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The mob went happily down Broadway, repeating in every theater, the Rialto, the Tower, Loew's. Others stopped streetcars, pulled off zooters, Mexicans or just dark-complexioned males. On went the mob, ripping pants, beating the young civilians, into the Arcade, the Roxy, the Cameo, the Broadway, the Central and the New Million Dollar theaters. The mood of officialdom (the Shore Patrol, the Military Police, the city police, the sheriff's office) seemed complaisant.
Hoodlumism. The mob split all over Los Angeles, to Watts, Belvedere, Boyle Heights, El Monte, Baldwin Park, Montebello, San Gabriel — anywhere that Mexicans lived.
Hearst's Examiner kept pounding: "Police Must Clean Up L.A. Hoodlumism." The first paragraph of an editorial said: "Riotous disturbances of the past week in Los Angeles by zoot-suit hoodlums have inflicted a deep and humiliating wound on the reputation of this city."
California's zoot-suit war was a shameful example of what happens to wartime emotions without wartime discipline.
Some of Los Angeles' young Mexicans, organized into zoot-suit "gangs" that were the equivalent of boys' gangs almost any where, had got out of hand: they had robbed and used their knives on some lone sailors on dark side streets. But probably the trouble could have been ended right there. One who thought so was Eduardo Quevedo, a plump, cigar-chewing, shock-headed amateur sociologist, president of the Coordinating Council for Latin Americans, member of the Citizens' Committee on Latin American youth.
Eight months ago, Goodman Quevedo went to work to stop youthful hoodlumism, started a kind of grown-up Boys Club for the zooters. He knew that they represented a basic American problem: the second generation. Their fathers and mothers were still Mexicans at heart. They themselves were Americans — resented and looked down on by other Americans. Jobless, misunderstood in their own homes and unwelcome outside them, they had fallen into the companionship of misery. They dressed alike, in the most exaggerated and outlandish costume they could afford: knee-length coats, peg-top trousers, yard-long watch chains, "ducktail" haircuts.
If the pachucos had asked for trouble, they got more than was coming to them last week. The military authorities were notably lax (all shore and camp leave could easily have been canceled), the Los Angeles police apparently looked the other way. The press, with the exception of the Daily News and Hollywood Citizen-News, helped whip up the mob spirit. And Los Angeles, apparently unaware that it was spawning the ugliest brand of mob action since the coolie race riots of the 1870s, gave its tacit approval.