Oscar Zeta Acosta

American writer, lawyer, and activist

• Born: April 8, 1935
• Birthplace: El Paso, Texas
• Died: disappeared 1974
• Place of death: Mexico

Acosta was one of the most significant figures of the Chicano movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Along with his work as a lawyer and political activist, Acosta produced two of the most important Chicano texts of the era: The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973).

Early Life

Oscar Zeta Acosta (SEH-tah ah-COHS-tah) was born on April 8, 1935, in El Paso, Texas. His parents, Manuel Mercado Acosta and Juana Fierro Acosta, were born in Mexico and moved to El Paso before their son was born. In 1940, the Acosta family moved to Riverbank, a small town near Modesto in the Central Valley of California, where the family earned a living by harvesting peaches. Acosta’s father, originally from the Mexican state of Durango, earned his U.S. citizenship as a result of serving in the Navy during World War II. Acosta describes Riverbank as a town with strict social divisions between Mexicans and whites. According to Acosta, these racial divisions torpedoed his early romantic relationships with Anglo girls whose parents were unwilling to accept him.

After graduating from high school in 1952, Acosta joined the Air Force, serving as a clarinetist in the band. During his time in the military, Acosta, who was raised Catholic, converted; while stationed in Panama, he was a Baptist missionary and minister before renouncing the faith. After his honorable discharge in 1956, Acosta studied French and creative writing at Modesto Junior College. He finished his studies in mathematics and creative writing at San Francisco State University.

In 1956, Acosta married Betty Daves who gave birth to their son, Marco, in 1959. In his published work, Acosta does not discuss his relationship with Daves, whom he divorced in 1963; their son, Marco; or his second wife, Socorro Aguiniga, to whom he was married from 1969 to 1971. However, correspondence between Acosta and Daves, dated from 1956 to 1971, has been preserved at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the Oscar Zeta Acosta Papers archive.In 1957, Acosta began to receive psychiatric care from Dr. William Serbin, and he continued to receive treatment until 1967. Acosta completed his legal studies at San Francisco Law School, where he attended evening courses while working for The San Francisco Examiner, and passed the California bar exam in 1966.

Life’s Work

Acosta documents his life in The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). Although mostly autobiographical, these two books contain fictionalized elements, including pseudonyms for real historical figures, the conflation of time, the omission of certain details, and unrealistic scenes.

The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo focuses on the second half of 1967, but throughout the text, Acosta also describes key moments in his adolescence. The book opens in 1967 with Acosta abruptly leaving his unfulfilling first job as a legal aid attorney in Oakland, firing his psychiatrist, and leaving San Francisco on a road trip with an uncertain destination. Acosta’s travels took him through Idaho, Colorado (where he met writer Hunter S. Thompson), Texas, Los Angeles, and Mexico. A major element of Acosta’s journey was his desire to comprehend his identity as a Mexican American. Although Acosta rejected popular counterculture figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo extensively chronicles Acosta’s use of various drugs, including peyote and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), throughout his travels. Upon his return to El Paso, Acosta planned to travel to Guatemala to participate in that country’s revolution; however, his brother Bob suggested that Acosta instead focus on the East Los Angeles Brown Power movement. Acosta was electrified to learn of the uprising of “brown buffalos,” a term he uses to refer to Chicanos as a group of people that had survived mass slaughter. At the end of the book, Acosta arrives in Los Angeles, ready to “start the last revolution.”

The Revolt of the Cockroach People explores Acosta’s experiences in Los Angeles from 1968 to 1971 as a lawyer and activist working in the Chicano movement. Acosta stated that he came to Los Angeles prepared to leave behind his legal career to launch his literary career. Despite his initial skepticism, however, Acosta was persuaded to provide legal help to movement organizers in part because of an inspirational meeting with César Chávez in Delano in 1968, while Chávez was on a hunger strike. Acosta’s experiences in Los Angeles caused him to seek a stronger connection to his ethnic identity, and he began to improve his Spanish. During this time, Acosta adopted the name “Zeta.”Acosta was involved in key events of the Chicano movement, including the Chicano walkouts (also called blowouts) in 1968, during which students walked out of their high schools to protest the poor quality of public education in East Los Angeles. Acosta participated in the legal defense of the “East L.A. Thirteen,” the walkout leaders who were charged with conspiring to disturb the peace.

In protest of the criminal justice system, Acosta became a La Raza Unida Party candidate for sheriff of

Los Angeles County in 1970, earning more than 100,000 votes. He announced his candidacy on the radio to Rubén Salazar, the news reporter who was killed by a sheriff’s deputy during the Chicano Moratorium on August 29, 1970. Acosta also took part in the defense of criminal cases involving the “Saint Basil Twenty-one,” the “Biltmore Seven,” and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, a founding leaders of the Chicano movement, who was accused of crossing state lines to incite a riot because of his role in the Chicano Moratorium. As a lawyer, Acosta pushed the boundaries, attempting to expose what he saw as inherent racism within the U.S. legal system. He stopped practicing law in 1972 to devote himself to writing.

Acosta disappeared in 1974 while traveling in Mexico. His last known conversation was with his son, Marco, in May, 1974; he is believed to have boarded a boat and disappeared off the coast of Mazatlán. Acosta was legally declared dead in December, 1986.

Significance

Acosta was an influential figure in the areas of literature, the law, and Chicano political activism. He played a key role in the Chicano movement as a lawyer and activist but also was important for his iconoclasm. In his autobiographical writings, Acosta documented the tension he felt between his commitment to social justice and his fierce embrace of his own individuality and freedom. He challenged numerous types of institutions and identifications, refusing to embrace any dogmas, even those of the Chicano movement itself. Acosta’s body of literary work has had a profound impact on Chicano literature. Acosta’s friend Hunter S. Thompson was much better known in the mainstream as a “gonzo” journalist; nonetheless, in his autobiographical writings Acosta also used a “gonzo” style, characterized by an emphasis on the subjectivity and participation of the chronicler, a sense of immediacy that tends to reject much editing, and, in Acosta’s words, the practice of “reporting under fire and drugs.” Acosta’s work also pushed the boundaries of the autobiography genre, blurring the distinction between author and narrator, truth and imagination.

Bibliography

Acosta, Oscar Zeta. Oscar “Zeta” Acosta: The Uncollected Works. Edited by Ilan Stavans. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1996. This collection includes autobiographical writing, poetry, fiction, letters, political writing, and a teleplay by Acosta. The volume also includes a bibliography of Acosta’s work and a chronology of important events in Acosta’s life and Chicano history.

Bracher, Philip. “Writing the Fragmented Self in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo.” In Ethnic Life Writing and Histories: Genres, Performance, and Culture, edited by Rocío David, Jaume Aurell i Cardona, and Ana Beatriz Delgado. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007. In this chapter, Bracher argues against the traditional view of Acosta’s autobiography as one in which Acosta embraces his ethnic identity. Bracher instead emphasizes the carnivalesque elements of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, focusing on the “polyphonic consciousness” of the identity envisioned by Acosta.

Stavans, Ilan. Bandido: The Death and Resurrection of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta. 2d ed. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003. This book is partly a biography of Acosta and partly Stavans’s examination and discussion of the legacy of the Chicano movement. The author ruminates on Acosta’s biography and, especially, the lasting significance of Acosta’s body of work.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1971. Thompson’s most famous book is a fictionalized representation of two trips he took with Acosta to Las Vegas in 1971. “Dr. Gonzo,” a character based on Acosta, accompanies narrator and protagonist Raoul Duke, a stand-in for Thompson, on a trip to Las Vegas. It is considered one of the most important texts about the aftereffects of the 1960’s counterculture era in the United States.