>>13128524I couldn't tell you. I only know from what my family has told me. My great grandfather actually got attacked during the zoot suit riots. He was an officer in the army air corps (the air force wasn't a separate branch back then) by a few White teenage infantry men from Kansas. He wasn't in uniform and was walking around with my great grandma downtown and they thought my great grandmother was White (she isn't, she's just always died her hair) so took it as a Mexican guy with a White women and flipped out. One of them clocked him over the back of the head with a fucking toolbox and then they beat the shit out of him while he was down and probably would have killed him but some random guy walking by pulled a gun on them and the cops ended up arresting them after he told them he was an officer. He was able to stab one of them pretty bad back. I don't know what happened to all of them but the guy that hit him in the head got kicked out of the army and went to prison. I think the others got off. They likely only were penalized because he was also in the army and outranked them.
For those that don't know, the zoot suit riots occurred because a lot of freshly drafted soldiers from back east were staged in California before deploying to combat and had never seen Mexicans. It started because Mexicans were wearing ornate suits and you were supposed to conserve clothe for the war effort. My grandpa said most zoot suiters actually just got their suits imported from Mexico to get around this as Mexico had no such conservation laws during WWII, but basically hicks used it as justification to attack Mexicans.
