Oscar (Zeta) Acosta, the inspiration for the sidekick to Hunter S. Thompson’s alter ego in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” believed that Thompson had helped himself to his sensibility and personality—and then erased his identity.
,” a roman à clef about the Chicano movement, published in 1973. They have become controversial classics, as canonical in Chicano literature as Thompson’s work is in any New Journalism syllabus. They are slippery and unclassifiable and, in places, wildly bigoted and misogynistic. They offer a rare perspective from a period when very few Mexican-Americans were getting published.
In high school, Acosta played football, dated a popular white girl, and was president of his junior class. “I was not like the average Chicano who, in the forties, would either drop out or go quietly off to the side,” he recalled later. After graduation, he joined the Air Force. While stationed in Panama, he became a Baptist preacher and missionary—“a Mexican Billy Graham,” as he put it—delivering regular sermons at a leprosy settlement.
Acosta describes his upbringing, in a shack on the west side of Riverbank, through flashbacks. He was keenly aware of the caste system not only outside his home but also within it. His father was of indigenous descent, and his mother would refer to him derogatorily as “Indio”; if Acosta or one of his siblings misbehaved, she would accuse them of “behaving like an Indian.” There were three types of people in Riverbank, Acosta writes: “Mexicans, Okies, and Americans.
As part of his epiphany, Acosta decides to move to Los Angeles. His second book, “The Revolt of the Cockroach People” is a loosely accurate chronicle of the next three years of his life, which he devoted to the Chicano movement. On his first night in L.A., Acosta feels a cockroach crawl across his butt and thinks of the old revolutionary“La Cucaracha.” When he runs for sheriff, “cockroaches from the barrios and beaches” pass out bumper stickers on his behalf.
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