Zoot Suits Vs Headscarves

Oppression, Agency, and Identity: Zoot Suits and Headscarves Both the Pachucos in the United States and Muslim women in France suffer from the same xenophobic ideology that convinces the public to see them each as alien, other, ungrateful, and threatening. Both the Pachucos in the United States and Muslim women who wear headscarves in France have been oppressed in social systems that resentfully treat them as second-class citizens, marginalizing and discriminating against them in a multitude of ways—socially, politically, economically, and culturally. A question that many have pondered throughout history is: Are people merely contained and controlled by the social structure and hegemony, or do they have the free will to disrupt, destabilize

The Pachucos do not consider themselves as full-fledged Mexican like their parents and are considered American enough by American society. Their beliefs, traditions, and language have been taken from them so they are considered not quite Mexican. As well, their skin color and cultural hybridity as second and third generation working-class immigrants compels American society to ignore, overlook, and denigrate them. Therefore, the Pachucos are “forced … into an ambivalent experience between two cultures” (Cosgrove, 1984: 2). The 1981 movie Zoot Suits depicts this characteristic hybridity and ambivalence brilliantly through the representation of the unique language and conventions of Pachuuquismo (Valdez, 1981). Also at various parts, the 1995 movie Frontierlandia also portrays the same process of Mexican and American cultural contact, confrontation, and hybridization (Lerner and Ortiz, 1995). The Pachucos are disadvantaged, disinherited, and alienated, and this makes them feel like they have been silenced and shunned from both the Mexican enclave community and American society at large. Their anger, anxiety, and frustration with feeling muted, rejected, and discriminated upon guide their desire to realize and construct

That is, while many of the Pachucos appropriated the zoot suit as a way to cope with feeling powerless and voiceless in a white supremacist society, Muslim women at the beginning wore the headscarves mostly for religious, functional, and personal reasons. For Muslim women in France, at least in the 1990s onwards, there was no literal appropriation involved. Instead, the headscarf was worn because it was a sign of modesty and means of controlling sexuality by their culture and religion, a material and psychic link to their homeland, a form of self-protection, and an expression of religious identity (Scott, 2005: 117). Like Mexicans in the United States, Muslim women in France are also marginalized and discriminated upon. The ideals of the French revolution and French republicanism created an ideology that there is a true self and essence, and the government embarked on a journey under the rubric of that ideology (Scott, 2005: 109; Miller 2010: 41). Therefore, just like how the zoot suit became associated with social action from the margins, some women decided to continue to or even started to wear the headscarf to “assert pride in one’s identity in the face of discrimination” (Scott, 2005: 117). After all, the Muslim women