The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory

The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory. By Catherine S. Ramirez. (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2009. xxvi, 229 pp. Cloth, $79.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4286-1. Paper, $22.95. isbn 978-0-8223-4303-5.)

The woman in the zoot suit is Catherine S. Ramirez's starting point from which she explores questions of race, nation, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship in this interdisciplinary study. She begins by interrogating two important absences, first, she points out the striking absence of young Mexican American women in press and scholarly accounts of the 1940s zoot suit phenomenon in Los Angeles. Ramirez reveals that young Mexican American women were swept up in dragnets, held as suspects, and - in some cases - sent to reform schools as a result of their participation in the Sleepy Lagoon murder case of Ì942 and in the zoot suit riots...