Cayla Gillam

Dulling document4 Monday 7:00 pm

Racism can show its ugly head around every corner if you look hard enough. Some will try harder than others to hide the discrimination, but others will be open and not ashamed to show that their race is the better one. Most of my dulling documents have involved race in one way or another because I believe that racism is a big part of our history, and in some cases our future. History always has a way of repeating its self, in the beginning it was African Americans who were the target of the discrimination in America. Then the Indians began to rub Americans the wrong way and they saw the wrath of what its like to be hated for the color of their skin. In the 1940s, the Mexicans coming into America would feel what the Indians and African Americans have felt for years. Zooters was believed to be a Mexican gang that oriented from southern California. The truth on what Zooters really were, was just Mexican men who adopted the style of Harlem hipsters. They never intended to be classified as a gang, they were just kids picking up a new trend of society. The council of California saw the young Mexican boys dressing as zooters and took it as them trying to join together to form a criminal culture. The city council then made it a crime to wear a zoot suit. In 1942 police discovered the body of Jose Diaz by the Sleepy Lagoon. Police had no proof that it had been on purpose that this man was killed or an accident, but they did not hesitate to blame the local Zooters. The police had round up hundreds of local zooters for the death, but could only charge 17 of them. 12 of the zooters were convicted of the crime. Whether or not the zooters really did cause the death is still unclear. What is clear is that when one man was killed a whole race

Cayla Gillam

Dulling document4 Monday 7:00 pm

got blamed for it. Hundreds of young men were arrested for an accident. Edward Ayres wrote a report about how all zooters were right to be charged with this death. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee wrote a counter argument to Edwardss racist report. In Edwards report he is not shy to say the Mexicans coming into America were treated differently than the Americans living in the same area. Edward claims that Mexicans as a whole in thesis country are restricted to only certain kinds of labor and that they perform the jobs with the lowest paying rate. Edwardss theory on why this is, is that it is programed in our and their DNA to be lower than us. That the biological basis is what to blame for the crime that the zooters could have committed. By this Edward means that we cant blame each zooter as an individual that we have to blame the whole Mexican race for this gang violence. He compares Americans and Mexicans as wild cats and domestic cats. That we are both cats essentially, but raised differently showing that we will never be the same because our nature is different than one anothers. Edward wanted the zooters to be committed of this crime because they were the ones that had the gang gene coded in their biological basis. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee saw this case as something completely different than what everyone else did. They saw the zooteres as the kids that they were, and what the case was really about. The Los Angeles paper started with all the headlines coming out about how packs of young Mexican boys were prowling around In packs. That these young boys were going around breaking in to homes robbing and killing the residents who were there. People all around the LA area were being scared of these young boys because of what they were reading in the papers.

Cayla Gillam

Dulling document4 Monday 7:00 pm

On August 3rd every Mexican was being racial profiled in being a zoot-suit killer. Police would wait outside clubs armed with pokers with sharp razor blades, and they would poke the young men as they came out. The boys were then taken to jail on the account of what color there skin was. Although racial profiling is illegal now, it is something that still continues to happen way more than it should. This dulling document shows how even though as a society we were supposed to be accepting to the immigrants coming into our country and to be treating them the same as all the other people living in this country. Each of these documents have completely different out looks on what happened with the zooters did at the sleepy lagoon. We will never know if they did kill that man, but what is more important than that is that we are killing a race all together. When we attach someone by the color of their skin we are do doing more than just harming them we are going back to racism and how awful it can really be.

As my last dulling document Im wondering if you really even read this, or if I have been wasting my time putting all this effort into all these essays. So if you do read all of these I salute you in that. Ps if you could just say yes or no you read these that would be great.