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Act 1, Scene 9: Opening of the Trial
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Zoot Suit, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Nationalism, and Scapegoating
Self-Presentation and Cultural Identity
Public Perception and the Press
Advocates vs. Saviors
Summary
Analysis
The scene changes as Della describes the night of the Sleepy Lagoon murder. She and Henry are seen walking under the moonlight, holding hands and looking out at a set of distant lights. Henry guesses that somebody’s having a party at the Williams’ Ranch, where several Mexican families live. Perhaps, he says, they’re having a wedding—a statement that gives him pause. Turning to Della, Henry asks what Della will do if he never comes back from World War II. He then asks if she’ll marry him if he does survive the war, and she says yes. As they kiss, they notice that Rafas and the Downey Gang have approached Henry’s parked car and have started vandalizing it. Henry rushes over to them and tries to fight them off, but they beat him unconscious.
When Henry mentions the possibility that he could die in World War II, viewers are reminded of the fact that he has willingly signed up to put himself in danger for his country. This is an aspects of Henry’s story that the press, the public prosecutor, the judge, and the general public are all too eager to ignore in their attempts to create a false narrative and frame Henry and his friends as threats to the so-called American way of life.
Themes
When Henry wakes up, he and Della go back into town to get the rest of the 38th Street Gang, wanting to take revenge on the Downey Gang. By the time they return to the Lagoon, though, the Downey Gang is no longer there, so they drift toward the party at the Williams’ Ranch. What they don’t know, though, is that the Downey Gang has just terrorized and left the ranch, which is why the Williams family attacks them as they approach, thinking they’re the Downey Gang again. A large-scale brawl ensues, and Henry urges everyone to retreat. As they try to leave, Henry notices a man hitting somebody with a stick, so he tells him to stop. However, the man keeps beating the other person, and the rest of the gang leaves, driving away without knowing that José Williams—the man getting beaten—has died.
In this section, Valdez reveals what happened at the Sleepy Lagoon on the night of José Williams’s murder. However, it remains unclear who, exactly, killed José, about whom the audience knows essentially nothing. This lack of concrete information suggests that Valdez is uninterested in actually focusing on the murder in question. Instead, he wants the audience to concentrate on the ways in which Henry—as the leader of the 38th Street Gang—is wrongfully blamed for the murder, since it is now clear that, at the very least, he was not the one to kill José Williams, even if he was there when it happened.
Themes
