Oscar Zeta Acosta: One of God's own prototypes

[Squigglenob]

I, like most people who hear Oscar's name, know him for his literary works, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). As I was doing my research, though, I realized that Oscar--a legendary, compelling figure in Chicano history--remains in the shadows of the general American culture. He has never really gotten his due.

Acosta's name is not one that rings many bells today, and if it does, most people remember him as being the inspiration for Dr. Gonzo, the character immortalized in Hunter S. Thompson's book, 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.' In 'Fear,' the character of Dr. Gonzo--a man with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs and dangerous living--is the perfect complement to Thompson's journalist alter ego, Raoul Duke, who uses his assignment to cover an off-road race as an excuse to overindulge in booze and drugs in Vegas.

Oscar, however, is more than simply an inspiration for a character, albeit an important one. Acosta was a gifted writer and storyteller, an activist, a civil rights attorney, and is considered the Malcolm X of the Chicano/a community. He wrote two of the most important novels of the Chicano Protest Movement; his books were precedent-setting works and in the literary style of Gonzo journalism were pseudo-documentaries of California's Latino movement; they set the writer/attorney at the front lines of literary Chicanismo.

His mysterious disappearance happened three years after the notorious... http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2008/01/04/oscar-zeta-acosta-one-of-gods-own-prototypes">read the rest of Edmundo Rocha's post at S&R