Zorita became a household name by engaging, and often challenging, the very social, political, cultural, and economic forces that pulsed through the headlines splashed across the city newspaper. Although she came to know Miami law enforcement and courts quite well over the years, Zorita—a white, non-Hispanic woman—sustained a long and successful career in burlesque and entertainment. And although her audiences consisted primarily of men, Zorita preferred the company and intimacy of women in her personal life, and today she would likely identify as a lesbian or queer woman.
Zorita’s life and career provide an important snapshot of Miami as it radically transformed from a sleepy city of the New South into a dynamic global city. Zorita was a pathbreaker who created spaces and platforms for other LGBTQ and marginalized people during a time when very few others were able or willing to do so. Though Zorita was not born or raised in the South, she spent most of her adult life living in Florida during a time of its radical transformation. The Miami that Zorita traversed during the peak of her career is a quintessential story of the New South and its evolving identity and character.
Becoming Zorita
Ada Brockette, the woman who became known as Zorita, was born on August 30, 1915, in Youngstown, Ohio. A strict Methodist couple adopted her as an infant. She and her family lived in Chicago for several years and, following some family troubles, Brockette dropped out of school at age fifteen, moved to California, and became a manicurist. She soon wedded a man studying to be a lawyer, ending the marriage just a few weeks later. Rebelling against the wishes of her conservative family, she began a career in burlesque while she was still a teenager. She took work as part of a traveling carnival and nudist colony that mostly performed in California. She was part of a troupe that featured several women frolicking mostly in the nude in a Garden of Eden–like setting. Customers paid to watch them in action.
In these spaces, she learned how some entertainers used snakes as part of their carnival exhibitions, and she soon adopted them as part of her “exotic” burlesque acts. She confessed that snakes terrified her, but she knew that incorporating them into her routines would help set her apart. By the early 1930s, the carnival billed her as the highlight of its show: “Princess Zorida.” She took on the role of a high priestess with the ability to charm snakes. It featured nearly all the “exotic” tropes of the racialized Other, ones made more palatable to general audiences by way of her whiteness, femininity, and sexual prowess. Her character would be sold at auction in a slave market before being sacrificed to the Sun God.