,
in the early nineteen forties, there were a lot of
service members from the U. S Military in Los Angeles
at any given time. Some of them were passing through,

(18:06):
some were preparing to deploy somewhere on shore leave, and
some were training at the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve
Center in Chavez Ravine, also known as the Naval Reserve Armory.
This facility opened in a predominantly Mexican part of the
city in nineteen forty. Especially on weekends, the number of
military personnel in Los Angeles could swell to about fifty thousand.

(18:30):
A lot of these servicemen felt like the zoot suitors
were deliberately antagonizing them. They were wearing unpatriotic clothing that
flew in the face of wartime rationing, and on top
of that was the perception that the zoos suitors were
also draft dodgers, and while that may have been the
case for some, a lot of the Mexican youths who
were part of the Patuco culture were too young to enlist.

(18:53):
There were also stories of men wearing their zoot suits
when they reported in and being turned down for military
service because of the perception that they would be troublemakers.
And of course, there were plenty of Mexican Americans serving
in the armed forces, although numbers were not clear because
their numbers were not separated out from the white population.
At the same time, there was also a lot of

(19:14):
overall anti immigrant sentiment going on, even though most of
the young people being targeted here were American citizens of
Mexican descent. What we're talking about today was happening in
parallel with the signing of Executive Order ninety sixty six
and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans from the West
coast of the United States. Almost two thirds of the

(19:37):
people who were incarcerated under that executive order were also
American citizens. Fights between service members and Mexican civilian use
became increasingly common in late nineteen forty two. In December,
they were reported at a rate of about one per week.
By the spring of nineteen forty three, that had increased

(19:58):
to between two and three fights day. Each fight became
justification for the next one, and sometimes they erupted into
mass violence. It's not totally clear what caused these ongoing
clashes between service members and civilians of Mexican descent to
escalate and to mass violence. According to a number of sources,

(20:20):
it was a fight between eleven sailors and a group
of zoot suitors on May nineteen forty three, which left
one sailor with a broken jaw. These riots started on
June three, and we're at least in theory and retaliation
for that earlier fight. And we're going to get into
the details of the zoot suit riots after we first
pause for a break where we hear from one of

(20:41):
the sponsors that keeps his show going. On June three,
a group of about fifty sailors left the Naval and
Marine Corps Reserve Center in Chavez Ravine. They were are
with makeshift weapons and they made their way through the

(21:02):
neighborhoods near the armory looking for a fight. They specifically
looked for and attacked anyone wearing a zoot suit This
was the first night of the zoot suit riots. June
four was a Friday, and that evening sailors began hiring
cabs to take them into the barrios. They treated this
like a seek and destroy mission, seeking out and beating

(21:25):
Mexican youth, especially the ones in zoot suits, but they
also attacked people who were not in zoot suits. Five
victims were hospitalized. Most of the sailors had returned to
base by the time shore patrol and the police arrived,
and there were only a few arrests, and those were
mainly Mexican victims. On June five, the scene was much

(21:46):
the same, with the riots spreading further into East Los Angeles.
The attacks targeted men, especially the ones who quote looked
like pachucos. Has included a group of musicians who were
leaving Aztec Recording Company. On June seven, news reports spread
that zoos suitors were planning a coordinated effort to kill police.

(22:06):
Based on what evidence, we have no idea. It was
kind of just a rumor as far as we know.
We don't know why that was being reported as though
it was a real thing. That's the question of a
lot of the reporting that happened with this, and in response,
thousands of servicemen came to downtown Los Angeles, some of
them from as far away as San Diego. Cab drivers

(22:28):
offered the servicemen free rides, and they attacked people not
only in Mexican neighborhoods, but also in the predominantly black
neighborhood of Watts. June seventh was really the peak of
the zoot suit riots, and throughout this sort of war,
servicemen attacked and beat up young men in zoot suits.
They were often armed with things like clubs and tire irons.

(22:49):
In some cases, they stripped their victims down to their
underwear in the streets and then sometimes set fire to
their zoot suits in front of them. Sometimes the soldiers
cut off their targets hair. They also invaded people's homes,
and they stormed movie theaters to drag Mexican and other
minority patrons out into the street and attack them. While

(23:11):
there were definitely cases of Mexicans and other minorities fighting
back or like taunting the sailors, like being generally aggressive,
this was not a case of two factions coming together
and fighting. The servicemen were definitely the instigators here, and
law enforcement did little to intervene In all of this.

(23:33):
Officers often arrived on the scene after the violence was
over and then arrested the victims instead of the perpetrators,
purportedly for their own protection. Servicemen who were picked up
by law enforcement were typically taken back to base or
just taken a few blocks away from the violence and
dropped off and otherwise faced no consequences. There were also

(23:55):
reports of young Mexican American men turning themselves into police
station and asking to be taken into custody rather than
face being the victims of violence in their own neighborhoods.
Throughout all of this, news reports generally praised the servicemen
as carrying out a much needed vigilante war against uncontrollable
Mexican delinquents. The Los Angeles Times read headlines like zoot

(24:20):
suitors learn lesson in fight with servicemen. Here's how The
New York Times kicked off its reporting on June seven,
quote subdued and no longer ready to do battle. Twenty
eight zoot suitors stripped of their garash clothing and with
County jail barber's hopefully eyeing their flowing ductail haircuts, languished

(24:40):
behind bars today after a second night of battle with
fleers and servicemen, and the next paragraph the article acknowledges
that this was quote a war declared by servicemen. First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about the riots in her My
Day column, saying, quote, the question goes deeper than a suits.
It is a racial protest. I have been worried for

(25:03):
a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is
a problem with roots going a long way back, and
we do not always face these problems as we should.
After this appeared, the l A Times accused her of
sewing racial discord. On June eighth, the violence largely stopped
because the servicemen were barred from leaving base, and downtown

(25:26):
Los Angeles was made out of bounds for soldiers and sailors.
At the same time, the official Navy position was that
all of the actions by sailors were in self defense.
That was patently false. They were picking the fights themselves.
The short patrol was also given orders to arrest any

(25:47):
member of the military whose behavior was disorderly. On the ninth,
the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution banning the
public wearing of zoot suits, with fifty days in jail
as punishment. Although there had been hundreds of injuries, some
of them severe, there were no deaths during the zoot
suit riots, but the racial aspect of the violence is

(26:09):
obvious by the numbers. In terms of hospitalizations, about one
hundred Mexican Americans suffered serious injuries compared to roughly sixteen servicemen.
There also would have been lots and lots of people
who were hurt but didn't seek medical care. There were
also arrests of close to a hundred Mexican Americans compared

(26:29):
to about twenty servicemen and about thirty non Hispanic civilians.
After this was over, two committees were formed to investigate
and find out the cause of the riots. One was
a Citizens Committee ordered by California Governor Earl Warren. The
other was an Anti American Activities investigation presided over by

(26:50):
State Senator Jack B. Tenney, which looked for fascist and
Nazi instigators. No evidence was ever found or published to
back up the whole fascists ash Nazi angle, but the
Citizens Committee report was clear quote and undertaking to deal
with the cause of these outbreaks, the existence of race
prejudice cannot be ignored. In response to this, Los Angeles

(27:12):
Mayor Fletcher Born, on the other hand, maintained that race
was not a factor and continued to blame the riots
on the zoot suitors and on juvenile delinquents. The Citizens
Committee report outlined some of the social conditions that had
led to all of this. Quote, there are approximately two
hundred and fifty thousand persons of Mexican descent in Los

(27:32):
Angeles County. Living conditions among the majority of these people
are far below the general level of the community. Housing
is inadequate, Sanitation is bad and is made worse by congestion.
Recreational facilities for children are very poor, and there is
insufficient supervision of the playgrounds, swimming pools, and other youth centers.

(27:54):
Such conditions are breeding places for juvenile delinquency. The report
also addressed the basically ubiquitous idea that there was an
epidemic of juvenile delinquency, specifically among Mexican youth saying, quote,
all juvenile delinquency has increased recently in Los Angeles. This

(28:15):
includes crimes committed by youths of Mexican origin, but the
fact is that the increase of delinquency in the case
of youths of Mexican families has been less than in
the case of other national or racial groups, and less
than the average increase for the community. The committee also
made a number of recommendations to try to address the

(28:36):
root causes of delinquency and gang formation, better training for
police officers who were working in multiracial communities, better and
more widely available youth and recreation facilities in Mexican neighborhoods,
an end to discrimination and segregation at public facilities. What
the committee really did not investigate, though, was the actions

(28:59):
of the Anglo servicemen and any Anglo civilians who had
participated in these riots. It didn't touch on the fact
that large numbers of servicemen were leaving their basis during
an actual war, that being World War Two, to go
and attack civilians. So even though the report included an
acknowledgement of racism as a factor in all of this,

(29:22):
and even though it included a lot of common sense
recommendations that could help the Mexican community in Los Angeles,
it really did not touch on anything that could have
addressed the serviceman's decision to stage a vigilante attack on
Los Angeles Mexican community. There was a whole lot of
this is what we should do to prevent delinquency among

(29:42):
Mexican youth, but virtually no, this is what we should
do to prevent servicemen from forming a racist vigilante mob.
This whole incident was really formative in both the Hispanic
and the Anglo communities. It was a national news story,
and for a lot of people who didn't live in
the Southwest, it was the first time that they really

(30:03):
heard about a significant Mexican minority living in the United States,
which makes it particularly unfortunate that much of the news
reporting was handled in such a racist way with the
Hispanic and Latino community. The Sleepy Hollow murder case and
the zoot Suit riots were both precursors to the Chicano movement,
also called the Mexican American Civil rights movement. We've talked

(30:26):
about some of the other events that were also part
of the development of this movement, including Mendes versus Westminster,
which was a school segregation case, and the case of
Maccario Garcia, who was the first Mexican national to be
awarded the Medal of Honor, who was arrested after being
denied service at a restaurant after returning home. There were
also similar incidents in other cities after the zoot Suit riots,

(30:49):
although not as massive or as widely reported as what
took place in Los Angeles, and it could have become
an international incident since most of the people targeted were
not Mexican now tionals, and because this happened during World
War Two, Mexico's diplomatic response was somewhat muted. There was
also a lot of other just mass racist violence that

(31:10):
happened that wasn't necessarily similar to the zoot Suit Riots,
but did follow in the immediate months and years after this.
It's also a whole other topic, but worth mentioning. Chavez
Ravine was emptied through a series of evictions starting in
nineteen forty nine, just a few years after this, with
the city originally saying that it was going to be

(31:31):
redeveloped and that the evicted residents would get the first
choice of the newly built homes instead. It's now the
site of Dodger Stadium. There is also a Broadway play
called zoot Suit, directed by Luis Miguel Valdez that debuted
in nineteen seventy nine, and it was the first play
with the Chicano director on Broadway that has also been
made into a film. And there's also that song by

(31:53):
the Cherry Pop and Daddy's which were only mentioning so
that everyone will know that, yes, we do know that
it exists. Uh. And yeah makes it sound like a
whole lot of fun when it was not. It was
not fun at all. Uh. Do you have some listener
mail for us? Sure? Do. I'm chuckling because the subject

(32:17):
line of the email is yea for coal mining, Which
this isn't a sentence that you see in your email
all that often. Uh and in many contexts. Um, this
is from Rochelle. Rochelle says, good morning, ladies. I've never
written into a podcast before, but I have been so
taken by your podcast I can't help myself. I have

(32:38):
only started listening to your podcast a couple of months ago,
but I am quickly catching up to the most recent episodes.
You have such a delightful, wonderful podcast that helps me
get through dull days at work. It's been a lifelong
history buff and fun fact fiend, and your podcast is
a wonderful mixture of both. For me, I would just
like to take a moment and say I love fun.

(33:00):
In fact, fiend to return to the email I'm writing
in because I've just listened to the abra Van disaster
episode from November. I'm from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Before the office,
it was most famous as a coal mining area. Northeastern
Pennsylvania is the location of the largest deposit of anthracite
coal in the world. The two most common types of

(33:21):
coal are anthracite and but too minus coal, anthracite being
the rarer of the two. My grandfather on my dad's
side and my great grandfather on my mother's side were
coal miners. We have had our own mining disasters switched sadly,
as you said in the episode, are all the same.
I am a metal smith and for my m F
faith thesis, I created sculptures and paintings telling the stories

(33:44):
of coal mining in northeastern Pennsylvania, with the main takeaway
being that this story is common a thousand times over
and being told through the lens of Scranton. Rachel then
ends with some episode suggestions for future episodes, and I
just wanted to say thanks for sending this email. If
you want to send us pictures of your m F
faith thesis. I would be super interested in seeing that

(34:06):
as well. Uh so, thank you, Rochelle. If you would
like to write to us about this or any other podcast,
we are at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also all over social media at missed in History.
That is our Facebook and our Twitter, and our Instagram
and our Pinterest. You can come to our website, which
is missed in History dot com and you will find
show notes for all the episodes that Holly and I

(34:28):
have done together, as well as the searchable archive of
every episode that's ever been on this show. And you
can subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts,
and wherever else you get your podcasts. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works
dot com