This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Lizzie Peabody.

In the 1930s, zoot suits were all the rage in black communities like Harlem, Detroit, and Chicago.

What's a zoot suit?

So a zoot suit is a regular suit made, you know, probably wool, probably cotton, and it has a distinct look.

Here to paint the picture for us is Steve Velazquez.

He's a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

It's kind of big shoulders, a long jacket that's probably a bit longer than the length of your fingers and hands.

The pants are baggy with tapered legs at the end,

and also people would wear, like, watch chains, a hat with, like, feathers.

Denise Sandoval is a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge.

She says the suits were cartoonishly large, exaggerated looking.

They got popular in the jazz and swing culture of the time,

like in this song featuring Paul White.

I want a zoot, suit, suit, I went the wreaths,

pleat with the draper shape and stuff, come to look sharp enough

to see my sunny gas. But the popularity of zooot Suitsuits soon spread west.

By the 1940s, young Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles had really taken to the suit.

They liked that it was a symbol of counterculture, a pushback against acceptable fashion.

And the youth in California, the youth in Mexican-American communities were drawn to this kind of

identity.

Denise says, that's like punk rockers putting patches on their jackets, shaving their hair

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