![]() ![]() ![]() By spotlighting the government’s unjust targeting of the Chicano community in the early 1940s, Valdez invites audience members to consider an unfortunate part of the country’s history, ultimately calling attention to the ways in which prejudiced authorities sometimes manipulate patriotism and fear to villainize minority groups. Because this trial unfolds during World War II, this rhetoric is especially effective, since the prosecutor takes the worst fears of the American citizenry at that time-“anarchy” and “destruction”-and pins it on people of color, conflating the fight against extremism in Europe with completely unrelated domestic matters. Although it’s clear from a legal perspective that the 38th Street Gang wasn’t responsible for the death of José Williams (the dead man in question), the public prosecutor insists to the jury that to let Henry and the others free would mean unleashing “the forces of anarchy and destruction” into American society. As the gang go through the legal process, the judge presiding over the case does everything he can to help the prosecutor frame the men as malicious and dangerous. ![]() ![]() Valdez makes it clear that Henry and his friends are at the mercy of a biased court system, as the men are held accountable for a murder they didn’t commit. In Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit, a play about discrimination against Los Angeles’s Chicano population in the 1940s, Henry Reyna and his fellow members of the 38th Street Gang face institutionalized racism and prejudice. ![]()
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