This weeks reading on the Zoot Suit “movement” was one that was harder for me to blog about. I think it was the ambiguity in both the defining of the “movement” and the ambiguity of Alvarez’s argument made it difficult for me to pin down exactly what I wanted to say. I immediately made a connection to a contemporary “movement” if you will known as Krumping. Krumping was a movement started by the youth in Los Angeles as a way to avoid gang violence in their neighborhood. There was a relatively mainstream movie released in 2005 by David LaChapelle called Rize. Rize was a documentary that followed the movement and the youths involved and allowed the audience to see what they might not otherwise be able to. This related to the three main topics we discussed in class, Youth, Dignity and Public Space. One of the key issues in both the Zoot Suit movement and the Krump movement is the idea of public space. I took a class at Pitzer called Race, Place and Space which I highly recommend which talked about the idea of race, place and space and how they are related to today’s society and what these three terms mean to different people. There is a normative discourse that exists about place and space and how everyone is entitled to both. This is the key difference between formative and substantive equality that both the Zoot Suit movement and the Krumpers are addressing. While there aren’t segregation laws formally in today’s culture there is a lack of substantive equality that creates an environment similar to segregation. The Krumpers and the Zoot Suiters took a different approach to reclaiming public space. They didn’t demonstrate or protest but rather just “did their own thing” I realize this doesn’t sounds very academic and it blurs the line between working within the system and working out of the system but I think there is something to be said about these two unique forms of rebellion. We kept going back to Malcolm X in class and this made me think about Martin Luther King Jr. versus Malcolm X’s approach to the civil rights movement and what people thought about their opposing approaches. Is it just useless to try and work out of the system or is it the most effective way to make change?
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I wrote my Core 2 paper about the movie Rize and the positive movement of Krumping. This is a very good connection to the zoot movement. Krumpers, like the zoot-suiters were also very concerned with fashion in their movement, but it was unclear what the purpose of fashion was in their movement as well. This is very interesting considering people pay a lot of attention to the clothes that both of these groups wear. It is possible that the Krumpers used fashion to differentiate between their different dance groups or it could have been a larger critique of society. I think it is impossible to reach any sort of conclusion unless you are actually involved in the movement.
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