The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II
Flamboyant zoot suit culture, with its ties to fashion, jazz and swing music, jitterbug and Lindy Hop dancing, unique patterns of speech, and even risque experimentation with gender and sexuality, captivated the country's youth in the 1940s. The Power of the Zoot is the first book to give national consideration to this famous phenomenon. Providing a new history of youth culture based on rare, in-depth interviews with former zoot-suiters, Luis Alvarez explores race, region, and the politics of...
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"Luis Alvarez has quite simply crafted a magnificent first book—one that tells a national story from African American and Mexican American youth in New York and Los Angeles to Nisei, Filipino, and Euro-American zooters and the wartime race-based violence that erupted in Detroit, Beaumont, and Mobile."—Vicki L. Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America "Alvarez has broken new ground, with implications for our understanding of minority youth cultures of the past and today."—Edward J. Escobar, author of Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945
List of IllustrationsIntroduction 1Pt. 1 Dignity Denied: Youth in the Early War Years1 Race and Political Economy 152 Class Politics and Juvenile Delinquency 42Pt. 2 The Struggle for Dignity: Zoot Style during World War II3 Zoot Style and Body Politics 774 Zoots, Jazz, and Public Space 113Pt. 3 Violence and National Belonging on the Home Front5 Zoot Violence in Los Angeles 1556 Race Riots across the United States 200Epilogue: From Zoot Suits to Hip-Hop 235Notes 245Bibliography 289Index 305
