Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [243]
The Spanish-speaking minority is large, getting larger, and developing an increasingly distinct sense of self. After the Mexican War (1848), the United States acquired a compact block of Spanish-speaking people, mostly in the Southwest. They were of a different race and culture from the white Americans living in the region, and they suffered a good deal of discrimination.87 Their great-grandchildren, along with millions more who have poured over the border, form the Chicanos, that is, Americans of Mexican ancestry, clustered primarily in California and the Southwest. Chicanos are not the only Hispanics. There is a solid contingent of (mainland) Puerto Ricans, centered in New York City; Cubans, heavily concentrated in southern Florida; and an increasing number of immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and other countries of Latin America. Hispanics are, on the whole, poorer than Anglos; some speak little or no English; they are, in many parts of the country, no strangers to severe disadvantage and outright discrimination.
A large bloc of Hispanics live in Los Angeles. There, as elsewhere, the police department has been overwhelmingly Anglo. Many people in the Chicano community, like many in the black community, look on the police more as an alien or occupying army than as protectors of the peace. Indeed, the whole legal system is deeply suspect in the community. Prejudice burst into the open in 1942, in the so-called “Sleepy Lagoon case.”88 Twenty-two young Mexican men were arrested (and seventeen were convicted) on charges of conspiring to murder a man named Jose Diaz. The incident supposedly took place on August 2, 1942, near a reservoir whose nickname was Sleepy Lagoon. There is some question of what actually happened there. The trial was blatantly unfair; newspapers ran stories about “zoot-suit gangsters” and “pachuco killers.” A captain in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office solemnly reported to the grand jury that Mexicans had a “biological” tendency to violence. They were the descendants of “tribes of Indians” who were “given over to human sacrifice”, in which bodies were “opened by stone knives and their hearts torn out while still beating.” Mexicans had “total disregard for human life”; the Mexican, in a fight, will always use a knife; he feels “a desire ... to kill.”
The District Court of Appeals overturned the convictions, though not before the defendants had spent almost two years in San Quentin. The so-called zoot-suit riots began in June 1943, one year after the Sleepy Lagoon affair. “Zoot-suits,” with peg bottoms, long coats, and exaggerated shoulder pads, were a fad among young Chicano men, though others wore them too. The riots were touched off in part by rumors that “zoot-suiters” had stabbed a sailor. Servicemen and off-duty policemen chased, beat, and stripped “zoot-suiters” in four consecutive nights of rioting. 89
How much has changed since the 1940s? The city of Los Angeles, along with other large cities, has made an effort to hire more Spanish-speaking police, and to be more sensitive to the needs and wants of Hispanic communities. Two somewhat contradictory impulses underlie the change. On the one hand, Hispanic victim groups are disaffected, rights-conscious, despairing and defiant at one and the same time. Their anger is a potent source of unrest, sometimes boiling over into violence. But behind