In this painting, Vincent Valdez depicts a fictionalized moment in the Zoot Suit Riots. Here is Dr. Roberto Tejada, poet, writer, art historian, and faculty at the University of Houston who focuses on Latinx artists in his work.
The Zoot suit riots are misguiding as a name is so far as there was a year leading up to what the newspapers, primarily the Los Angeles Times, was calling the Zoot Suit Riots.
In 1942, the death of a youth, of 22 years old, Jose Diaz was tied and to youth
gangs in Los Angeles who wore zoot suits and it involved a trial in which many Mexican Americans and African Americans had been basically um brought in to the police department, put on trial, and as the- as the Los Angeles Times began to cover this trial, the Newspaper used very racialized language to talk about Mexican Americans and identifying them with the zoot suit. And this led to a uh a rise of 546 soldiers and marines and cops were basically going through the neighborhoods of Mexican Americans and stripping them of their zoot suit and beating them and beating them up. it was during the months of June in which this violence, this sort of white supremecist violence was inflicted on Mexicans, Mexican Americans, who had been identified uh by the zoot suit that they wore.
Valdez’s cinematic scene based on these historical events is surreal. Look at the bar's dizzying checkered floor, or the moon’s odd angle as seen through the door. Here is Tejada again:
now I am thinking there is a wink on the part of Vincent in that broken glass door to say there is never any transparency in historical painting. It is always going to be a door through which you walk into a mobilized and dynamic scene that is meant to convey the emotional drama and the emotional antagonisms that are taking place in historical moments. But every moment is a historical moment, we just never realize it is unless it is depicted after.