In June 1943, white American servicemen stationed in Los Angeles began hunting Mexican American and other minority youths through downtown streets, stripping them of the zoot suits that had made them targets and beating them in front of cheering crowds. This film traces how a wartime fabric shortage, a moral panic over Mexican American youth culture, and simmering resentment toward Hispanic, Black, and Filipino communities collided into days of open street violence that police mostly stood back and watched, and sometimes joined. Archival photographs, period newsreel, and historian interviews reconstruct the Sleepy Lagoon murder case that preceded the riots, the press coverage that painted zoot suiters as unpatriotic criminals, and the eventual military ban that sent servicemen back to their bases. The film sets the riots inside the broader story of Los Angeles race relations during the war, when Japanese Americans were already interned and Black and Mexican American workers were pouring into the city for defense jobs. It treats the violence as a case study in how clothing became a pretext for something older and uglier.