Zoot Suit (Criticism)

Criticism

Carole Hamilton

Hamilton is a Humanities teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay she discusses Valdez’s treatment of the love relationship between Henry and Alice and its effects on the plot and reforming mission of the play.

Zoot Suit is a tightly written drama with each element contributing to its overt demand for social reform, specifically a correction of the social injustice suffered by Henry Reyna and his gang. Luis Valdez conducted thorough research on the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial of 1942 and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 in order to present the facts responsibly, but he also wanted to present the psychological and mythical truths of the Chicano experience. As a result, his work is a combination of documentary and myth, fact and fiction, instruction and entertainment. On the whole, both the play and the later film version succeeded beautifully in accomplishing these goals, especially in the popular arena.

Criticism was leveled at Valdez’s portrayal of women (stereotypical) and complaints were leveled that the playwright turned his back on his roots with the farmworker’s theater and had somehow “sold out” to the expectations of Hollywood and Broadway. To this criticism, Valdez turned a deaf ear. He did admit, however, that he had to revise the story’s plot between the stage and film versions to correct a flaw that misled audience members. In a 1982 interview two weeks after the opening of the film adaptation, Valdez told Roberta Orona-Cordova in Mexican-American Theatre that he struggled with his portrayal of the love affair between Henry and Alice Bloomfield. The historical Henry had fallen in love with Alice, and Valdez wanted stayed true to history in his dramatic version of the story. The inclusion of this cross-cultural affair hampered what he wanted his play to communicate, however. It alienated some members of the audience, who could not accept a white woman falling in love with a Chicano, “They didn’t like the romance or the politics of it: a white woman falling in love with a pachuco.” The same issue came up in another interview with Gregg Barrios, who told Valdez “The love angle between Henry and Alice Bloom-field bothered me in the play.” Valdez responded:

Actually, that angle in the play got me a narrower audience, especially in the confrontation scene and when Henry makes a choice between the two girls. I think what it is that led a lot of people astray was that point. That was really not the point I intended. Again, it was the play trying to decide what it was going to say after all. . . when I began to transfer the play to a screenplay . . . I focused more on Henry and this business with Alice was put into its proper perspective.

The affair between the historical Alice Bloom-field and Henry Leyvas (Valdez changed the name to Reyna), took place through their letters. Valdez includes fictional versions of these letters in the play, but they culminate in an intense physical encounter in the prison and the incident provides a pivotal moment in the plot. Alice’s belief in Henry revitalizes his hope for release, just when he is ready to give up. Her commitment is not just to obtaining justice in his particular case but because she has “never been able to accept one person pushing another around.” At that moment, they understand each other, but their rapport quickly conflates with passion.

Why is this passion bothersome or “alienating” to some members of the audience? It would be overly simplistic to dismiss these viewers’ concerns as evidence of their own prejudice. There is also the matter of Henry’s obligation to Della. On the eve of the arrests, Henry promised her a big “pachuco” wedding when he returns from his tour in the Navy. She is not simply awaiting him patiently at home; she shares his misery, having been committed to a year at the Ventura State School for Girls — a prison of sorts — for her ostensible participation in the murder. Two brief scenes before his tryst with Alice, Henry complains to El Pachuco how much he misses Della. This love relationship seems permanent: for Henry to betray Della with any other woman seems unpardonable. That he would betray her with an Anglo woman complicates matters considerably.

In addition, a love interest between Alice and Henry muddies Alice’s social reform agenda: campaigning for Henry out of love is not the same as campaigning against a social injustice. Furthermore, a love interest between these two characters, a hybrid marriage, would be a form of assimilation, which the play opposes. Enrique is the model of the assimilated Mexican American; he sweeps the dirt from the city’s streets but has no power to sweep away its injustices. Assimilation is a kind of acceptance of the limitations society places on Mexican Americans. Enrique’s big dream is for Henry to find a way out and up; the solution seems to be Henry’s enlistment in the Navy, an event that Enrique plans to celebrate in style. However, as El Pachuco reminds Henry, joining the Navy will do nothing to solve the problems of the barrio, “Forget the war overseas, carnal. Your war is on the homefront.” For Henry to marry Alice is the same as his going off to the Navy: he would be joining the culture that oppresses him, not aligning himself with his own culture and fighting for a better Hispanic lifestyle.

The staging of Henry’s moment of decision between Alice and Della underscores the significance of his rejection of Alice/Anglo culture and his acceptance of the war “on the homefront.” Alice stands alone, while Della is surrounded by Henry’s family and the gang. This blocking of characters suggests that in choosing Della, Henry chooses his own culture, with all of its perils and promise; had he chosen Alice, he would have taken an avenue out of that culture, a move away from his social responsibilities.

One reason that Alice is able to connect with Henry is their shared experience of social oppression: she is Jewish and the year is 1943, America is fighting World War II in part to free the Jews from German leader Adolf Hitler’s genocidal persecution (Hitler believed that Jews and other ethnicities were inferior and a detriment to the new society he wished to build). Alice helps him to win his battle, just as the Americans are winning the war in Europe. Henry elatedly tells El Pachuco, “We won this one because we learned to fight in a new way.” Alice’s experience and wisdom make her an excellent steward for Henry’s transition to this new frame of mind. She helps Henry advance into social adulthood — or rather humanity, since Anglo society, as represented by Sgt. Smith and Lt. Edwards, treats him like an animal.

Henry may be an “hombre” — a man — to his doting parents, but he is a “greaseball” to the police; Sgt. Smith reminds Lt. Edwards that “You can’t treat these animals like people.” Alice, on the other hand, asks Henry to write for her People’s World newsletter. She treats him like an educated and valuable member of society whose words are significant. She can redeem him through her conviction that he is innocent and socially worthy. She is one of the few outside of his family who accept his integrity, in a world that judges him guilty of the “crime” of looking different, of adopting a defiant style of dress, the pachuco style. She presides over his transition from an animal held in solitary confinement to a man taking part in the affairs of the world. The fact that he spent ninety days — echoing nine months — in confinement hints at a kind of rebirth, as he is released from solitary confinement (a kind of womb), into his parent’s home, appearing as the guest of honor, an object of celebration, like a newborn child.

El Pachuco is with Henry at the beginning of his solitary confinement, but Henry gets fed up with his alter ego’s negative attitude, his constant refrain that “No court in the land’s going to set you free.” Henry yells, “Fuck off,” and El Pachuco departs for the streets, where he takes Rudy’s place in a beating, is overwhelmed by the Anglos, and stripped of his zoot suit. El Pachuco has been Henry’s confidante and alter ego up to this point but now he disappears, and Henry, who has gotten used to his ubiquitous presence, asks in vain, “Are you even there anymore?” He is not, because El Pachuco has been crucified by the Anglos. This act parallels Henry’s crucifixion, in the solitary confinement cell. In the very next scene, Alice takes over the guardianship of Henry from El Pachuco, appearing at the prison and expressing devotion to his cause.

The transfer of mentorship has completed, and Henry will be in her hands until he returns to society, rising from the dead just as El Pachuco rises after his beating.

El Pachuco rises wearing a hybrid of icons: the Christian cross and an Aztec loincloth; Henry rises from his incarceration witnessed by a Jewish mother archetype. At this point, Alice’s job is finished, so El Pachuco reappears. With a snap of his fingers (signaling that he has resumed control of the play), El Pachuco speaks of the tentativeness of Henry’s new social standing. He is not free, he is merely back in the barrio, with all of its prejudice and injustice. Henry’s is the only voice that does not recite a version of his future — because he has so little control over it. Alice has raised this man from incarceration only to put him back into the same vicious cycle of ethnic oppression and injustice.

Alice’s faith in Henry is a mark of her own integrity, making her a role model for the audience. This is revolutionary theater, not mere entertainment, and Valdez wants the audience to learn from her example. In this respect, Alice’s guardianship over Henry would be complete and actually more effective without the love affair. Valdez realized this, and when he wrote the screenplay for Zoot Suit, he downplayed their passion. In its place he emphasized Alice’s human compassion. The shift away from love to humanitarianism is at once more acceptable to the audience and more focused on the central issue of social injustice in this play.

Source: Carole Hamilton for Drama for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Julia Alvarez’s novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent chronicles the experiences of four sisters who immigrate from the Dominican Republic to the United States, losing their Spanish language and culture before they fully acquire fluency in English. In a similar vein, Sandra Cisneros recalls her childhood in a Spanish-speaking section of Chicago in the lyrical vignettes of House on Mango Street.
• Ernesto Galarza’s 1971 novel Barrio Boy and Jose Antonio Villareal’s 1970 Pocho both explore growing up in a barrio from a young boy’s perspective.
• The 1997 novel Macho! by Victor Villaseñor describes Cesar Chavez’s strike efforts through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old boy who migrates to California from Mexico.
• The poems of Ricardo Sánchez in 1971’s Canto y grito me liberacion (title means “The Liberation of a Chicano Mind”) explore the ambiguities of living in two worlds, while Rodolfo Corky Gonzales’s epic poem, “I am Joaquin” explores the Chicano identity. Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poems address the erosion of ethnic identity in transplanted families; her “Freeway 280” expresses frustration over urban renewal programs that razed Chicano neighborhoods.
• Several films also explore territory similar to Zoot Suit: Robert Redford produced and directed The Milago Beanfield War (1988), an endearing comedy about a group of Mexican-American citizens who resist oppressive big business owners out to abuse the farmers’ civil rights; Edward James Olmos, who plays El Pachuco in Zoot Suit, stars in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), a film about a Chicano murderer that allows the audience to believe in Cortez’s guilt until the last moment; Olmos also directed and starred in a stunning film portrayal of a hardened Chicano prison inmate and his family: American Me (1992).