The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The plan is simple. You may think me naïve, a fool and a bungler but we'll see .... I'll go talk to the Brown Berets and get them to hustle up the revolutionaries .... ladies and gentleman [sic]. . . my name is Oscar Acosta. My father is an Indian from the mountains of Durango. Although I cannot speak his language ... you see, Spanish is the language of our conquerors. English is the language of our conquerors .... No one ever asked me or my brother if we wanted to be American citizens. We are all citizens by default. They stole our Land and made us half-slaves. They destroyed our gods .... Now what we need is, first to give ourselves a new name. We need a new identity .... So, I propose that we call ourselves .. The Brown Buffalo people .... No, it's not an Indian name, for Christ sake ... don't you get it? The buffalo, see? Yes, the animal that everyone slaughtered. Sure, both the cowboys and the Indians are out to get him ... and, because we do have roots in our Mexican past, our Aztec ancestry, that's where we get the brown from ....
Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
The Brown Buffalo, Oscar Zeta Acosta, disappeared many years ago. Time magazine considers his disappearance one of the ten most famous disappearances in United States history. Acosta's last communication came from Mazatlan, Mexico, in 1974, and the case has never been solved, neither officially nor unofficially.
Image caption: Oscar Zeta Acosta, Las Vegas, 1971. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Acosta hails from El Paso, Texas. His family moved to California when he was a small child, and he returned only once to El Paso. Acosta usually lived in California. He spent much of his short life in the courts as an attorney, in the streets as a Chicano Movement activist, on the road with Hunter S. Thompson, and at the typewriter working on his stories.
Acosta was a flamboyant lawyer. He represented people in well-publicized cases in California, such as the Biltmore 6 case (which involved Ronald Reagan). The book Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice states Judge Alarcon describes Acosta's behavior as "rude, insolent, and contemptuous." He put Acosta in jail twice for contempt of court. Acosta also participated in the East L.A. 13 case. The Los Angeles Times reports that "defense attorneys in the case included Oscar Acosta, a hell-raising lawyer with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs and dangerous living."
Acosta had unusual behaviors in the courtroom. He wore brightly colored ties and carried a loudly decorated briefcase into the courtroom. The New Yorker article "What 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' Owes to Oscar Acosta" states, "He was known to show up in court barefoot, often with a pistol and occasionally on acid; he had the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli, printed on his business cards."
An article in the Duke Law Journal states that in the Biltmore 6 trial, "Nevertheless, none of the defendants suffered convictions either at the Oscar Zeta Acosta, Las Vegas, 1971 initial trial or at a second trial ... both trials ended in dismissals or in acquittals." Tu Revista Latina notes about the East L.A. 13 trial, "The East L.A. 13 were eventually set free and two years later, their cases were thrown out of court on appeal." Despite Acosta's unusual tactics in the courtroom, or perhaps because of those controversial tactics - all the defendants went free.
Acosta became an activist in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reports, "Oscar popped up out of nowhere offering to help," organizer David Sanchez recalls with a laugh. "I asked him once, 'How'd you learn about us?' He said he had been waiting on tables at a restaurant in Aspen, Colo., when he looked up at a television on the wall and saw news footage of Eastside kids being chased and beaten by police. Oscar said he took off his apron, threw it down on a table and announced, 'Those people need a lawyer!' Then he drove to L.A." He found a group of activists and volunteered to work as an attorney.
As an activist, he marched and spoke in the streets of Southern California with a microphone in his hand, speakers blaring. KCET television station in Los Angeles states, "Within two years of moving to East L.A., Acosta had become an integral part of the Chicano Movement. In 1970 he ran for sheriff under the Raza Unida Party, a small party that aimed to bring Chicano issues to light. Acosta ran with the single platform of wanting to disband the L APD; he received over 100,000 votes, which wasn't enough to win him the election, but demonstrated his popularity within the community." In Bandido: Oscar "Zeta" Acosta and the Chicano Experience, llan Stavans - Mexican American scholar, author, and radio and television personality - talks to some of the "activists" and other people who knew Acosta. Stavans states, "He showed us hope," said one. To which a second added, "He showed that once we can use the language of our oppressors, we can become part of the system, and change it from within. He proved that the struggle can be fought on new, different fronts."
Acosta befriended Hunter S. Thompson, the counter-culture journalist of the 1960s and 1970s and became famous as the character of Dr. Gonzo, the wildly excessive drug-taking attorney in the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and a 1998 movie with Johnny Depp (as Raoul Duke/ Hunter S. Thompson) and Benicio del Toro (as Dr. Gonzo/Oscar Acosta). In the article "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," Thompson writes about Acosta, "Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach - but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of thirty-three - just like Jesus Christ - you have a serious piece of work on your hands." Acosta became angry with Thompson because Thompson portrayed Acosta as a "300-pound Samoan" in the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In "What 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' Owes to Oscar Acosta" The New Yorker states, "Acosta did not object to being portrayed as a drug-guzzling maniac. But he wanted his ethnicity corrected." The Acosta and Thompson friendship ended after legal disputes arose over the book.
Image caption: Hunter S. Thompson caricature. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
At the typewriter, Acosta wrote two famous books about his life and Chicano culture, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. KCET in Los Angeles explains:
Acosta eventually left the legal profession and concentrated on writing. He published two works, both of which would become essential to the Chicano Movement. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, published in 1972, was a fictionalized biography that ended with the main character moving to East Los Angeles after hearing about the Chicano Movement. East L.A. was a place he could finally feel welcomed and at home - a place that would accept that he was neither American nor Mexican, but somewhere in between. In the 1973 book Revolt of the Cockroach People, Acosta depicts a fictionalized version of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium.
llan Stavans, in the foreword to Oscar "Zeta" Acosta: The Uncollected Works, states, "Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta is one of the most enigmatic and compelling figures in Chicano history, as well as a profoundly puzzling writer."
Acosta was born on April 8, 1935. In "From Whence I Came," from his The Uncollected Works, he writes, "I, Oscar Zeta Acosta, who in the beginning of 1971, was the only militant Chicano lawyer in the country, was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1935 .... The kid [Acosta] was born in El Paso. I don't add the state name because that city isn't really a part of Texas no matter what the maps say. Not that I am an authority on Texas history or on El Paso, but believe me, I wasn't born in Texas!"
Still from "From Whence I Came," Acosta continues, "The first five years I lived in El Paso. My father worked at odd jobs in grocery stores and garages. He used to give us our domingo or what you'd call an allowance. We were living on Durango Street... the toughest neighborhood I ever lived in. There were gangs and wars and all the problems of growing up that we are all familiar with."
Image caption: Oscar Zeta Acosta during his famous reading from Revolt of the Cockroach People. Courtesy of USC Libraries.
Acosta continues, "We had tortillas every morning with scrambled eggs and chorizo and usually a side of refried beans. For holidays or special occasions, the women would, on the night before, grind the corn for the dough and paste the cornmeal in the corn leaves filled with bits of beef and pork and chili sauce for the tamales. They'd always make sweet ones for the kids with brown sugar and raisins. The kitchen was always hot and steam-filled and welcome."
"The kid's father used to hang around with the motorcycle gang. I see him now as the stolid Indian that he is." Acosta writes of his grandmother, "I will say that she has guts. She brought a son and a daughter across the border all by herself .... That bunch came from Durango, Mexico."
ln The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Acosta remembers his mother and father: "Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel's wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande."
Acosta recalls in The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo his one return to El Paso much later in his life: I decided to go to El Paso, the place of my birth, to see if I could find the object of my quest. .. just who in the hell I really was. I scoured the neighborhood of my youth. It was just a stone's throw from the border. Crackling, rusty electric street cars, Mexican restaurants and bars blaring norteño music onto gutted, packed, crowded sidewalks teeming with brown faces, black hair and that ancient air of patience which I'd always seen in the faces of the indio from the mountains of Durango.
Acosta crossed the border into Ciudad Juárez, went to the red-light district, and rented a cheap room. He then had many ten-cent glasses of cheap tequila. He went back drunk to the cheap, unheated room and then got into an altercation with the old men overseeing the hotel about the lack of heat in his room. After some cursing in English and Spanish, the police arrived, took him to the Juárez jail, strip-searched him, and threw him in. Eventually, Acosta told the Mexican authorities he was a United States attorney, trying to talk his way out. He was released after paying the fine. Acosta states, "Juárez in the morning, when you have two cents in your pocket and been ordered out of town at gun point, is 
as depressing a city as you can find."
Acosta returned to El Paso and then eventually back to California. Acosta disappeared in the vicinity of Mazatlán, Mexico, in May of 1974. Various sketchy reports exist about the disappearance. His son Marco reported that Acosta finally telephoned him, stating he was "about to board a boat full of white snow." In an afterword to The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Marco writes, "I was fourteen when he disappeared from Mazatlán, Mexico, via a friend's sailing boat, in June of 1974. I was the last person, as far as I know, to speak with him." Marco reports, "In the following years there were rumors that he was shot by one of the 'thugs' he was hanging around with in Mexico, or that he was spotted somewhere off the coast of Hawaii or Florida. The bottom line, however, is that no one, to my knowledge, knows for sure what happened, including the FBI and the U.S. Coast Guard - or so they say."
Stavans offers several theories about Acosta's disappearance in his short biography of Acosta, Chicano Experience. One is that Acosta was trying to make money in a drug deal. Stavans observes, "Supposedly, Zeta [Acosta] died in a shoot-out after an argument that turned sour." Stavans then states, "A second possibility is that he was on a boat on his way to Puerto Vallarta and then Santa Cruz, California, when a storm hit. In any event, his body was never found." Another possibility that Stavans considers is "he simply had a heart attack - un ataque fatidico." Stavans says that Acosta's sister Anita "is certain that agents of the U. S. government disposed of him." His sister states that government agents "used to come knocking on my door when Oscar was living with me."
Image caption: Oscar Zeta Acosta Mural, 701 Texas Ave, El Paso, Texas. Courtesy of Michaela Esparza.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote that he received many reports of Acosta's disappearance with wild tales of Acosta selling guns in Africa, buying children in Asia, and hanging around somewhere in Miami. In "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," Thompson mentions "other twisted rumors of the latest Brown Buffalo sightings," adding, "He will be seen at least once in Calcutta, buying nine-year-old girls out of cages on the White Slave Market.. .and also in Houston, tending bar at a roadhouse on South Main ... or perhaps once again on the midnight run to Bimini, standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand." Thompson thought maybe Mexican drug dealers murdered him, or he was killed in a politically motivated assassination.
Some sources mention a drug overdose. Some sources consider a nervous breakdown as the cause. Suicide was mentioned. Reportedly, there was no death certificate and no body. Oscar Zeta Acosta vanished without any traces or clues.
In "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," Thompson eulogizes, "It might even come to pass that he will suddenly appear on my porch in Woody Creek on some moonless night when the peacocks are screeching with lust. ... Maybe so, and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house, even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull maggots around his neck. He was too weird to live and too rare to die."
A final note: Oscar Zeta Acosta vanished in Mexico many years ago, and the disappearance seems unlikely ever to be solved. But interest in the life and works of Oscar Zeta Acosta has increased in recent years.
The New Yorker article "What 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' Owes to Oscar Acosta" states, "His novels have become the subjects of scholarly inquiry, his name figures heavily in histories of the Chicano Movement, and his legal strategies are analyzed as templates for challenging institutional racism in court."
The memory of Acosta's unconventional life came back into the public view in 2018 in the PBS documentary The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo.
