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Proposed Monument Preserves the Memory of Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots

A watercolor illustration of a wooded and vegetated area with a creek running through. A centerpiece of the area is a cut tree stump with words circling around it. It reads, "Water is our life," in English, Spanish and Tongva. A person is seen sitting on another tree stump across the creek.
A rendering of the Meditative Seating Area from the design of the Sleepy Lagoon Memorial. | Courtesy of Mapache City Projects and the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice
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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.

A black and white photo of young men lined up, side-by-side in front of a table. On the other side of the table, three people — two older men and an older woman — are seated.
Arraignment of Sleepy Lagoon suspects charged for Jose G. Diaz's murder, August 1942. | Courtesy of Herald Examiner Collection in the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Archive

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.

A yellowing paper with the words, "The Sleepy Lagoon Case" centered and in large writing. Below, in smaller text, reads "with a foreward by Orson Welles."
Pamphlet titled "The Sleepy Lagoon Case: With A Forward by Orson Welles" published by the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in 1943. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (SLDC) was established to support the defendants in People v. Zammora and eventually raise funds for their appeal. | Courtesy of UCLA / Department of Special Collections / Charles E. Young Research Library

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.

Two photos arranged side by side with black borders. The photo on the left is a photo of a mural along a concrete river. The mural features a young Brown man knelt down on the ground in the shadow of an officer standing above him. The officer can only be seen from the knees down. Below the scene, the words, "Zoot Suit Riots L.A. 1943" is written. The photo on the right is a photo of a painting that collages various scenes. The scene in the middle features a young man kneeling over another who is laying on the ground, presumably wounded or dead.
The Zoot Suit Riots included in Judy Baca's "Great Wall of Los Angeles," left, and Barbara Carrasco's "L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective," right. | Victoria Bernal
An old, brown vintage car is parked alongside an old town street. A man wearing glasses and a hat is in the driver's seat, looking out the window. A puppet with blue makeup on its face and a blue hat is seated in the backseat, with its arm resting out the window.
Two cars from the 2022 Zoot Suit Riot Memorial Cruise. The puppet, El Triste, looks out from the window. | Victoria Bernal

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.

Two photos, side-by-side with black borders around them. The photo on the left is one of a young woman with brown hair and holding up a collage featuring snippets from newspapers and archival photos. The photo on the right is a foldable table set up outside, over green grass. People are seen making collages using archival material and construction paper. Stickers, scissors and glue sticks are strewn across the table as people work on their artwork.
In addition to workshops on Tongva history and native gardens, community members remixed archival materials into collages at one of the community engagement events. | Lluvia Higuera / Courtesy of Mapache City Projects and the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice

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."

A sepia-toned black and white photo of four young Mexican American people, posing for a photo in a studio setting. They are all dressed formally. There are two women and two men, alternating.
Sandra de la Loza's mother Hilda de la Loza (far left) with her sister Florence de la Loza (third from left) with unknown friends, taken in the early 1940s. | Courtesy of Sandra de la Loza's Family Archive

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.

A black and white newspaper clipping with the headline, "Zoot Suiters Learn Lesson in Fights With Servicemen." Below that is a photo of a group of Mexican American men sitting in a jail cell. Two the right is a column of text headed with a subhead that reads, "Gangs Stay Off Streets After Dark."
A Los Angeles Times article features Sandra de la Loza's uncle Alejandro de la Loza who was swept up during the Zoot Suit Riots. | Los Angeles Times

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.

A watercolor illustration of a wooded and vegetated area with a creek running through. A centerpiece of the area is a cut tree stump with words circling around it. It reads, "Water is our life," in English, Spanish and Tongva. A person is seen sitting on another tree stump across the creek.
A rendering of the Meditative Seating Area from the design of the Sleepy Lagoon Memorial. | Courtesy of Mapache City Projects and the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice

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.

A watercolor illustration of a gray arched wall featuring a mural engraved into its material. The wall stands at the end of a creek that runs through a wooded and vegetated area. Off in the distance, a bridge can be seen.
Whispering Wall and Bench from the design of the Sleepy Lagoon Memorial. | Courtesy of Mapache City Projects and the East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice

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.

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