LA, The National Guard, Immigration and the Zoot Suit Riots (Some Sunday Context)

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today, as part of our "Some Sunday Context" series, Jody offers some thoughts on the story playing out in Los Angeles where the Trump administration has called in the national guard, over the objections of local officials. This is the first time something like that has happened since 1965. We've done a number of stories that include the moment where the national guard appears, and it is often just the beginning of the political and cultural fallout. We're all watching the latest from LA play out.

The, we bring you a story that may provide a little deeper context on Los Angeles as a city of immigrant communities, violence, and policing. Or at the very least, an interesting listen. Let us know what you think!

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It’s June 3rd. This day in 1943 marked the start of the “Zoot Suit Riots,” a series of skirmishes and attacks in Los Angeles targeting Mexican-Americans, who were often identified by their flashy ensembles.

Jody, Niki and Kellie are joined by Emily Spivack of “Worn Stories” to discuss the causes of the riots, how the zoot suit became a political symbol, and whether super-baggy clothes are on their way back.

Check out Emily’s “Worn Stories” book and the new series on Netflix!

Find a transcript of this episode at: https://tinyurl.com/esoterichistory

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, Jody Avergan here. Welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. I'm recording this early on the morning East Coast time of Sunday, June 8th. And this is the day that we are then putting out the episode. So a quick turnaround, as they say in the business. Look, I'll be honest, we were intending to run an episode today as part of this
0:20.8	Sunday context series about William F. Buckley. There's this big new biography about him that's
0:26.1	getting a lot of attention. And we've done a couple episodes that touch on Buckley and the intellectual
0:30.3	roots of the modern conservative movement. And I thought it might be interesting to provide some
0:34.7	context. But then, like a lot of you, I started to see the news from
0:38.2	Los Angeles come in. Of course, this is a quickly changing, evolving story, but Friday and
0:44.0	Saturday in L.A. we saw increasing resistance to raids by ICE to arrest and deport Los Angeles
0:50.4	residents. These protests were from relatively small groups, hundreds of people, but these
0:55.6	were citizens of L.A. standing in the way of federal agents trying to round up their immigrant
1:00.3	neighbors. And then late on Saturday, a big, big moment when the Trump administration called in
1:06.1	over the objections of the governor of California, the National Guard. Usually local officials request that the
1:12.0	National Guard gets sent in. This is the first time that the President has overruled local officials
1:17.3	and sent in the National Guard since 1965 when LBJ sent the National Guard to Alabama to protect
1:23.6	civil rights protesters during integration over the objection of George Wallace.
1:29.1	This, of course, is a bit of the opposite. Trump wants the guard to suppress what many of us see
1:33.8	as civil rights protests, certainly constitutionally protected protests. Now again, I'm coming to you right
1:40.2	in the middle of this story. There's a lot of things that may change, that certainly will
1:44.3	change. It's unclear how this will play out. And in moments like these, the specific legal framework
1:49.6	in which an act like this has taken really matters or in theory in a constitutional democracy.
1:55.4	It should matter. For instance, so far, no invocation of the Insurrection Act.
2:02.1	So there's that.
2:07.8	But as we think about some Sunday context, from my vantage point, I will say, as someone who has hosted this show for many years and done a bunch of stories about moments of uprising
	...

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