Pachuco

The word Pachuco comes from the slang name for El Paso, (El Chuco) Texas which for a time, was the main point of entry for Mexicans into the U.S. In Spanish slang, if you were heading to El Paso you were heading “Pa’l Chuco”. When Mexican Americans took trains along the Southern Pacific railroad, through the southwest to Los Angeles for wartime employment, they were referred to as pachucos.  During Montoya’s adolescence, the word Pachuco had become more associated with wearing zoot suits, jazz music, juvenile delinquency, a lack of patriotism, swing dancing, and Mexican American youth. This was due to the attention that was brought to pachuco culture in Los Angeles because of the Sleepy Lagoon incident of 1942, the Sleepy Lagoon trial that concluded in early 1943, and the Zoot Suit Riots of mid-1943. These events popularized the perception of pachucos as gang members and criminals. This perception often left out the complexities of pachuco culture and the racism and bigotry towards Mexican Americans. 

Pachuco/á: Pachuco/a is a group of Mexican American youth which originated in the early 1940s in the locations of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Eventually, through migration, a population of Pachucos were concentrated in Los Angeles, California. Pachucos faced discrimination from wealthier Americans as well as from structural law enforcement groups on accounts of identity and customs, like their fashion styles and language.  

Zoot Suits: Popularized by African American Jazz musicians in the 1940s, they were meant to be flashy and loud but also loose fitting, allowing for easy movement on the dance floor. They spread from jazz musicians to the nightclubs of Harlem, to teens of Chicago, and finally made it to California as the preferred style of Pachucos. During WWII, restrictions were put in place on the amount and kind of fabric used for anything other than the war effort. With all their extra fabric, zoot suits were seen as extravagant and unpatriotic. Pachucos, refusing to change their look, quickly became the target of racially motivated attacks that became worse after the Sleepy Lagoon incident. 

Montoya’s Pachuco Work: Aimed to fight the loss of cultural memory at a time when the Chicano civil rights movement was beginning to enter a less militant phase. In his documentary exhibition and publication Pachuco Art: A historical update, that stemmed out of the RCAF’s Barrio Art Program. He sought to fight cultural memory loss through collective remembering. Combining the imagery and symbolism of the pachuco into contemporary Chicano art and barrio life. Through instilling pride into new Chicano generations and removing the stereotype of negation and marginalization, Montoya aimed to remove shame and reinvent and reinforce the Pachuco as the Chicano prototype of cultural resistance calling them “the first Chicano freedom-fighters of the Chicano Movement.”