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Eduardo Obregón Pagán The University of North Carolina Press, 2003 312 pp. PaperbackISBN: 0-8078-5494-8
It's about justice, or the lack thereof. It also does justice to one of the most popular and least written about, moments in Chicano/a history: the Sleepy Lagoon murder and trial. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. , by Eduardo Obregón Pagán is sure to become a classic in the field of Chicano/a Studies and a favorite with diverse audiences ranging from high-school students to veteran professors. As a fellow pachucologist or zootsuitólogo who has read the over 6,000 pages of trial transcripts and poured over every scrap in the collections devoted to the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee and the Zoot Suit Riots, I can "testify" to the meticulous research and superb contextualizing and analysis Pagán has assembled.
Pagán's narrative begins and ends with the murder of 22-year-old José Díaz in Los Angeles, California on August 1, 1942. The murder is dramatized but carefully reconstructed, offering new insight into what might really have happened that fateful night leading to the then largest mass trial in US history. In between is a geographic, legal, demographic, racial, popular, and military history of the Mexican American experiences in Southern California in the 1940s, and how those experiences intersected with those of Anglo, African, and Japanese Americans.
That is the obvious and literal read of Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon. The mastery of Pagán's work goes beyond the book-length retelling of a story that has captivated students and scholars of the Chicano/a experience for over...