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Chicago Tribune
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: Zoot Suit riots
Today is Tuesday, June 3, the 154th day of 2025. There are 211 days left in the year. Today in history: On June 3, 1943, an altercation between U.S. Navy sailors and young Mexican Americans on the streets of Los Angeles led to several days of clashes known as the Zoot Suit Riots, during which white mobs attacked Mexican Americans across the city, injuring more than 150. Also on this date: In 1844, the last confirmed specimens of the great auk were killed on Eldey island, near Iceland. In 1888, the poem 'Casey at the Bat' by Ernest Lawrence Thayer was first published in the San Francisco Daily Examiner. In 1935, the French liner SS Normandie set a record on its maiden voyage, arriving in New York after crossing the Atlantic in just four days. In 1937, Edward, The Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated the British throne, married Wallis Simpson in a private ceremony in Monts, France. In 1965, during the Gemini 4, spaceflight, astronaut Edward H. White became the first American to 'walk' in space. In 1989, Chinese army troops entered Beijing's Tiananmen Square to begin a crackdown on student-led pro-democracy demonstrations. In 2016, former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, whose athletic feats and activism placed him among the most revered athletes of all time, died in Scottsdale, Arizona, at age 74. In 2017, elite rock climber Alex Honnold became the first to climb solo to the top of the massive granite wall known as El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes or safety gear. Today's Birthdays: Former Cuban President Raúl Castro is 94. Basketball Hall of Famer Billy Cunningham is 82. Golf Hall of Famer Hale Irwin is 80. Singer Suzi Quatro is 75. Singer Deniece Williams is 75. Former first lady Jill Biden is 74. Olympic gymnastics gold medalist Peter Vidmar is 64. Musician Kerry King (Slayer) is 61. Broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper is 58. Tennis player Rafael Nadal is 39.
Boston Globe
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Today in History: June 3, the Zoot Suit Riots begin in Los Angeles
In 1888, the poem 'Casey at the Bat' by Ernest Lawrence Thayer was first published in the San Francisco Daily Examiner. In 1898, Governor William Eustis Russell signed a bill creating the Metropolitan Parks Commission, the nation's first regional park system. (Starting with 7,000 acres, the service, now managed by the Department of Conservation and Recreation, encompasses almost 20,000 acres of woodlands, beaches, swimming pools, skating rinks, bicycle paths, and open areas, including the Charles River Esplanade.) In 1935, the French liner SS Normandie set a record on its maiden voyage, arriving in New York after crossing the Atlantic in just four days. Advertisement In 1937, Edward, The Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated the British throne, married Wallis Simpson in a private ceremony in Monts, France. In 1943, an altercation between US Navy sailors and young Mexican Americans on the streets of Los Angeles led to several days of clashes known as the Zoot Suit Riots, during which white mobs attacked Mexican Americans across the city, injuring more than 150. Advertisement In 1965, during the Gemini 4 spaceflight, astronaut Edward H. White became the first American to 'walk' in space. In 1989, Chinese army troops entered Beijing's Tiananmen Square to begin a crackdown on student-led pro-democracy demonstrations. In 2016, former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, whose athletic feats and activism placed him among the most revered athletes of all time, died in Scottsdale, Arizona, at age 74. In 2017, elite rock climber Alex Honnold became the first to climb solo to the top of the massive granite wall known as El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without ropes or safety gear.
Washington Post
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Isabel Allende's new novel sends an adventurous reporter to war
Isabel Allende often finds thematic inspiration in her lived experience of revolution. She fled political persecution in Chile after a coup in 1973 deposed President Salvador Allende, her father's cousin. While in exile in Venezuela, she achieved renewal and personal liberation through professional success. She published her critically acclaimed best-selling debut, 'The House of the Spirits,' in 1982. Her new novel, 'My Name Is Emilia del Valle,' returns to her childhood home of Chile, though the story begins in San Francisco's Mission District in 1866. Here, an Irish nun finds sanctuary after a failed love affair with a Chilean aristocrat. Taken in by a local teacher, whom she marries, she gives birth to a daughter she names Emilia. The girl is raised by her mother and stepfather to think for herself and find meaningful work, and Emilia ends up making a living by writing popular pulp fiction and a column for the San Francisco Daily Examiner under the pen name Brandon J. Price. Emilia and her family 'spent hours coming up with the most macho name we could think of,' she explains. When civil war breaks out in Chile in 1891, Emilia seizes the chance to cover the revolution and find her birth father. Along with another reporter from the Examiner, she travels to Chile, begins an affair with her colleague, meets her estranged father and embeds with government forces supporting Chilean President José Manuel Balmaceda, an autocrat dressed as a reformer. She's got a gut feeling about Balmaceda's claims that his reforms will benefit everyone in Chile, that 'Balmaceda was fighting for the rights of the common man, trying to break the iron grip of the aristocracy. And yet I had heard that he did so with a shocking brutality.' She's determined to report whether the rumors are true. Emilia is soon caught up in Balmaceda's paradox. Her fraught journey of romance and self-discovery pivots desperately to survival when Balmaceda's army is defeated. The 1891 civil war in Chile was described by military historian Lt. Col. Don P. Wyckoff as a 'unique civil war — a navy without an army opposing an army without a navy — an elephant in conflict with a whale.' Emilia's journalism is part and parcel of the story's narrative. We learn, as her readers do, that Balmaceda's reform policies are quickly opposed not only by his political enemies, but also by his own ministers. The root of the conflict was fiscal policy: Balmaceda wanted to eliminate domestic tax revenue and fund his reform programs with duties collected from British mining companies. And when he moved to do so without congressional approval, a constitutional crisis quickly devolved into violent confrontation, with the Chilean Navy supporting the congressional rebels and Balmaceda commanding the army. Emilia's reports from the battlefield offer a stark counterpoint to the policy debates over taxes and tariffs. She sees it as her job 'to collect the dispersed fragments' of stories for thousands of men who would die on the battlefield and never get to tell theirs. 'It is impossible to describe the horror of war,' she writes. 'How is it possible that, from the dawn of their presence on earth, men have systematically set out to murder one another? What fatal madness do we carry in our soul? That propensity toward destruction is the original sin.' Allende offers readers a deeply researched historical adventure, excavating both romantic and journalistic exploits with verve and passion. But it is the story's prescient alignment with our current cultural and civic upheaval that lands like a mortar from Allende's epic depiction of the Battle of Concón. The United States is in a paroxysm of tariff-induced economic crisis, market collapse, frenzied political stasis, and battles for institutional power and control over individual citizens, native and foreign. From that vantage, Chile's history (including the role of foreign interests) and Emilia's story offer an essential lesson. If history and a free press illuminate a revolution's explosion of civil norms, literature reveals the human triumph, vanity and tragedy of revolution's impact. The upheaval that Emilia del Valle recounts in 1891 is our clarion call in 2025. Marcela Davison Avilés is a multimedia producer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. By Isabel Allende Ballantine. 304 pp. $30
