Noir and Forgotten History Unite in ‘Death to Pachuco’

The Zoot Suit Riots exemplify the type of historical events that aren’t exactly obscured, but don’t really get covered in anyone’s core curriculum. The short version of the story is that in 1943, white people rioted in Los Angeles out of resentment over Mexicans basically existing. More specifically, they were angry when they saw Mexicans taking up an American government invitation to work in domestic factories to provide indirect support for World War II. Zoot suits, associated with the Pachuco subculture, became an excuse for this hatred because they were made of materials that were being conserved for the war effort.

The five part comic series Death to Pachuco, now collated in paperback from Image Comics, provides context and color: explaining how the Zoot Suit Riots spun out of the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial nearly a year prior. The trial was a notorious flashpoint, and prompts the tagline that in America, “now’s not a good time to be a Mexican.”

Death to Pachuco
Story by Henry Barajas, Art by Rachel Merrill
Image Comics; 168 pages

Also on the front cover is the reminder that this is “A Ricky Tellez Story.” Tellez, a noir styled private detective, is both the main character and the main problem with Death to Pachuco. The problem isn’t that he’s an especially awful character so much as it is that he’s by far the least interesting part of the story. The noir elements swirling around Tellez more often than not just distract from the central murder mystery and the rather more important socio-political mystery of why the death of a Mexican man at a Mexican party is something that would become a major news story in the dominant white culture.

The short answer is that racists wanted to push a narrative of Mexican gangbangers at war with each other. This is unfortunately not as well communicated in the graphic novel as it is in the supplementary Sleep Lagoon Murder Case propaganda leaflet included in the book. A fascinating historical artifact in its own right, the pamphlet was originally bankrolled by a group including Orson Welles, of all people. It provides an extended, passionate argument both that racism is bad and moreover that racism is unpatriotic fifth columnist behavior designed to weaken the war effort. It’s a messy, fascinating document that trumpets the importance of labor organizing while condemning communism.

The pamphlet also has surprisingly little representation in Death to Pachuco itself, despite the lengths author Henry Barajas went to in order to reprint it here. This is mainly because Death to Pachuco has to twist the exact facts of the case to make the story more noir. The actual victim’s name isn’t even Carlos. Death to Pachuco is a bit puzzling in that regard. The historical perspective is the main hook the story has going for it. Frankly speaking, the case itself is already so dramatic, and so important, that Tellez feels like a distraction. As amusing as it is to watch him wander around shooting up drugs and punching people to find leads, the book’s premise is that no one actually cares about who killed Carlos, and going by how the trial is depicted in the propaganda leaflet, it seems unlikely that literally any evidence would have swayed the court from a decision it appears to have decided on well in advance, the facts be damned.

This is another problem with Death to Pachuco deploying the noir format. Your typical noir detective, be it Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, or modern Perry Mason, is typically employed by people who, for whatever reason, are trying to avoid getting the police involved. Once criminal charges are involved, the legal elements become much more important than the detective work, which is part of why Perry Mason is better known as a lawyer than a detective. By focusing on Tellez’s investigation adventures, rather than the case, Death to Pachuco needlessly obscures what’s going on.

Ironically, though the narrative of Death to Pachuco is muddled, the scene-by-scene dialog, often in mangled Spanglish, is quite good. Every character seems to have their own unique angry way of cussing at each other, which also works well as thematic shorthand for how the situation seems destined to explode no matter what Tellez finds out regarding the murder. In one sense, it’s also refreshing that Death to Pachuco doesn’t lapse into tropes about perfect victims. More civil rights stories should be angry like this: more outraged living folks, fewer martyrs.

This collation is not getting into libraries and Scholastic markets, though, with its cursing and violence. Barajas and his artist Rachel Merrill even manage to get a sex scene in at one point, with boobs and nipples in a pillow talk scene. For what it’s worth, Merrill’s art isn’t exactly erotic. In general her lines are sharp and ugly, and while not always the best fit for the daily sports strip Gil Thorp (yes it’s still going on) there’s an excellent flow to the more violent scenes in this book, where a man getting his face beaten so bad he looks like a hideous monster… actually really does look like a hideous monster.

The book’s angry energy is appropriate for the topic at hand, hinting at the grand historical narrative of which the propaganda leaflet claims to be a part, boldly closing with a decisive demand to vanquish the racist fifth columnists. In contradistinction, the comic just ends with… a promise of more adventures with Ricky Tellez. Maybe I was naive to expect something a little more profound from a comic book, but there are just enough exceptional elements here that it’s easy to feel let down by Death to Pachuco. The leaflet sets it up to be something worthwhile: anti-racist and historical. The graphic novel in ultimate execution, though, is too generic for its own good, and not even generic in the kind of genre kids would actually want to read.