The War Against Ourselves

By Eric Avila

California’s inhabitants have always been diverse, but World War II unleashed a sudden and intensive phase of racial and ethnic diversification, especially in cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, where access to jobs and housing was available to newcomers of very different cultural backgrounds. Although the commingling of diverse people in California’s urban centers created new possibilities for interracial cooperation and camaraderie, the stress and anxiety of wartime produced new social tensions that were often expressed in racial terms. California maintains a long and troubled history of racial conflict and violence dating back to the initial confrontation between Europeans and indigenous peoples, but the early 1940s added its own dark chapter to that story.

Perhaps nothing symbolized the heightened state of racial tensions in wartime California than the forced internment of Japanese Americans. The Japanese military’s attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 plunged the nation into war with Japan, creating an immediate and pervasive suspicion of Japanese Americans in California, who maintained a peaceful presence in the state as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. The rumored possibility of a Japanese attack upon mainland soil in California sparked anxieties about the possibility of internal subversion and sabotage, singling out Japanese Americans in particular. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times substantiated these fears, invoking the specter of the “Jap Menace” in a barrage of racist words and images. These anxieties underlie the 1942 issuance of Executive Order 9066, which declared Americans of Japanese descent a “hostile and enemy race” and ordered the seizure of Japanese American property and the prompt relocation of Japanese American families to makeshift encampments in the remote deserts of California and Nevada, replete with barbed wire and armed sentries. Almost overnight, Japanese American neighborhoods that grew organically over the course of several generations had become ghost towns. Detained in interment camps over the course of the war, Japanese Americans experienced the destruction of their communities and bore the brunt of racist anxieties in wartime California.

The war years entail a more mixed record for California’s Mexican-American community. On the one hand, Mexican-American men garnered public respect for their military service, and the war bestowed new economic prosperity upon Chicanos and Chicanas. For many Mexican-American men, enlisting in the armed services afforded the chance for steady employment, as well as an awaited opportunity to demonstrate national loyalty and patriotic sentiment. But on the other hand, young Mexican-American men found themselves the particular target of racist anxieties in California. The infamous "Sleepy Lagoon" trial in Los Angeles in 1942, for example, proved that Chicano youths could be convicted and imprisoned without evidence of their guilt, while the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots,” in which white servicemen and police officers launched an all-out attack upon Chicano men dressed in the conspicuous style of the Zoot Suit over the course of five days upon the streets Los Angeles in June of 1943, revealed the racist contempt that endured toward Mexican Americans. Wartime labor shortages also brought Mexican immigrants to California through the 1942 establishment of the Bracero Program, which created a temporary guest worker program for Mexican immigrants, particularly in the low-wage, agricultural sector of California’s economy.

World War II also brought unprecedented numbers of African Americans to California. While the state maintained a relatively small proportion of African Americans throughout its history, the war sparked what historians often describe as the ‘second great migration’ of African Americans to the Far West -- to California, and to the cities of Los Angeles and Oakland in particular. Lured by the prospects of steady employment building ships, aircraft and bombs, hundreds of thousands of African Americans came to California seeking to escape the impoverished conditions of the rural South. While California did entail the promise of jobs and housing, the growing presence of African Americans generated sharp anxieties among whites about the ‘blackening’ of California, particularly in cities like Los Angeles, whose Black population increased by approximately 300% between 1942 and 1945. In a city that historically prided itself on its relative lack of racial diversity, Black migrants to Los Angeles encountered discrimination in housing and employment, and yet managed to forge their own vibrant communities that preserved some of the most vital aspects of Black culture. World War II thus entailed a mixed legacy for a new generation of Black Californians. While it brought the promise of steady employment and affordable housing, it also generated hostilities of many white Californians who sought to maintain the nation’s legacy of white privilege.

Historically, white skin has been a powerful basis of unification among Americans of European descent, but only in the presence of non-white peoples and especially in moments of political crisis and economic turmoil. In California during the early 1940s, a society mired in a frightening global conflict with an uncertain future and growing rapidly by the sudden convergence of diverse strangers of different cultural backgrounds and complexions, the conditions for asserting white skin privilege were ripe. Many white Californians, like many white Americans, recognized World War II as a racial war against non-white peoples, although that sentiment had uncomfortable and often unacknowledged parallels to Nazi German assertions of Aryan supremacy. Nonetheless, the War took on ugly manifestations in California, in the internment of Japanese Americans, the persecution of Mexican youths, and the exclusion of African Americans from jobs and housing. Although California may have been removed from the Old South in both geographic and historic terms, the wartime experiences of Californians of color issued a sobering reminder that old-fashioned racism and racial hierarchy were alive and well.