Students Produce a Winning Re-Creation of History

Tony Machuca, 17, recalled his heart “pounding hard” as he waited at a banquet table for the California History Day judges to make a decision.

Then the judges in the Sacramento arena announced that a film by Machuca and four other Roosevelt High School juniors had won first place in the group media division.

“We just screamed and jumped and ran up to the stage to accept,” said Guillermo Frias, 16. “I mean, what else could you do?”

For the teen-agers and their partners, Javier Alvarez, 16; Jaime Delgado, 17, and Samuel Ortiz, 17, it was the most exciting time of their lives.

Starting with no film-making experience, they produced a movie on the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, which won over 15 other entries in the Los Angeles County competition on April 4.

At the state competition May 11-12 in Sacramento, sponsored by the California Historical Society and the state Department of Education, they won over 20 more entries. Judges commended their 17-page research bibliography and called the movie “a good production of an ethnic tragedy that may have affected your lives.”

On Saturday, the five teen-agers left for Washington to compete against 65 entrants in the national History Day finals this week at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The students worked hard for the acclaim, researching the eight-minute black-and-white film thoroughly and attending weekly planning meetings for six months.

They boned up for their task at breakfasts with Emmy Award-winning documentary producer Nicholas Clapp, who had employed Delgado’s mother as a housekeeper. On Saturday mornings from September through March they sat with Clapp in a Hollywood fast-food restaurant and discussed technique.

Then the teen-agers walked across the street to the Junior Arts Center in Barnsdall Park. There, they entered a classroom full of stage lights, tripods and film archives.

For 20 weeks, instructor Alfons Greber, an experimental film maker, drilled the boys and loaned them cameras and tape recorders.

“They were very diligent,” said Greber. “ . . . They had this vision to re-create the story of the Zoot Suit Riots as we know it from the media and then to show a second story which reveals that the media reports were all manipulative. That is what carried them through.”

The youngsters gained that vision from Prof. Mauricio Mazon of the USC Department of History.

Mazon had researched the zoot suiters, who often wore coats that reached almost to the knees, pants with exaggerated pleats and a low-hanging chain, wide-brimmed hats and two-tone black-and-white shoes.

The research convinced him that the armed services labeled the disturbances a race riot to cover up their loss of control over AWOL servicemen.

“I suggested to them something that was rather shocking: They weren’t riots in the usual sense,” said Mazon, whose book on the event is called “The Zoot Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation.”

“One of the things that had happened was that . . . men from the Navy, Army, Coast Guard and Marines were running around the city . . . AWOL.

“The Navy acknowledged that there were some confrontations going on with zoot suiters. They acknowledged that the zoot suiters had initiated these confrontations and that they represented a bad element of the community.

“However, within their own communications that were classified . . . what they noted . . . (was) that the servicemen were attacking innocent people.

“They were concerned about the problem of enforcing their own jurisdiction on the servicemen. If they ordered them to return to base and the servicemen refused, which they were doing, what do you do? Court-martial them? The penalty for refusing an order during war is very severe. How do you handle it?

“One of the approaches they took was to go along with the myth that this was a race riot.”

That argument pervades Alvarez’s narration for the film, which opens with a young Latino putting on his zoot suit to the music of Harry James. The documentary moves to news photos of the riot, switches to an interview with Mazon and closes with the Andrews Sisters’ rendition of “A Zoot Suit (for My Sunday Gal).”

The teen-agers completed the film as part of teacher Susan Anderson’s junior history class at Roosevelt.

In last year’s class Javier Alvarez’s brother, Gerardo, entered the contest with a display on the changing demographics of Boyle Heights and finished fourth in the nation. Gerardo holds a straight A grade average and is headed for Princeton University next year. This year’s entrants all are preparing for college and Delgado is applying to the Ivy League’s Brown University in Providence, R.I.

All feel they learned things from the production that will make them better students and citizens.

“We can’t take what the media prints for granted,” Frias said. “From what we learned we felt The Times was being biased. They did not find out that there were black and Anglo Zoot Suiters. It wasn’t just Mexican Americans.”