Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. Review

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(More customer reviews)This is perhaps the most sophisticated study of 1940s street-level Los Angeles working class culture to appear thus far.
Historiographically, Pagon's book fits firmly in the anti-conspiratorial tradition of Richard Hofstadter, offering very subtle community-oriented analyses of the 1940s LA "pachuco" hysteria where others have tended to see manipulating conspirators at work (blaming, for instance, Hearst's rather irresponsible newspapers, in one common scenario of the left that is dismissed rather perfuctorily here).
Pagon, unlike some reviewers of his book, tends to avoid assuming too much about the teenagers who lay at the heart of the Sleepy Lagoon case, preferring to make very cautious statements about them and their motivations. The 38th Street youths emerge here not as figments of some Sociological treatise or as political or ideological pawns, but as energetic, if somewhat clueless, actors on an urban stage that was clearly often quite daunting to them. As such, Pagon does not excuse delinquent behavior - rather, he simply refrains from assuming that the activity of Mexican American teenagers was criminal merely because sensationalist press accounts claimed it was. As is perfectly clear from Pagon's account, several of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants were clearly budding petty criminals of various stripes, but most were ordinary city kids living on the mean streets of wartime LA. (And to doubt that Los Angeles was a violently segregated city during this era of restrictive covenants and police brutality is simply willfully naive.)
Although the book fails to provide the sort of details about the youths' motivations and actions that one might wish from a novel, one must recall that this book is in reality a work of rigorously documented history, and in fact represents the most difficult and painstaking sort of social history to actually construct. There simply is not a great deal of written documentation about these immigrant working class kids at more than a half-century's remove. What Pagon has managed to put together is very admirable, and his writing style, despite a bit too much repetition, is wonderfully clear and free of obfuscating jargon. What we have here is a fine work of historical scholarship that reveals quite a bit both about the individual characters involved and about the larger political purposes to which their stories were put.
Oh, and the prologue and epilogue represent absolutely wonderful examples of gripping and compelling historical detective writing, including a very reasonable and balanced new theory about just who actually committed the notorious Sleepy Lagoon murder!

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