Word: zoot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pachuco: tough guy. Used of teenage Mexican-American boys in gangs. During World War II, dressed in gaudy zoot suits, they were the target of racial violence in Los Angeles and elsewhere...
...bitter boy who has been summarily dropped out of an American Army paratroop unit. Harold, a literate older brother, irreverently sabotages the ultra-patriotic camp newspaper by inventing a comic-strip character known as "the Nippon Pimpernel." Against an otherworldly background of Screenland magazines, Baby Ruth candy bars, and zoot suiters jitterbugging to the music of "the Jive Bombers, the true Mi-kados of swing," camp life is not all camp. The prisoners are soon polarized into two groups. On the one hand are the Super Japanese, paying homage to the Emperor and extolling Yamato da-mashii, the Japanese fighting...
...speaker is a muscular Detroit Negro ("I was one of those zoot-suit boys") whose scarred forearms bear witness to a misspent life of violence. In all his 44 years, he has worked a total of eleven months, spent 26 years in prison for armed robbery. Yet last week he was performing proudly at a full-time $134.80-a-week job: tightening bolts on the front suspension of Chevrolet trucks for General Motors, the world's largest manufacturer...
Malcolm Little came to Boston from Mason, Michigan, in 1941 to live with his aunt in Roxbury. Within a few months he had picked up the adornments that lent to ghetto negroes a kind of status he had never known in Michigan. He wore blue or shiny grey zoot suits, burned his long red hair straight by a process called "conking", peddled reefers and dope, and slept with a white woman. Later in Harlem his reputation as a hustler grew. He played and then worked the numbers racket, pimped for male and female prostitutes, sold and took dope in increasing...
...quit school after the eighth grade, eventually made his way to New York. Nicknamed "Big Red," he was a gangling zoot-suiter who fancied yellow-toed shoes and straightened his hair with lye in a scalp-searing process called "conking." He worked briefly as a waiter at Small's Paradise, still one of Harlem's top nightspots. But an honest dollar was not for Malcolm Little. He was caught pimping on the side and fired. He thereupon turned himself into a full-time hustler whose specialties were fixing up white men with Negro whores and Negro men with...