It’s been a pastime of mine for many years to wonder where it is that West Side Story takes place. You might say that’s like asking the color of George Washington’s white horse. The West Side of Manhattan, dummy! Yes, but where on the West Side?
The answer turns out to be: west. Way west. Like, Los Angeles. Which explains why both the original West Side Story and its recent remake commit the disconcerting sociological error of airbrushing African Americans out of the setting.
We’ve seen a lot of essays in the last week faulting West Side Story, even in its newest version, for its treatment of Puerto Ricans, who migrated in record numbers to New York City after World War II. But the larger ethnic insult, it seems to me, is that West Side Story pretends that an even bigger postwar migration never took place. That’s the Black migration into New York City from the segregated South, which began decades earlier and prompted at least as much ethnic prejudice. (The deficit is addressed very indirectly by casting the Afro-Latina actress Ariana DeBose as Anita.)
The new film sets the action in San Juan Hill, the slum in the West 60s cleared by Robert Moses to build Lincoln Center, and it portrays the neighborhood as a battleground between whites and Puerto Ricans. But in fact, San Juan Hill was a Black neighborhood of long standing, into which Puerto Ricans migrated during the postwar years. There was never much gang activity there during the 1950s. These jarring story elements make sense only when you learn that West Side Story’s creators drew inspiration not from gang wars in New York City but rather from gang wars in Los Angeles.
It was in L.A. that teenage gangs first burst onto the national consciousness with the 1943 Zoot Suit riots. The riots were provoked by Anglo GIs stationed in L.A., en route to the Pacific. The GIs harassed Mexican-American pachucos for flouting wartime regulations that outlawed the pachucos’ baggy zoot suits (because they used too much fabric). An argument ensued, and a uniformed Navy sailor was beaten up. In retaliation, 50 U.S. sailers marched through downtown Los Angeles and beat with clubs anyone in a zoot suit they could find. The result was six days of violence between servicemen and pachucos. These riots were, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, a “racial protest.” L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron replied that the Chicano rioters were gang members. Both were right.