Oscar zeta acosta biography

  Oscar Zeta Acosta (April 8, ) was a writer, lawyer, and political activist. He was born in El Paso, Texas and was raised in California's San Joaquin Valley, near Modesto. Because Acosta's father was drafted during World War II, Oscar held much responsibility in helping to take care of the family. As an attorney his activities began in Oakland but it was in East Los Angeles where he gained notoriety, prior to his mysterious disappearance in Mexico in the Spring of

  Acosta is most well known as the author of two of the most important novels of the Chicano Protest Movement, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo(), and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (). Both novels are highly acclaimed as major contributions to the Chicano literary renaissance. They are semiautobiographical and relate to Acosta's search for self-identity in the midst of an Anglo society at a time of great social unrest within the Chicano community.

  Immediately following high sch

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The Brown Buffalo and the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles

One of the most colorful figures of the Chicano Movement of the late 60s and early 70s was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a.k.a. the Brown Buffalo. A radical, hard-living lawyer and activist, Acosta helped lead the East L.A. school walkouts in , successfully argued or brought attention to the court cases of many defendants associated with Movement actions, and even ran for sheriff of L.A. County in , representing the La Raza Unida party—he lost but did komma in second, receiving over , votes for his cause of dismantling and reorganizing the sheriff’s department. Nowadays Acosta is better known to counterculture fans as Hunter S. Thompson’s sidekick in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (), fictionalized as Dr. Gonzo in what is acknowledged by all involved to be a fairly accurate portrayal of their drug-crazed trip to Vegas for a journalistic assignment. Feeling that he should have gotten more than sidekick credit for his contributions to T

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The Marginalization of Oscar Zeta Acosta

To understand why a lawyer would be willing to admit publicly to a litany of felonies, as would be the case if Thompson had acknowledged Acosta in print as the real Doctor Gonzo, then one has to look back at his life. Oscar Acosta was, of course, not Samoan. Nor was he, as Thompson sometimes claimed, a Mexican. Acosta was born on April 8, in El Paso, which he argued “isn’t really a part of Texas no matter what the maps say. Not that I’m an authority on Texas history or on El Paso, but believe me, I wasn’t born in Texas!” A child of the Great Depression, he migrated westward with his family and grew up poor in the Chicano section of Riverbank, California.

At school, he was different from his Hispanic peers and seemed to fit in more with his white classmates. He was studious and athletic, and he excelled at music. While the other Hispanic kids dropped out, he became class president and earned a scholarship to the University of Southern Califo