54: Wartime Los Angeles's Sleepy Lagoon Murder & Zoot Suit Riots w/ Eduardo Pagán

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, Education, History

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2017

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Two events in early 1940s L.A. grabbed newspaper headlines almost back to back- The murder of José Díaz and following trial of 22 boys, and the race riots between American sailors and zoot-suit wearing Mexican-American kids in downtown Los Angeles. Eduardo Obregón Pagán is a professor at Arizona State University and a co-host of PBS's History Detectives, and he talks with me about his book, "Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A.". More about the author here: https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/person/eduardo-pagan/ Become a Most Notorious patron: https://www.patreon.com/mostnotorious Most Notorious website: https://www.mostnotorious.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:30.0	Welcome to the most notorious podcast, I'm Eric Rivenes.
0:51.1	I'm so glad to be talking to Eduardo Pagon, a professor of history at Arizona State University.
0:59.5	He's also a co-host of History Detectives on PBS and worked on the PBS series American
1:06.1	Experience.
1:07.1	He is the author of Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, Zoot Suites, Race and Riot in War Time LA,
1:15.5	an absolutely fascinating book.
1:18.2	A great pleasure to have you here with me.
1:20.7	Thank you.
1:21.7	Oh, you're very welcome.
1:23.0	I'm happy to talk to you.
1:25.2	So what drove your interest in this notorious series of events, culminating in what is commonly
1:32.1	known as the Zoot Suit riots?
1:34.8	What motivated you to write about them?
1:38.0	Well, so I guess I should start by a little bit of just my own background growing up in
1:47.2	Arizona.
1:49.8	Particularly during the time when Luis Valdez's play, Zoot Suit Riot came out and then it
1:56.5	became a movie after that point.
1:58.1	I think that was really my first introduction to this time and this phenomenon as well.
2:06.9	And I always grew up kind of interested in this particular moment for those of us who
2:13.7	grew up in the 1970s, 1980s.
2:16.9	Luis Valdez's play and subsequent movie was really foundational in constructing kind
2:24.4	of the history of Mexican Americans in the United States in the post-war period or during
	...

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