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The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, by Catherine S. Ramírez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. 229 pp. Paper, $22.95.)
According to historian Catherine S. Ramírez, women are conspicuously absent from the story of the World War II era, the zoot suit, and the creation of Chicano cultural nationalism. In The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, Ramírez admirably sets out to correct this problem through her discussion of pachucas and their involvement in zoot-suit culture as well as the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot-Suit Riots. While recent studies such as Luis Alvarez's The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II address the suit's importance to Mexican Americans and other ethnic and racial groups, Ramírez creatively links the zoot-suit culture of the 1940s with the Chicana/o artists of later decades to reveal how these artists redefined the pachuco and the zoot suit, making both icons of Chicano/a culture. She demonstrates that women were not simply hangers-on, but were integral to the formation of this culture, and that Chicana feminists used the memory of the pachuca in poetry and art to create their own version of Chicano/a nationalism that did not cast them as strange or beyond the scope of proper Chicano/a gender roles.
The first of the book's two sections focuses on the World War II era and American nationalism, while the second emphasizes the movement-era development of Chicano/a nationalism. Four chapters examine pachucas' involvement in the construction of zoot-suit culture and Mexican American households; the larger social structures that shaped the portrayal of pachucas and their actions; their part in the riots and the Sleepy Lagoon case; the reinterpretation of the pachuco by...