Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta
* INTRO
* BIO
* HIS LITERARY WORKS
* PHOTOS
* LINKS
Chicano activist Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta was the inspiration for Hunter
Thompson's hell-raising buddy in 'Las Vegas,' but his true legacy remains in the
shadows.
Oscar "Zeta" Acosta--an outrageous lawyer who once subpoenaed every member of
the Los Angeles County grand jury to prove a pattern of discrimination against
Mexican Americans--is somewhat of a Chicano folk legend.
He was a driven, hell-raising attorney who was involved in high-profile civil
rights cases in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and early '70s and inspired the
character of Dr. Gonzo in Hunter S. Thompson's surreal book "Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas."
Acosta eventually gave up law and wrote two semi-autobiographical books, and
then disappeared like a puff of smoke off the coast of Mazatlan, Mexico, in the
spring of 1974. But not before leaving an indelible mark on the pages of L.A.
political history and Chicano literature.
His disappearance took place three years after the notorious drug-enhanced trip
to Las Vegas that is the subject of Thompson's book and the current Terry
Gilliam movie starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro.
But the book completely obscured Acosta's background and the film only hints at
his real story. The legend of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta--a compelling figure in
Chicano history--remains in the shadows.
In "Fear and Loathing," 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 Las Vegas.
"I recognized in Oscar [someone] who would push things one more notch toward the
limit," said Thompson of his Mexican American friend, who in the name of
ambiguity liked to refer to himself as a 300-pound Samoan. "You never knew with
Oscar what was going to happen next."
Acosta was an ambitious, hard-working man, born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in
the San Joaquin Valley. He attended San Francisco State University, where he
took up creative writing. After getting his law degree from San Francisco Law
School, he worked at the East Oakland Legal Aid Society, but eventually decided
that rather than work within the system, he would use his law degree to
challenge it. According to those who knew him, he was also restless, someone who
was always looking for more out of life.
"The thing about him is that he never took things too seriously," said his son,
Marco Acosta, 38, a San Francisco-based musician and vocational counselor, who
manages his father's estate. "Whenever he set out to do something, he went at it
full force, but he was never satisfied with any one thing."
Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's personal explorations of cultural identity and divergent
career choices brought him to Los Angeles during the late '60s and early '70s,
one of the most explosive periods in the city's political history: In 1968, 13
Chicano activists were indicted on conspiracy to disrupt the schools after a
walkout by teachers and community members who were protesting educational
inequality; in 1969, two Brown Berets were charged with felonies stemming from
the disruption of a speech by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan at the Biltmore Hotel;
and, in 1970, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was killed by a Los
Angeles County sheriff's deputy following a Vietnam War protest rally in East
L.A.
Acosta was involved as defense attorney in the first two notorious cases, but
his 1970 bid for sheriff of Los Angeles County (in which he won half a million
votes, coming in second) is what assured him a place in Los Angeles political
history.
And it was Thompson's invitation to Vegas--the two had been introduced by a
mutual friend--that assured Acosta a place in U.S. literary history.
"I dragged Oscar away while he was working on the 'Biltmore Seven' trial because
we couldn't talk in that war zone," Thompson recalled. "So I said, 'Let's get
the hell out of town.' "
Thompson, a practitioner of the kind of "New Journalism" that writers such as
Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer popularized in the '60s, said he was inspired by his
adventures with Acosta to take his writing to a new level, hence the term "gonzo
journalism." It's Thompson's own take on a style of writing in which the
journalist participates in his stories' development.
"Thompson is damned talented and one of the best writers of his generation, but
the book itself without Oscar would be like . . . taking the heart away from the
book," said Del Toro ("The Usual Suspects," "Excess Baggage"), who gained 45
pounds to more realistically portray the rotund lawyer.
But in the book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Duke refers to his associate
as a "Samoan, or something"--never as a Mexican American--so Gonzo is a
character with no cultural context. The real Acosta is, in a sense, swallowed up
by his alter ego, a man with no defined identity aside from his role as Duke's
buddy.
"There's no point in the book that you ever realize this guy was a real lawyer
and an activist," Del Toro said.
"I think that's a big part of the book that was missing," said Thompson of his
work, which was first published in Rolling Stone in October 1971.
In the film, however, director Gilliam and producer Laila Nabulsi opted to add
that cultural context, in a sense bringing Acosta back out of the relative
obscurity he sank into after his disappearance.
Props used in production of the film are the only clues to Dr. Gonzo's true
identity. In one scene, Duke phones Gonzo at his L.A. office. On Gonzo's walls
are posters with the images of the United Farm Workers' symbol and UFW leader
Cesar Chavez's face.
But Acosta told his own story. Just as Thompson was inspired by his adventures
to write "Fear and Loathing," Acosta too was inspired to document his
experiences, most notably in two semi-fictionalized books, "Autobiography of a
Brown Buffalo" (1972) and "Revolt of the Cockroach People" (1973), which his son
is developing into feature films.
"Oscar had that kind of natural weird spirit," Thompson said. "There aren't that
many of us in the world, and we recognize each other. His writing was just an
extension of that."
In his 1995 book, "Bandido: Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta and the Chicano Experience,"
author Ilan Stavans likens him to a "flirtatious yet angry" version of "A
Streetcar Named Desire's" Stanley Kowalski. And it was Acosta's wild spirit and
extreme persona that attracted Del Toro to the role of Dr. Gonzo. That, and
Thompson's amazing written account of their friendship, according to the actor.
"Dr. Gonzo is all about rage," Del Toro said. "And about forcing the silent
majority to wake up. He's all about loathing."
Rage and complete disregard for authority were Acosta's trademarks. They're the
stuff legends are made of, the kind of attributes that make some people larger
than life.
"He would do things like drop me off at the airport in my rental car, and then
two months later I'd get a bill for three weeks that he used the car," Thompson
said, laughing at the memory. "He'd forget to take it back."
Acosta literally vanished without a trace. His body was never found and his
family assumes he met a bad end in Mexico. Thompson speculated that he was
either the victim of a political assassination or that he died at the hands of
drug dealers.
Rolling Stone received a hospital bill for a broken arm for a patient
named Oscar Acosta in 1977. RS was unable to trace the bill any farther
than the hospital
In the foreword to a reprint of Acosta's "Revolt of the Cockroach People,"
Thompson summed up his friend's life:
"His birthday is not noted in any calendar, and his death is barely noticed. . .
. But the hole he left was a big one, and nobody even tried to sew it up."
These days, that hole is still gaping, according to Thompson. "For some horrible
reason I miss him. I miss him like I miss the smell of tear gas."
Oscar Zeta Acosta (April 8, 1935-) 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. 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 1974.
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 (1972), and The
Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). 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 school, at the age of seventeen, Acosta enlisted in
the Air Force and was honorably discharged after four years of service. During a
tour of service in Latin America, Acosta converted to Protestantism and became a
Baptist missionary in a leper colony in Panama, although later, in Autobiography
of a Brown Buffalo, he rejected Christianity. Following his discharge, Acosta
worked his way through Modesto Junior College, and attended San Francisco State
University where he took up creative writing. After his graduation he attended
San Francisco Law School at night and passed the State Bar exam in 1966. Acosta
was married twice--his first wife was Betty Daves during the years 1956-1963.
His second marriage was to Socorro Aguiniga from 1969-1971. As a lawyer, he
first worked for the East Oakland Legal Aid Society, an antipoverty agency.
Later, he moved to East Los Angeles, where he joined the Chicano Movement and
generated controversy as an activist attorney during the years 1968-1973. Acosta
defended various Chicano protest groups and activists such as the Saint Basil 21
and Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez. As an attorney, Acosta figured prominently in
legal cases which addressed political, social, and educational injustices
against Chicanos. He frequently clashed with the judicial system, winning ardent
supporters as well as making political enemies. He garnered respectable
grass-roots support when he ran for Los Angeles County Sheriff, winning well
over one hundred thousand votes.
Acosta was last heard from in May, 1974, with a telephone call from Mazatlan,
Sinaloa, to his son Marco. The journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, who was
Acosta's close friend and confidante, speculated on Acosta's untimely
disappearance as either a political assassination or murder at the hands of drug
dealers. Acosta is presumed dead.
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Advertisement in Rolling Stone for his Book "Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo".
Oscar Zeta Acosta (right) and unknown admirer.
Oscar, Unknown.
* California Ethic
and Multicultural Archives - The Acosta Collection
*
The Biography Project - More In Depth Information
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