Proposed Monument Preserves the Memory of Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots
If Americans were to find their own social history preserved in the public landscapes of their own neighborhood and cities, then connection to the past might be very different.Dolores Heyden, "Power of Place"
Eighty years ago, the body of José Gallardo Diaź was found severely wounded in the bushes near Sleepy Lagoon after a neighborhood birthday party turned violent. His death set off a city-wide dragnet in which hundreds of Zoot Suit-wearing young men and women were harassed, beaten and rounded up for questioning. By October 1942, 22 young men were tried in the case People v. Zammora, the largest mass trial in California history.
During the course of the trial, the press demonized these young Pachucos with headlines like "Goons of Sleepy Lagoon" and "Smashing California's Baby Gangsters." Terms like "Pachuco" and "Zoot Suitor" were published in the press as coded language synonymous with gangster and criminal. With public opinion turning against these young people, clashes with service men stationed in Southern California violently exploded into what is widely known as the Zoot Suit Riots in which young men were stripped of their draped jackets and pants.
Not much can be found in the public landscape that documents this flashpoint in Los Angeles' 20th century history. Two large-scale public art projects — Judy Baca's "The Great Wall of Los Angeles" and Barbara Carrasco's "L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective" — incorporated Zoot Suit Riot scenes as part of broader histories of Los Angeles. A large mural in the Council District 9 field office that honors Charlotta Bass features two young Zoot Suitors as the California Eagle publisher spoke out in support of the young people attacked by soldiers and police. Zoot Suit-themed commemorative acts take place throughout the year, including the annual Zoot Suit Riot Memorial Cruise that pays tribute to this history as drivers don their best 1940s suits and roll through downtown Los Angeles in their classic cars.
These expressions of collective memory show the importance of this history to the community and reflect the need for a permanent memorial to more formally remember and heal from this violent episode in the region's past. Over the last few years, the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice has led the effort to design a Sleepy Lagoon memorial located near the original site of this watering hole, now gone and believed to be Bell Business Center.
In an interview at Maywood's Riverfront Park, the current site planned for the memorial, artists from the design team Sandra de la Loza and Arturo Romo spoke about the ideas that informed this project as it relates to their collective work exploring the social histories within ecological histories. Considering how much of the riparian landscape has been lost to industrialization, there is little to indicate the importance of this site to Los Angeles's 20th century history. This site-specific Sleepy Lagoon Memorial addresses the tragedy that happened on that August night of 1942, its violent aftermath and the layers of history in this Southeast Los Angeles neighborhood. As Romo explained, this is "a monument and a site that serves multiple purposes with different functions and different ways to interact with it."
East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice created a Story Map (below), which illustrates how the 1940s story of Sleepy Lagoon connects to histories about the region's water, Tonvga villages and the industrialization of Southeast Los Angeles. Scroll through the Story Map below or view it on a separate browser.
This layered history begins with the first caretakers of Los Angeles who, in along this stretch of the Los Angeles River, lived in Tongva villages named Chokishngna, Wenot and Apachiagna. Tongva cultural bearers were critical to planning the memorial and participating in the community workshops that informed the design. These workshops, in which Tongva members shared their traditional practices, also gave space to residents with Indigenous roots from other parts of the U.S. and Mexico as Southeast Los Angeles is home to a large Native community. In these workshops, questions like "what plants do your family use?" generated a wealth of information for designing sculptural tree trunk seats that will be embedded in the California native garden that could serve as a gathering space for Tongva members and local residents.
Another layer of history looks at how the Spanish colonizers transformed the land from Tongva villages into ranchos and designated a large swatch of Southeast Los Angeles as Rancho San Antonio. This rancho was first granted to Antonio Maria Lugo in 1810 and his descendants mostly maintained the land into the city's U.S. era. Long after the rancho had been partitioned and subdivided, a section was designated the Central Manufacturing District in the 1920s, modeled after the one in Chicago, to support the region's growing interest in manufacturing. For the memorial, these layered histories will be represented with an urban grid sourced from topographical maps and aerial photos sandblasted onto the walking path of the park's bridge. Dancing feet swirl in between text from the big band songs to honor the young zoot culture that navigated the boundaries that come with living in first-generation families. As de la Loza reiterated, "this was a youth culture and they were boundary crossers. Youth that were crossing boundaries, transgressing, standing out and then paying the price for it."
For artist and CSUN Assistant Professor of Chicano Studies Sandra de la Loza, this memorial is personal. Her parents were pachucos/as. Her uncle was one of the young men rounded up by police during one of the many sweeps of Zoot Suitors and was even featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times in June 1943. Like many Mexican American families, her family didn't discuss the tragedies as a result of the Zoot Suit Riots and most of that history was kept silent until de la Loza began to ask questions when she noticed photos in her family albums.
Memorializing the Difficult Histories
The Sleepy Lagoon Memorial tackles the monumental task of giving space to these difficult and traumatizing histories that have been historically silenced in most community monuments. The trauma of those families who endured violence at the hands of the police, at the hands of peers and at the hands of WW2 soldiers, trickled down the generations through the crevices solidified with silent painful memories. As Romo articulated, "this is a project about making something concrete and beautiful, but it's also about delving into personal histories and how it impacted the lives of our ancestors." De la Loza confirmed that while the memorial has many components, "it's also about creating a space of solace, to be with our silences." Meditative seating has been designed as four semi-private concrete tree stumps, modeled after trees native to Southeast Los Angeles residents. Archival poems in bronze inlaid text, crafted with themes and words culled from archival research and community workshops, swirl around each stump.
If monuments have a tendency to transform historical figures into icons, the Sleepy Lagoon memorial aims to do the opposite by, to quote Romo, "complicating, softening and opening up the imagery of the zoot suit" that has grown almost larger than life through the magnifying lens of the media. In popular culture, those in 1940s draped jackets and tapered pants tend to be portrayed as adult men, leaving out the central role young women played in this subculture, as documented in Catherine Ramirez's book "The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory." De la Loza expanded on this idea, "We don't think of Zoot Suitors as young, vulnerable kids navigating displacement, urbanization, segregation, moving between two different cultures and finding their identity within that." These complex ideas are presented in the memorial's bas relief on the Whispering Bench in which two versions of the pachucos/as are depicted. One side shows these young people with hard angles and sharp contrasts as exaggerated through the media's glare, while the other side features softer silhouettes that humanize these now iconic figures.
Eighty years ago, the tragedy at Sleepy Lagoon and the death of José G. Díaz set off a series of more tragedies that will most likely be commemorated in the coming year. The proposed Sleepy Lagoon Memorial invites a deeper reflection into the layers of history of these Southeast Los Angeles neighborhoods that have been erased, paved over and industrialized. The watering hole has been gone for decades but with a memorial situated at Maywood's Riverfront Park, these memories of Sleepy Lagoon, and those that came long before it, will be rooted and made visible in a nearby landscape. Restoring these ecologies and histories that have long been covered in cement, hopefully, not only helps regenerate the native riparian area, but also regenerate authentic connections between those young people in 1942 and those navigating similar terrain 80 years later.
Sources
De la Loza, Sandra. “The Pocho Research Society field guide to LA: Monuments and murals of erased and invisible histories.” Chicano Studies Research Center, 2011.
East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. “Sleepy Lagoon Memorial” Report. (2020).
Pagán, Eduardo Obregón. “Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime LA.” University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Ramírez, Catherine S. "The Woman in the Zoot Suit." In The Woman in the Zoot Suit. Duke University Press, 2009.
Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. “The Sleepy Lagoon case, With a Forward by Orson Welles.” Los Angeles, 1943. Department of Special Collections, UCLA Library.
