Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots

On a clear night in August of 1942, a group of Mexican-American teenagers from LA's 38th Street headed to a swimming hole called Sleepy Lagoon. Riding in the car was Hank Levas. Earlier that evening, Hank and his girlfriend had been beaten by Mexican-American kids from another neighborhood. Hank was determined to defend his sweetheart's honor. As they approached Sleepy Lagoon, the sounds of a party filtered through the trees, and Hank Levas thought he had found the boys he was looking for. To spin one with you, with you To dance with you, please And let our hearts beat Down in that dim cavern That's my desire, desire, desire, desire The ten minute fight at Sleepy Lagoon had all the markings of a typical teenage rumble Except for what neighbors discovered later that night In the light of the full moon, Jose Diaz, a 22 year old about to go off to war, lay dying. He had been beaten and stabbed. During the summer of 1942, there had been growing concern about Mexican-American youth crime. When the Sleepy Lagoon case broke, when Jose Diaz's body was found, it came at exactly the right moment for the hysteria to erupt. In the 1940s, one Mexican-American kid killing another didn't attract much interest from authorities. But in wartime Los Angeles, Jose Diaz's murder would play out differently. The police department stormed the city's Mexican-American community. Hank Levas was the main suspect. The arrest and trial of Levas and others from the 38th Street neighborhood raised fears that Mexican youth were out of control. Within months, the city would be gripped by brutal racial rioting. Mexican-Americans would point to the riots of 1943 as the darkest days of their long history in the City of the Angels. In 1942, the mood in the City of the Angels was eerie. The country was at war. On the streets, the talk was of spies and traitors. Suspicions swirled around young Mexican-Americans. Fears abounded that rebellious kids were being manipulated by enemy agents. In the local papers you saw often columns right next to each other. Japan is doing this and our local threat is these Mexican-American youth. Less than a hundred years before, Los Angeles belonged to Mexico. Business was conducted in Spanish and streets had names like Eternidad and Chapule. But by 1942 Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles was now simply Los Angeles. In more than just the name of the city had changed, Chapule became Pearl Street, and Eternidad became Broadway. As Los Angeles grew, Mexican-Americans came to be viewed as foreigners in a city established by their ancestors. Within 48 hours of Jose Diaz's murder, 600 young Mexican-Americans were caught in a dragnet. They picked up everybody that was over 12 and up to 25. And you couldn't walk out in the street because they would take you. So the word went out in the neighborhood, they're picking up everybody. And it's about a fight and it's about somebody got killed. Then the parents would go to the other parent and tell them, look, they're doing this and that, keep the kids in the house. We were just peeking out the windows and police were all over the streets. The police did regularly harass Mexican kids on the street because they thought of them as being the criminal element. If the kid looked suspicious, they would pick them up. If the kid looked sullen or didn't give proper respect, the kid could get beat up by the police. There are a number of instances in which Mexican kids said, you know, if you're on the street after 8 o'clock, just be careful. You've got to get off the streets. Hank Levas was no stranger to the LAPD. Levas was routinely picked up by police when the suspect of a crime was ambiguously described as an unknown Mexican. From the perspective of the LAPD, Henry was a delinquent with a chip on his shoulder. on his shoulder. largely because he was the kind of kid who would stand up for his rights. He would protest assaults upon him. He would protest if he was arrested, for example. He would challenge them. By the summer of 1942, his life seemed headed in a new direction. He had enlisted in the Merchant Marine, even been issued a uniform. But now, here's the suspect in the murder of Jose Diaz. As soon as we pulled up, my mother started to get off the car, and the police surrounded the car, and they arrested my brother. I asked them, where are you taking him? And he said to the 77th Police Station. Decades of discrimination had forced the Mexican-American community to turn inward. By the 1940s, LA's 250,000 Mexican-Americans lived in a series of tight-knit neighborhoods called barrios. The communities were traditional, conservative, and self-contained. But like many Mexican-Americans of his generation, Hank Levas refused to accept the confines of the barrio. There was a different America outside their neighborhood, and Hank and others like him wanted to claim a peace for themselves. The tensions that arose from this sort of splitting of... culture is that often parents really saw their children disappearing from them, from the sanctity of the barrio, from the cultural world, even though physically they remained, they more often were the people that would venture into various aspects of American culture. This kid spoke to each other in English and it was in English that was punctuated by jazz phrases. Cool, hip, on time. All of these kinds of things that they very clearly drew from jazz culture during this period. And some of the boys from 38th Street will tell you they didn't know Spanish during this time. They didn't speak Spanish. The wartime of The economy put money in the kids' pockets. In 1942, they were spending it on big balloon pants, pegged at the ankle, and long baggy coats. A style borrowed from African Americans. It was called the Zoot Suit. The zoot suit was everywhere. In the nightclubs, kids in zoot suits ruled the dance floor. Their stoic moves, the essence of L.A. cool. All you do is get the girl's arm like... that and she'd go around him and he'd put his arm out this way and then she'd go around about three times and he'd go like that because that guy was not going to move he didn't want to wrinkle the He's older than nothing. He don't want to mess up his pants. As soon as they would get out of the house, they would beeline straight down to Central Avenue. A lot of jazz clubs were. They would go there to listen to jazz artists and to dance the swing. All these things that their Mexican parents would probably not have approved of. And they found ways of sneaking around that. And in fact, wearing the zoot suit, I would say, was part of that. Many times I wore my skirt just above my knee till I got around the corner and then I'd roll it up at the waist. And so it would be really short, you know. Then coming back from school we'd just pull it down. The boys wore their pants very wide at the knee. They were always to be 40 inches at the knees and 10 to 11 inches at the cuff, so they were very ballooned out. very high-waisted. Their outrageous clothes and cocky attitudes shocked their traditional parents, who feared their sons and daughters were becoming pachucos. In Los Angeles in the early 40s, the word pachuco meant punk. These were ill-mannered kids. These weren't the kids that you wanted your children to hang out with. Many white Los Angelinos felt threatened by their assertive presence. To them, any Mexican kid in a zoot suit was a potential pachuco. By wearing their zoot suits and swaggering down the streets in public, these kids defied the norms of segregation. It's hard for us to imagine, but to go back in the context of the 1940s, when everything around you told you, you're not one of us, you're not American, and because you're not American, because you're not white, you're supposed to remain in your neighborhoods, you can't go to our clubs, you can't go to our restaurants, you can't go to our movies, and on and on and on. And of course that's going to breed some sort of resentment. The tension on LA's streets was heightened by the presence of 50,000 sailors looking for a way to let off steam before heading off to war. Tensions between servicemen and Mexican-American boys, I think, came from a lot of different places. The first place to look is in terms of the servicemen's own backgrounds. A lot of these servicemen were coming from other parts of the United States. They were not familiar with Mexican-Americans, and they really were not accustomed to not only the diversity of Los Angeles, but the kind of interaction one would see on the city streets. The charged atmosphere sparked frequent street battles between sailors from the Naval Armory and Mexican-American boys from the surrounding community called Chavez Ravine. Many of the Mexican-American kids during this period came to terms with segregation by seeing their neighborhoods as their neighborhoods. They resented the presence of whites, particularly if you can imagine white military personnel during this period pumped up by boot camp, ready to go out and lick the Japs and lick the Nazis. The sailors making their way back from a night on the town had no alternative but to cut through a mostly Mexican-American neighborhood. Going down that canyon from the armory, Mexican kids were still playing inside the hill as we were walking them down the road there. You never want to get caught by yourself as a sailor in that area, by going through there in one single file. You're asking for trouble. You're really asking for trouble. At the base, they told us to get down to the sale shop, and they sewed 13 pennies in the back of our neckerchief, that if any of the pachucos came after you, you'd take that neckerchief off and use it as a billy club. 13 pennies would give you quite a blow, and we all had that. Each fight provided an excuse for the next. Sailors insulted Mexican-American teenagers, and they in turn taunted the sailors. The police had their own problems with L.A.'s Mexican youth. During the war years, the LAPD felt frustrated. They were losing their best and most experienced police officers to go off into the Army and the Navy and into the service. And in addition to that, they were faced with this new phenomenon of the zoot suiters. You don't know how many times you heard they were going to take their kid gloves off and they were going to deal with the Zoot Suiters harshly now. That they wanted to really step forward and deal with what they saw as this criminal element in a very harsh manner. Inside the interrogation room of the 77th Precinct, Hank Levas could not have imagined what was in store for him. The Sleepy Lagoon case was playing out like a Hollywood movie. Hank was the villain. The ending to this story would surprise everyone. The arrest of Levas and 21 other boys made front page news. Hank and his friends did admit to engaging in a fight, but they denied killing Jose Diaz. They stuck to their story, despite tough treatment by the police. They put gloves on so they would mark their hands up, you know, and just whip you, just hit you all over the body, the face and everything. And the leg, kicking the legs, yeah. And they were trying to get a confession. We got to the police station and I went up to the counter and I asked if we could see my brother Hank. He had just been picked up. What could we do? And the officer said... He looked it up and he said, oh yeah, he's the leader. And I said, well, I'm not sure that you've got the right person if you're calling him a leader. He said, no, we know who you want. He said, you want to see Hank. They opened the door and I saw my brother, but I didn't even recognize him. They had him handcuffed. His hands were behind the chairs. He had his head down, his lip was hanging all below his chin. And I called to him, but he didn't lift his head up. He just, he was knocked out. And he said, well, now you've seen him. Hank claimed that one of the cops who beat him was Chief Clem Peoples. The chief was the lead investigator on the Sleepy Lagoon case. When the largest mass trial in California history began in October of 1942, Peeples was there, building a case against Hank and the boys in the courtroom, and writing articles about Sleepy Lagoon in the pulp press. presiding over the case was the Honorable Charles Fricke a well-respected judge known as a law and order man dad used to talk about Fricke as a prosecutor's judge judge Fricke according to my father would take his prosecutors aside over lunch hours and educate them on how to introduce evidence he prided himself in and knowing criminal law better than anybody. I think my father felt that he thought of himself as infallible and tended to look down at counsel and look down at people that he didn't agree with. Overruling objections from the defense, Judge Fricke sat all the defendants together, isolating them from their lawyers. Since their arrest, the defendants had not been allowed to get haircuts or clean clothes. Defense attorneys requested that the defendants be permitted to clean up. Their request was denied. The judge ruled that the boy's appearance was relevant to the case. That's the way they are. That's the way they have to be out here. He said they wear long ducktail hair and we're not allowing them to take haircuts. Nothing was allowed. And so naturally they looked really bad. The jury was looking at the defendants who sat in two rows of seats opposite them, and their dislike of the defendants was palpable. They did not. like those people they were looking at. Hank and the other boys looked like vagabonds, said one observer. They were no longer those young men that took their pride in their clothes. They didn't have that. Only Hank Levas grasped the significance of the trial. His conviction would send a message that the city had Mexican youth crime under control. My brother Hank knew that he was going to be the one that they were going to zero in on. He was very aware of what was happening. Hank was cast as the villain because... both in personality and size. These are larger than the others. The prosecution painted a picture of the 38th Street group as ruthless killers, with Hank as their leader. When the 38th Street kids took the stand, they told a different story. They said they were driving around that night looking for the boys who had attacked Hank and his girlfriend earlier that evening. As they approached the party, two of the girls found Jose Diaz lying in the shadows. He had been beaten and stabbed. Blood is streaming down from both sides of his face. There's blood coming also out of his mouth. He's breathing quite shallow. And this is when they find him, already unconscious, before the fight breaks out. As the girls attended to Jose, Hank and his friends went on the attack. When the brief fight broke up, the girls helping Jose were pulled away. One of the boys spotted Diaz on the ground and hit him. The defendants admitted that one of their group had struck Diaz, but under oath, they denied any responsibility for his death. The girl's from 38th Street. were portrayed in the press as every bit as dangerous as the boys. It was plastered all over the papers that girls took part in this murderous foray the night that Jose Diaz was killed. And that was a huge part of the story, that women were actually on the streets fighting with boys. Eight girls were called to testify by the prosecution. One after another, they refused to cooperate. One of them was Lorena Encinas. She knew who killed Jose Diaz, but she would not reveal her secret. The trial dragged on for three months. Hank Levas' mother remained hopeful throughout the process. My mother always thought that because her son was not guilty, that no matter what they do, at the end they're going to be released because they didn't have anything to do with the killing. On January 12, 1943, the jury announced its verdict. When the jury came in and the verdict was read, The expression on the faces of the defendants were of horror. The mothers were all huddled together there and I was there with them. Most of them didn't speak English. There was, I think, only two that spoke English. So we were quickly trying to translate to them what had happened. Seventeen defendants were found guilty. Hank Levas was sentenced to life. Hank, I kind of expected that they would be found guilty. And he picked his head up. Well, a lot of them just dropped their head down and looking to the floor. But he just picked his head up like he knew this was coming. My brother Hank knew it was going to come. Some of the guys were in tears, you know. And me and Hank Laver was telling them, buckle up you suckers, you man, be a man, stop crying, you know. And we were hurting too, you know, but we were only trying to show it, we were trying to be machos, you know, and all that. But a lot of guys were crying. The boys were sent to San Quentin Prison, 400 miles from home. They weren't the only ones who would do time. The girls from 38th Street were taken from their families and made wards of the state. In a legal process that provided neither jury nor trial, they were sent away to an infamous reform school. The Ventura School for Girls at this time is really a very repressive institution. one that's custodial and disciplinary procedures completely rival the state prisons of the time Young woman would go to very drastic measures in order to escape going to the Ventura school for girls because of its bad bad reputation. There were women at the juvenile hall who knew that they were going to be ultimately sentenced to the minstrel school and they were swallowing safety pins the night before in order to get out of it. With the secret she held, Lorena Encinas could have made a deal, but she refused. My mother's reason for being there was for the mere reason that she failed to cooperate with the courts and divulge the information that they wanted her to name all the names of the people involved. During all the time she served at Ventura, Lorena kept details about Jose Diaz's murder to herself. While the 38th Street Boys did time in San Quentin, prominent Los Angelinos were working to get them released. Believing the Boys had been railroaded, communists... Intellectuals and Hollywood celebrities like Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth lent their names to the newly formed Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. I went to the Beverly Hills Hotel. They said I had to go speak. She says, bring some clothes, we'll pick you up. I went as I dressed with my knee-high white socks and my very short black skirt. They picked me up and we went to Rita Hayworth's house. And Rita Hayworth said, no, no, no, you can't wear that. You could get one of my dresses. And my first formal belonged to Rita Hayworth. Political activists also joined the cause. We had professional people, we had educators, we had congressmen, we had a lot of union people. The committee's efforts to portray the defendants as innocent victims paid off. Money to fund an appeal came in from across the country. Prominent members of the committee visited the boys to reassure them they would not be forgotten. And Anthony Quinn told us, don't worry, we're going to beat this on appeal. Yeah. You were very, very worried. And he said, I'm behind you guys. In the months following the trial, the city grew more tense. Skirmishes between sailors and zoot suiters became a daily occurrence. The pachucos would intimidate people. They would walk down the street, five abreast, and if you walked around them, they would laugh or stick their hand out and hit you. After a while, you got so you'd go... down the side streets instead of confronting them. A lot of them were from Mexico. They didn't speak English. They didn't adhere to our laws. They weren't even geared up for the war effort. On June 3rd, 1943, the city exploded. As a group of service personnel were passing a group of civilian youth, one young man raised his hand in a manner that one of the sailors thought was threatening. One of the sailors turned around and grabbed the arm of the young civilian, and from that point the fight broke out. It seemed that both sides were primed for confrontation, and the street seemed to explode in a fight. In the process, the sailor had his jaw broken, he was knocked unconscious, and his buddies had to drag him back to the armory. Later that night, a group of sailors armed with belts and clubs left the naval armory and headed downtown. The Zoot Suit riots had begun. We had a commanding officer and he told the guys, he said, okay man, we've had it. So the guys from the armory, they got up the gun belts and wrapped them around their hands and down they went, cleaned up town. I was in the theater downtown and watching a movie. All of a sudden, the lights went on. And you hear a lot of noise, commotion, a lot of guys yelling or something. Man, you turn around and you see these servicemen beating the heck out of all these Mexicans. And it was a fight not just with fisticuffs, but some of them had chains. So what I did is I dived underneath the counter and stayed there and, you know, protected myself because it became very wild. It was like a movie set. Among the victims in the theater were 12 and 13-year-old boys beaten by American servicemen because of the clothes they wore. I know a lot of them came back happy. A lot of the guys, the Americans, they came back happy. The following night, hundreds of sailors took the fight beyond downtown and into the heart of LA's oldest Mexican neighborhood. The servicemen would cross the river and head into communities like Boyle Heights and then other parts of East Los Angeles to seek out Mexican-American youth that were no longer ending up in downtown Los Angeles at theaters and bars. So as the riot played itself out, there had to be a lot more sort of search and destroy, to use a military metaphor. And that's where you get the real movement into East Los Angeles. Once in the barrio, sailors broadened their attack beyond Mexican boys in suit suits. Any Mexican in their path was a potential target. The way the riots develop is very much attached to what the notion of a zoot-suter was. The notion of a zoot-suter was always racialized, even though Mexicans were not the only people wearing zoot-suits. So a riot that first was aiming at individuals because of their dress becomes a more expansive sort of riot aimed at a particular racial population, Mexican-Americans. It didn't take long for the kids from the Varios to organize and fight back. There was an alley behind this theater and a lot right next to it. And it was just jammed. So we was waiting, it was already getting dark. So then about 20, 30 guys come out the street so that when the city was closed, when the sailors come they could see them. As soon as they went out there, here comes those truckloads. Truckloads of sailors and civilians. And they let out a cry, there they are, there they are, and they came in. Well as they came in, once they got all the way in, we all came out. I myself had a bat and I used it. And there was people hurt on both sides. Fist to cuffing, you know, and kicking and biting and crashing. I got a couple of good blows, knocked me down, they took me back to the base and put me in sickbay overnight. The next morning I went back to doing my normal duties, but I had two good shots. the shiners at night time they came at night time right at night time they came oh so we just disappeared right and disappeared but the we found out that the best thing to do to get even with them is watch them on william boulevard and when there was four or five guys riding in a car and we would follow them until they had to come to a boulevard stop and there'd be another car in front of them, we'd run out there, open one door and start pounding the hell out of the driver's door and get him out and then beat the hell out of that guy. On the fifth day of the riots, 5,000 civilians showed up to assist the sailors. My brother was only 14 years old. I was 16 at the time, but I did drive, and we got my mother's car, and we went to El Toro and picked up Marines. Los Angeles was like a war zone and we had to do something about it. The Pachucos had just taken over. I felt that I was doing my share for the war effort. The kids fighting the sailors were not entirely on their own. There's this man I never knew, I never seen him before. And he says, are you guys coming to fight sailors? And I said, yeah. He said, I have a car here. It's full of gas, and at that time the gas was rationed. Take it, use it when you get through, just leave the keys in it, put it any place on Central Avenue, and I'll pick it up. And he says, all I want you to do is get one of them white guys for me. By week's end, the Zoot Suit riots were making headlines across the country. Thousands of Marines, soldiers and sailors from as far away as Las Vegas arrived in the City of the Angels, itching to clean up the town. Mexican-American kids were overwhelmed. In a ritual repeated across the city, servicemen stripped them of their clothes and burnt the garments on the streets. The LAPD hangs back during this entire confrontation, about a week of rioting, never taking the offensive in trying to stop the riot, and only showing up after the rioting servicemen have swept through an area. And they show up only to arrest the victims of riot and throw them into jail. The shore patrol would naturally come out right away because they were patrolling like regular policemen. And they'd come to break up a fight. And they'd take these pachucos, if they could catch them, if they didn't run away, you know, they'd catch them and throw them in the jeep and put them in the paddy wagon and take them to jail. With the sailors, they put us in the jeep, take us a couple of blocks away, and tell us to get back to our ship or get back to the station. None of the sailors got arrested. Tell me one of the sailors that got arrested for beating the hell out of somebody. Huh? Within four or five days, LA officials realized this could move us out of control, out of control in a wartime society. It could, in fact, lead to much greater problems if servicemen kept disobeying their superiors and going down into these communities. And that's why it stops. On June 8th, 1943, military authorities, in consultation with civic leaders, declared the city off-limits to servicemen. The rioting ended soon afterwards. The following day, the city council adopted a resolution banning the wearing of zoot suits on LA streets. Wearing the suit in public was punishable by a 30-day jail term. Stores that sold the suits quickly moved to distance themselves from the style that had become a symbol of rebellion. Mexican-American youth, I think, were taught in World War II that they could not simply choose by themselves the way that they would express themselves. They simply couldn't choose what they could wear. They simply couldn't choose who they could be. That this was not a society that allowed for that kind of freedom of expression for these particular youth. And that's a very painful lesson. It's a very painful lesson when one hears the rhetoric of Americans all. The rhetoric of American promise open to all sorts of immigrants, all sorts of people. As the riots subsided, the governor ordered the creation of a citizens committee. His charge was to investigate and determine the cause of the riots. Ironically, prison life had sheltered the 38th Street Boys from the worst mob violence in Los Angeles history. With Hollywood stars still working on their behalf, the kids got special treatment. We used to have what the guards used to eat. Their food. Not prison food. Their food. You know, steaks, pork chops, milk, ice cream, cake, everything. Unlike the other boys, Hank Levas refused to play along. His resistance to authority earned him a stint at California's dreaded Folsom Prison. The locking of the doors, he wrote, left him with a lonesome, empty feeling. You are standing up to the iron door, waiting for the guard to come along and take the count. Listening as his footsteps fade away in the distance. You realize that you are alone. As the months passed, Levas grew increasingly resentful. Finally, in November of 1943, defense attorneys filed an appeal with the California 2nd District Court, claiming their clients had been denied a fair trial. A year passed before a decision was handed down. By this time, Hank and the others had been locked up for more than two years. I sent a telegram to San Quentin, care of Henry Labus, to tell all the guys, saying, appeal successful. I forgot what else it said, but I know that it ended. Oh, what a wonderful morning. We couldn't believe it at first, you know what I mean? It was like a shock. And one of the guys told me, he said, you know, this guy's got a barrel of homemade brew buried in the ground. And we felt like celebrating, you know. So we did. We dug it up and we got drunk that night in the barracks over there. And the officers came, you know, they weren't officers, they were like supervisors. And the head guy, the warden told them, as long as they don't fight nobody, you know, don't cause no problem, leave them alone. Leave them alone. And we drank that whole barrel, yeah. In October of 1944, Hank Levas and the other boys were set free. Ever defiant, Hank Leavis walked out of the Los Angeles Hall of Justice wearing a zoot suit. The court ruled that Judge Fricke had committed serious errors in the trial and threw out the verdict. But the court did not clear the 38th Street Boys of the murder charge. Although LA authorities declined to retry the case, the Sleepy Lagoon murder haunted Hank and the others for life. It stopped him from going into service, which is the thing that he wanted so bad. He'd already signed into the Merchant Marine. He'd already had a trial run. And he was in uniform. And it didn't happen. All this happened and it just broke his future. Jose Diaz was dead and his killer got away with murder. Those who had information weren't talking in 1942. My mom did know who the murderer of Jose Diaz was, but she kept it to herself. And she refused to cooperate with the authorities. Decades passed before the truth emerged. Toward the end of her life, Lorena Encinas at last shared her secret about Sleepy Lagoon. My mother admitted to me that the reason that she kept that secret from the authorities was that it was her brother, Louie, who was involved in the murder. She kept it to herself because she was not the type of person that would snitch, so to speak, on anyone else. And she also was trying to protect my Uncle Louie. Lorena claimed that her brother Louie was at the party before the 38th Street kids arrived, but had been thrown out for causing problems. Later that night, as Jose Diaz and two companions left the party, they were met by an angry Louie Encinas and his friends. In the fight that followed, Jose Diaz was stabbed and left to die. A short time later, Hank Levas and his friends arrived at the party. Louis Encinas was picked up in the dragnet following the Sleepy Lagoon murder, but was let go by police. Years later, Encinas committed suicide. In 1943, the Citizens Committee investigating the Zoot Suit riots issued its report. It condemned the role played by the press and by the LAPD, and determined race to be a central cause of the riots. At the same time, the mayor came to his own conclusion. The riots, he said, were caused by juvenile delinquents. Race was not a factor. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was powerless to help the 38th Street Girls. They remained wards of the California Youth Authority until they reached 21 years of age. Loretta Encinas died in 1991. As Hank Levas and the other boys walked out of prison, a guard remarked, they'll be back. He was right. Hank Levas and many of the other boys grew tragically familiar with prison life. Hank, the symbolic zoot-suter, died in an East LA bar in 1971. The Sleepy Lagoon murder remains officially unsolved. There's more about the Zoot Suit Riots at American Experience Online. Explore Zoot style in music, dancing, and clothes. And read letters the Sleepy Lagoon Boys wrote from prison. All this and more at PBS Online, pbs.org. America Online Keyword, PBS. To order Zoot Suit Riots on videocassette or other programs from American Experience, call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. Thank you.

Hank was determined to defend his sweetheart's honor. As they approached Sleepy Lagoon, the sounds of a party filtered through the trees, and Hank Levas thought he had found the boys he was looking for. To spin one with you, with you To dance with you, please And let our hearts beat Down in that dim cavern That's my desire, desire, desire, desire The ten minute fight at Sleepy Lagoon had all the markings of a typical teenage rumble Except for what neighbors discovered later that night In the light of the full moon, Jose Diaz, a 22 year old about to go off to war, lay dying.

He had been beaten and stabbed. During the summer of 1942, there had been growing concern about Mexican-American youth crime. When the Sleepy Lagoon case broke, when Jose Diaz's body was found, it came at exactly the right moment for the hysteria to erupt. In the 1940s, one Mexican-American kid killing another didn't attract much interest from authorities.

But in wartime Los Angeles, Jose Diaz's murder would play out differently. The police department stormed the city's Mexican-American community. Hank Levas was the main suspect. The arrest and trial of Levas and others from the 38th Street neighborhood raised fears that Mexican youth were out of control.

Within months, the city would be gripped by brutal racial rioting. Mexican-Americans would point to the riots of 1943 as the darkest days of their long history in the City of the Angels. In 1942, the mood in the City of the Angels was eerie. The country was at war. On the streets, the talk was of spies and traitors.

Suspicions swirled around young Mexican-Americans. Fears abounded that rebellious kids were being manipulated by enemy agents. In the local papers you saw often columns right next to each other. Japan is doing this and our local threat is these Mexican-American youth. Less than a hundred years before, Los Angeles belonged to Mexico.

Business was conducted in Spanish and streets had names like Eternidad and Chapule. But by 1942 Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles was now simply Los Angeles. In more than just the name of the city had changed, Chapule became Pearl Street, and Eternidad became Broadway.

As Los Angeles grew, Mexican-Americans came to be viewed as foreigners in a city established by their ancestors. Within 48 hours of Jose Diaz's murder, 600 young Mexican-Americans were caught in a dragnet. They picked up everybody that was over 12 and up to 25. And you couldn't walk out in the street because they would take you. So the word went out in the neighborhood, they're picking up everybody. And it's about a fight and it's about somebody got killed.

Then the parents would go to the other parent and tell them, look, they're doing this and that, keep the kids in the house. We were just peeking out the windows and police were all over the streets. The police did regularly harass Mexican kids on the street because they thought of them as being the criminal element.

If the kid looked suspicious, they would pick them up. If the kid looked sullen or didn't give proper respect, the kid could get beat up by the police. There are a number of instances in which Mexican kids said, you know, if you're on the street after 8 o'clock, just be careful.

You've got to get off the streets. Hank Levas was no stranger to the LAPD. Levas was routinely picked up by police when the suspect of a crime was ambiguously described as an unknown Mexican. From the perspective of the LAPD, Henry was a delinquent with a chip on his shoulder.

on his shoulder. largely because he was the kind of kid who would stand up for his rights. He would protest assaults upon him. He would protest if he was arrested, for example. He would challenge them.

By the summer of 1942, his life seemed headed in a new direction. He had enlisted in the Merchant Marine, even been issued a uniform. But now, here's the suspect in the murder of Jose Diaz.

As soon as we pulled up, my mother started to get off the car, and the police surrounded the car, and they arrested my brother. I asked them, where are you taking him? And he said to the 77th Police Station.

Decades of discrimination had forced the Mexican-American community to turn inward. By the 1940s, LA's 250,000 Mexican-Americans lived in a series of tight-knit neighborhoods called barrios. The communities were traditional, conservative, and self-contained.

But like many Mexican-Americans of his generation, Hank Levas refused to accept the confines of the barrio. There was a different America outside their neighborhood, and Hank and others like him wanted to claim a peace for themselves. The tensions that arose from this sort of splitting of...

culture is that often parents really saw their children disappearing from them, from the sanctity of the barrio, from the cultural world, even though physically they remained, they more often were the people that would venture into various aspects of American culture. This kid spoke to each other in English and it was in English that was punctuated by jazz phrases. Cool, hip, on time. All of these kinds of things that they very clearly drew from jazz culture during this period. And some of the boys from 38th Street will tell you they didn't know Spanish during this time.

They didn't speak Spanish. The wartime of The economy put money in the kids' pockets. In 1942, they were spending it on big balloon pants, pegged at the ankle, and long baggy coats. A style borrowed from African Americans. It was called the Zoot Suit.

The zoot suit was everywhere. In the nightclubs, kids in zoot suits ruled the dance floor. Their stoic moves, the essence of L.A.

cool. All you do is get the girl's arm like... that and she'd go around him and he'd put his arm out this way and then she'd go around about three times and he'd go like that because that guy was not going to move he didn't want to wrinkle the He's older than nothing.

He don't want to mess up his pants. As soon as they would get out of the house, they would beeline straight down to Central Avenue. A lot of jazz clubs were.

They would go there to listen to jazz artists and to dance the swing. All these things that their Mexican parents would probably not have approved of. And they found ways of sneaking around that. And in fact, wearing the zoot suit, I would say, was part of that. Many times I wore my skirt just above my knee till I got around the corner and then I'd roll it up at the waist.

And so it would be really short, you know. Then coming back from school we'd just pull it down. The boys wore their pants very wide at the knee. They were always to be 40 inches at the knees and 10 to 11 inches at the cuff, so they were very ballooned out. very high-waisted.

Their outrageous clothes and cocky attitudes shocked their traditional parents, who feared their sons and daughters were becoming pachucos. In Los Angeles in the early 40s, the word pachuco meant punk. These were ill-mannered kids. These weren't the kids that you wanted your children to hang out with. Many white Los Angelinos felt threatened by their assertive presence.

To them, any Mexican kid in a zoot suit was a potential pachuco. By wearing their zoot suits and swaggering down the streets in public, these kids defied the norms of segregation. It's hard for us to imagine, but to go back in the context of the 1940s, when everything around you told you, you're not one of us, you're not American, and because you're not American, because you're not white, you're supposed to remain in your neighborhoods, you can't go to our clubs, you can't go to our restaurants, you can't go to our movies, and on and on and on. And of course that's going to breed some sort of resentment.

The tension on LA's streets was heightened by the presence of 50,000 sailors looking for a way to let off steam before heading off to war. Tensions between servicemen and Mexican-American boys, I think, came from a lot of different places. The first place to look is in terms of the servicemen's own backgrounds.

A lot of these servicemen were coming from other parts of the United States. They were not familiar with Mexican-Americans, and they really were not accustomed to not only the diversity of Los Angeles, but the kind of interaction one would see on the city streets. The charged atmosphere sparked frequent street battles between sailors from the Naval Armory and Mexican-American boys from the surrounding community called Chavez Ravine. Many of the Mexican-American kids during this period came to terms with segregation by seeing their neighborhoods as their neighborhoods. They resented the presence of whites, particularly if you can imagine white military personnel during this period pumped up by boot camp, ready to go out and lick the Japs and lick the Nazis.

The sailors making their way back from a night on the town had no alternative but to cut through a mostly Mexican-American neighborhood. Going down that canyon from the armory, Mexican kids were still playing inside the hill as we were walking them down the road there. You never want to get caught by yourself as a sailor in that area, by going through there in one single file.

You're asking for trouble. You're really asking for trouble. At the base, they told us to get down to the sale shop, and they sewed 13 pennies in the back of our neckerchief, that if any of the pachucos came after you, you'd take that neckerchief off and use it as a billy club. 13 pennies would give you quite a blow, and we all had that.

Each fight provided an excuse for the next. Sailors insulted Mexican-American teenagers, and they in turn taunted the sailors. The police had their own problems with L.A.'s Mexican youth. During the war years, the LAPD felt frustrated.

They were losing their best and most experienced police officers to go off into the Army and the Navy and into the service. And in addition to that, they were faced with this new phenomenon of the zoot suiters. You don't know how many times you heard they were going to take their kid gloves off and they were going to deal with the Zoot Suiters harshly now. That they wanted to really step forward and deal with what they saw as this criminal element in a very harsh manner. Inside the interrogation room of the 77th Precinct, Hank Levas could not have imagined what was in store for him.

The Sleepy Lagoon case was playing out like a Hollywood movie. Hank was the villain. The ending to this story would surprise everyone. The arrest of Levas and 21 other boys made front page news.

Hank and his friends did admit to engaging in a fight, but they denied killing Jose Diaz. They stuck to their story, despite tough treatment by the police. They put gloves on so they would mark their hands up, you know, and just whip you, just hit you all over the body, the face and everything.

And the leg, kicking the legs, yeah. And they were trying to get a confession. We got to the police station and I went up to the counter and I asked if we could see my brother Hank. He had just been picked up.

What could we do? And the officer said... He looked it up and he said, oh yeah, he's the leader. And I said, well, I'm not sure that you've got the right person if you're calling him a leader.

He said, no, we know who you want. He said, you want to see Hank. They opened the door and I saw my brother, but I didn't even recognize him. They had him handcuffed.

His hands were behind the chairs. He had his head down, his lip was hanging all below his chin. And I called to him, but he didn't lift his head up.

He just, he was knocked out. And he said, well, now you've seen him. Hank claimed that one of the cops who beat him was Chief Clem Peoples. The chief was the lead investigator on the Sleepy Lagoon case.

When the largest mass trial in California history began in October of 1942, Peeples was there, building a case against Hank and the boys in the courtroom, and writing articles about Sleepy Lagoon in the pulp press. presiding over the case was the Honorable Charles Fricke a well-respected judge known as a law and order man dad used to talk about Fricke as a prosecutor's judge judge Fricke according to my father would take his prosecutors aside over lunch hours and educate them on how to introduce evidence he prided himself in and knowing criminal law better than anybody. I think my father felt that he thought of himself as infallible and tended to look down at counsel and look down at people that he didn't agree with. Overruling objections from the defense, Judge Fricke sat all the defendants together, isolating them from their lawyers.

Since their arrest, the defendants had not been allowed to get haircuts or clean clothes. Defense attorneys requested that the defendants be permitted to clean up. Their request was denied. The judge ruled that the boy's appearance was relevant to the case.

That's the way they are. That's the way they have to be out here. He said they wear long ducktail hair and we're not allowing them to take haircuts. Nothing was allowed. And so naturally they looked really bad.

The jury was looking at the defendants who sat in two rows of seats opposite them, and their dislike of the defendants was palpable. They did not. like those people they were looking at. Hank and the other boys looked like vagabonds, said one observer. They were no longer those young men that took their pride in their clothes.

They didn't have that. Only Hank Levas grasped the significance of the trial. His conviction would send a message that the city had Mexican youth crime under control.

My brother Hank knew that he was going to be the one that they were going to zero in on. He was very aware of what was happening. Hank was cast as the villain because... both in personality and size.

These are larger than the others. The prosecution painted a picture of the 38th Street group as ruthless killers, with Hank as their leader. When the 38th Street kids took the stand, they told a different story. They said they were driving around that night looking for the boys who had attacked Hank and his girlfriend earlier that evening. As they approached the party, two of the girls found Jose Diaz lying in the shadows.

He had been beaten and stabbed. Blood is streaming down from both sides of his face. There's blood coming also out of his mouth. He's breathing quite shallow.

And this is when they find him, already unconscious, before the fight breaks out. As the girls attended to Jose, Hank and his friends went on the attack. When the brief fight broke up, the girls helping Jose were pulled away.

One of the boys spotted Diaz on the ground and hit him. The defendants admitted that one of their group had struck Diaz, but under oath, they denied any responsibility for his death. The girl's from 38th Street. were portrayed in the press as every bit as dangerous as the boys.

It was plastered all over the papers that girls took part in this murderous foray the night that Jose Diaz was killed. And that was a huge part of the story, that women were actually on the streets fighting with boys. Eight girls were called to testify by the prosecution. One after another, they refused to cooperate.

One of them was Lorena Encinas. She knew who killed Jose Diaz, but she would not reveal her secret. The trial dragged on for three months. Hank Levas' mother remained hopeful throughout the process. My mother always thought that because her son was not guilty, that no matter what they do, at the end they're going to be released because they didn't have anything to do with the killing.

On January 12, 1943, the jury announced its verdict. When the jury came in and the verdict was read, The expression on the faces of the defendants were of horror. The mothers were all huddled together there and I was there with them. Most of them didn't speak English. There was, I think, only two that spoke English.

So we were quickly trying to translate to them what had happened. Seventeen defendants were found guilty. Hank Levas was sentenced to life.

Hank, I kind of expected that they would be found guilty. And he picked his head up. Well, a lot of them just dropped their head down and looking to the floor. But he just picked his head up like he knew this was coming.

My brother Hank knew it was going to come. Some of the guys were in tears, you know. And me and Hank Laver was telling them, buckle up you suckers, you man, be a man, stop crying, you know.

And we were hurting too, you know, but we were only trying to show it, we were trying to be machos, you know, and all that. But a lot of guys were crying. The boys were sent to San Quentin Prison, 400 miles from home.

They weren't the only ones who would do time. The girls from 38th Street were taken from their families and made wards of the state. In a legal process that provided neither jury nor trial, they were sent away to an infamous reform school. The Ventura School for Girls at this time is really a very repressive institution. one that's custodial and disciplinary procedures completely rival the state prisons of the time Young woman would go to very drastic measures in order to escape going to the Ventura school for girls because of its bad bad reputation.

There were women at the juvenile hall who knew that they were going to be ultimately sentenced to the minstrel school and they were swallowing safety pins the night before in order to get out of it. With the secret she held, Lorena Encinas could have made a deal, but she refused. My mother's reason for being there was for the mere reason that she failed to cooperate with the courts and divulge the information that they wanted her to name all the names of the people involved. During all the time she served at Ventura, Lorena kept details about Jose Diaz's murder to herself. While the 38th Street Boys did time in San Quentin, prominent Los Angelinos were working to get them released.

Believing the Boys had been railroaded, communists... Intellectuals and Hollywood celebrities like Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth lent their names to the newly formed Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. I went to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

They said I had to go speak. She says, bring some clothes, we'll pick you up. I went as I dressed with my knee-high white socks and my very short black skirt.

They picked me up and we went to Rita Hayworth's house. And Rita Hayworth said, no, no, no, you can't wear that. You could get one of my dresses. And my first formal belonged to Rita Hayworth.

Political activists also joined the cause. We had professional people, we had educators, we had congressmen, we had a lot of union people. The committee's efforts to portray the defendants as innocent victims paid off.

Money to fund an appeal came in from across the country. Prominent members of the committee visited the boys to reassure them they would not be forgotten. And Anthony Quinn told us, don't worry, we're going to beat this on appeal. Yeah.

You were very, very worried. And he said, I'm behind you guys. In the months following the trial, the city grew more tense. Skirmishes between sailors and zoot suiters became a daily occurrence. The pachucos would intimidate people.

They would walk down the street, five abreast, and if you walked around them, they would laugh or stick their hand out and hit you. After a while, you got so you'd go... down the side streets instead of confronting them. A lot of them were from Mexico.

They didn't speak English. They didn't adhere to our laws. They weren't even geared up for the war effort. On June 3rd, 1943, the city exploded. As a group of service personnel were passing a group of civilian youth, one young man raised his hand in a manner that one of the sailors thought was threatening.

One of the sailors turned around and grabbed the arm of the young civilian, and from that point the fight broke out. It seemed that both sides were primed for confrontation, and the street seemed to explode in a fight. In the process, the sailor had his jaw broken, he was knocked unconscious, and his buddies had to drag him back to the armory. Later that night, a group of sailors armed with belts and clubs left the naval armory and headed downtown. The Zoot Suit riots had begun.

We had a commanding officer and he told the guys, he said, okay man, we've had it. So the guys from the armory, they got up the gun belts and wrapped them around their hands and down they went, cleaned up town. I was in the theater downtown and watching a movie. All of a sudden, the lights went on. And you hear a lot of noise, commotion, a lot of guys yelling or something.

Man, you turn around and you see these servicemen beating the heck out of all these Mexicans. And it was a fight not just with fisticuffs, but some of them had chains. So what I did is I dived underneath the counter and stayed there and, you know, protected myself because it became very wild. It was like a movie set.

Among the victims in the theater were 12 and 13-year-old boys beaten by American servicemen because of the clothes they wore. I know a lot of them came back happy. A lot of the guys, the Americans, they came back happy.

The following night, hundreds of sailors took the fight beyond downtown and into the heart of LA's oldest Mexican neighborhood. The servicemen would cross the river and head into communities like Boyle Heights and then other parts of East Los Angeles to seek out Mexican-American youth that were no longer ending up in downtown Los Angeles at theaters and bars. So as the riot played itself out, there had to be a lot more sort of search and destroy, to use a military metaphor. And that's where you get the real movement into East Los Angeles. Once in the barrio, sailors broadened their attack beyond Mexican boys in suit suits.

Any Mexican in their path was a potential target. The way the riots develop is very much attached to what the notion of a zoot-suter was. The notion of a zoot-suter was always racialized, even though Mexicans were not the only people wearing zoot-suits.

So a riot that first was aiming at individuals because of their dress becomes a more expansive sort of riot aimed at a particular racial population, Mexican-Americans. It didn't take long for the kids from the Varios to organize and fight back. There was an alley behind this theater and a lot right next to it.

And it was just jammed. So we was waiting, it was already getting dark. So then about 20, 30 guys come out the street so that when the city was closed, when the sailors come they could see them. As soon as they went out there, here comes those truckloads. Truckloads of sailors and civilians.

And they let out a cry, there they are, there they are, and they came in. Well as they came in, once they got all the way in, we all came out. I myself had a bat and I used it. And there was people hurt on both sides.

Fist to cuffing, you know, and kicking and biting and crashing. I got a couple of good blows, knocked me down, they took me back to the base and put me in sickbay overnight. The next morning I went back to doing my normal duties, but I had two good shots. the shiners at night time they came at night time right at night time they came oh so we just disappeared right and disappeared but the we found out that the best thing to do to get even with them is watch them on william boulevard and when there was four or five guys riding in a car and we would follow them until they had to come to a boulevard stop and there'd be another car in front of them, we'd run out there, open one door and start pounding the hell out of the driver's door and get him out and then beat the hell out of that guy.

On the fifth day of the riots, 5,000 civilians showed up to assist the sailors. My brother was only 14 years old. I was 16 at the time, but I did drive, and we got my mother's car, and we went to El Toro and picked up Marines. Los Angeles was like a war zone and we had to do something about it. The Pachucos had just taken over.

I felt that I was doing my share for the war effort. The kids fighting the sailors were not entirely on their own. There's this man I never knew, I never seen him before. And he says, are you guys coming to fight sailors? And I said, yeah.

He said, I have a car here. It's full of gas, and at that time the gas was rationed. Take it, use it when you get through, just leave the keys in it, put it any place on Central Avenue, and I'll pick it up. And he says, all I want you to do is get one of them white guys for me. By week's end, the Zoot Suit riots were making headlines across the country.

Thousands of Marines, soldiers and sailors from as far away as Las Vegas arrived in the City of the Angels, itching to clean up the town. Mexican-American kids were overwhelmed. In a ritual repeated across the city, servicemen stripped them of their clothes and burnt the garments on the streets.

The LAPD hangs back during this entire confrontation, about a week of rioting, never taking the offensive in trying to stop the riot, and only showing up after the rioting servicemen have swept through an area. And they show up only to arrest the victims of riot and throw them into jail. The shore patrol would naturally come out right away because they were patrolling like regular policemen.

And they'd come to break up a fight. And they'd take these pachucos, if they could catch them, if they didn't run away, you know, they'd catch them and throw them in the jeep and put them in the paddy wagon and take them to jail. With the sailors, they put us in the jeep, take us a couple of blocks away, and tell us to get back to our ship or get back to the station. None of the sailors got arrested. Tell me one of the sailors that got arrested for beating the hell out of somebody.

Huh? Within four or five days, LA officials realized this could move us out of control, out of control in a wartime society. It could, in fact, lead to much greater problems if servicemen kept disobeying their superiors and going down into these communities.

And that's why it stops. On June 8th, 1943, military authorities, in consultation with civic leaders, declared the city off-limits to servicemen. The rioting ended soon afterwards. The following day, the city council adopted a resolution banning the wearing of zoot suits on LA streets. Wearing the suit in public was punishable by a 30-day jail term.

Stores that sold the suits quickly moved to distance themselves from the style that had become a symbol of rebellion. Mexican-American youth, I think, were taught in World War II that they could not simply choose by themselves the way that they would express themselves. They simply couldn't choose what they could wear.

They simply couldn't choose who they could be. That this was not a society that allowed for that kind of freedom of expression for these particular youth. And that's a very painful lesson. It's a very painful lesson when one hears the rhetoric of Americans all.

The rhetoric of American promise open to all sorts of immigrants, all sorts of people. As the riots subsided, the governor ordered the creation of a citizens committee. His charge was to investigate and determine the cause of the riots.

Ironically, prison life had sheltered the 38th Street Boys from the worst mob violence in Los Angeles history. With Hollywood stars still working on their behalf, the kids got special treatment. We used to have what the guards used to eat.

Their food. Not prison food. Their food. You know, steaks, pork chops, milk, ice cream, cake, everything. Unlike the other boys, Hank Levas refused to play along.

His resistance to authority earned him a stint at California's dreaded Folsom Prison. The locking of the doors, he wrote, left him with a lonesome, empty feeling. You are standing up to the iron door, waiting for the guard to come along and take the count.

Listening as his footsteps fade away in the distance. You realize that you are alone. As the months passed, Levas grew increasingly resentful.

Finally, in November of 1943, defense attorneys filed an appeal with the California 2nd District Court, claiming their clients had been denied a fair trial. A year passed before a decision was handed down. By this time, Hank and the others had been locked up for more than two years. I sent a telegram to San Quentin, care of Henry Labus, to tell all the guys, saying, appeal successful.

I forgot what else it said, but I know that it ended. Oh, what a wonderful morning. We couldn't believe it at first, you know what I mean?

It was like a shock. And one of the guys told me, he said, you know, this guy's got a barrel of homemade brew buried in the ground. And we felt like celebrating, you know.

So we did. We dug it up and we got drunk that night in the barracks over there. And the officers came, you know, they weren't officers, they were like supervisors. And the head guy, the warden told them, as long as they don't fight nobody, you know, don't cause no problem, leave them alone. Leave them alone.

And we drank that whole barrel, yeah. In October of 1944, Hank Levas and the other boys were set free. Ever defiant, Hank Leavis walked out of the Los Angeles Hall of Justice wearing a zoot suit.

The court ruled that Judge Fricke had committed serious errors in the trial and threw out the verdict. But the court did not clear the 38th Street Boys of the murder charge. Although LA authorities declined to retry the case, the Sleepy Lagoon murder haunted Hank and the others for life.

It stopped him from going into service, which is the thing that he wanted so bad. He'd already signed into the Merchant Marine. He'd already had a trial run. And he was in uniform.

And it didn't happen. All this happened and it just broke his future. Jose Diaz was dead and his killer got away with murder. Those who had information weren't talking in 1942. My mom did know who the murderer of Jose Diaz was, but she kept it to herself.

And she refused to cooperate with the authorities. Decades passed before the truth emerged. Toward the end of her life, Lorena Encinas at last shared her secret about Sleepy Lagoon. My mother admitted to me that the reason that she kept that secret from the authorities was that it was her brother, Louie, who was involved in the murder.

She kept it to herself because she was not the type of person that would snitch, so to speak, on anyone else. And she also was trying to protect my Uncle Louie. Lorena claimed that her brother Louie was at the party before the 38th Street kids arrived, but had been thrown out for causing problems.

Later that night, as Jose Diaz and two companions left the party, they were met by an angry Louie Encinas and his friends. In the fight that followed, Jose Diaz was stabbed and left to die. A short time later, Hank Levas and his friends arrived at the party. Louis Encinas was picked up in the dragnet following the Sleepy Lagoon murder, but was let go by police. Years later, Encinas committed suicide.

In 1943, the Citizens Committee investigating the Zoot Suit riots issued its report. It condemned the role played by the press and by the LAPD, and determined race to be a central cause of the riots. At the same time, the mayor came to his own conclusion. The riots, he said, were caused by juvenile delinquents. Race was not a factor.

The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was powerless to help the 38th Street Girls. They remained wards of the California Youth Authority until they reached 21 years of age. Loretta Encinas died in 1991. As Hank Levas and the other boys walked out of prison, a guard remarked, they'll be back. He was right. Hank Levas and many of the other boys grew tragically familiar with prison life.

Hank, the symbolic zoot-suter, died in an East LA bar in 1971. The Sleepy Lagoon murder remains officially unsolved. There's more about the Zoot Suit Riots at American Experience Online. Explore Zoot style in music, dancing, and clothes. And read letters the Sleepy Lagoon Boys wrote from prison. All this and more at PBS Online, pbs.org.

America Online Keyword, PBS. To order Zoot Suit Riots on videocassette or other programs from American Experience, call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. Thank you.

Transcript for:Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots

Transcript for:
Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots