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Other Published Works
by and about Oscar Zeta Acosta

Current Book Cover British Version Original Cover

Autobiography of the Brown Buffalo
Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano layer and notorious as the real life model for Hunter S. Thompson’s “Dr. Gonzo,” as fat, pugnacious attorney with a large appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge. This book is Acosta’s own account of coming of age as a Chicano in the psychedelic sixties, of taking on impossible cases while breaking all title rules of courtroom conduct, and of scrambling headlong in search of a personal and cultural identity. It is a landmark of contemporary Hispanic-American literature, at once surreal and unmistakably authentic.

Oscar "Zeta" Acosta: The Uncollected Works
Oscar "Zeta" Acosta: The Uncollected Works gathers unpublished stories, essays, letters, poems and a teleplay written by Acosta (1935-1974), the legendary Chicano attorney, political activist and writer. All of these works were written between the early 1960s and shortly before his mysterious disappearance in Mazatlan, Mexico, in 1974. Through these writings Acosta reveals a variety of personae: a leader troubled by issues of ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity, a man who saw himself as a Robin Hood of Mexican Americans, an unstable yet genial wanderer who joined Hunter S. Thompson in a search for the American Dream. Acosta realized that democracy is about speaking out, about feeling uncomfortable, about defining others and oneself through the prism of race and history. With the publication of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta: The Uncollected Works, the complete picture of a crucial player in the Chicano Movement - described by others as "our Thomas Aquinas" and by himself as "the Brown Buffalo" - finally emerges.

Bandido: Oscar "Zeta" Acosta and the Chicano Experience
By Ilan Stavans
HarperCollins Publishers

Considered the Hispanic Malcolm X, Acosta was a friend of Hunter Thompson and is portrayed as the Samoan in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Born in El Paso in 1935, Acosta later served in the air force, attended college, and graduated from law school. He coined the term "gonzo journalism" and wrote a number of articles as well as two books, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People. He was politically active for the Chicanos in Los Angeles, where he ran for the sheriff's office. In 1974 on a vacation in Mexico, he disappeared. Acosta is already a mythic figure among Chicanos, and this book should make him part of the Hispanic collective consciousness. Ilan Stavans examines the public and private persona of Acosta, his life and writings, and his work as a lawyer and activist among Chicanos, who total some nine million people and live mainly in California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado.

(NO BOOK COVER AVAILABLE)
Bandido: The Death and Resurrection of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta
By Ilan Stavans
Northwestern University Press

This is an exploration of the troubled odyssey of a major figure in the Civil Rights era. The Hispanic Malcolm X. Writer. Activist. Civil rights attorney. Obese, dark-skinned, and angry. Man with a surplus of personality. Man of vision. All the above describe Oscar "Zeta" Acosta. El Paso-born, Acosta became a leading figure in the Chicano rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, winning landmark decisions in civil rights cases as an attorney. As a tireless writer and activist, he has profound influence on his contemporaries. He seemed to be everywhere at once, knowing everyone in "el movimiento" (the movement) and involving himself in many of its key moments. Tumultuous and prone to excess, he is the Samoan in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In 1974, after a last phone call to his son, Acosta disappeared in the Mexican state of Mazatlan. Hailed as "a fine, learned homage" (Kirkus), "a kaleidoscopic portrait" (Booklist), and "a game of mirrors" (The Washington Post), Bandido is a veritable tour de force. Through interviews and Acosta's writings (published and unpublished), Ilan Stavans reconstructs-even reinvents-the man behind the myth. Part biographical appraisal, part reflection on the legacy of the Civil Rights era, Bandido is an opportunity to understand the challenges and pitfalls Latinos face in finding a place of their own in America.

(NO BOOK COVER AVAILABLE)
Chicano Controversy: Oscar Acosta and Richard Rodriguez
By Paul Guajardo
Lang, Peter Publishing, Incorporated

Chicano Controversy takes a unique approach to two colorful and controversial Chicano writers: Oscar Acosta and Richard Rodriguez. Paul Guajardo argues that Acosta’s involvement with the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was somewhat opportunistic as Acosta was always uneasy about his identity and ethnicity. Conversely, Guajardo argues that Richard Rodriguez—who also problematizes notions of ethnicity—requires re-evaluation and full inclusion into the broadening canon of Chicano literature.
Guajardo (University of Houston) looks at the lives and work of two colorful and controversial Chicano writers: Oscar Acosta and Richard Rodriguez. He argues that Acosta's involvement with the Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was opportunistic, and asserts that Rodriguez requires re-evaluation and full inclusion into the canon of Chicano literature.

Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magical realism in Oscar Zeta Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie
By Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Texas Press

Amazon Reviews-Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. Writers and filmmakers such as Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie have made brilliant use of magical realism to articulate the trauma of dislocation and the legacies of colonialism that people of color experience in the postcolonial, multiethnic world. This book seeks to redeem and refine the theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature and film. The author engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term "magical realism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a post ethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.

Love and Riot in Los Angeles: The Biography of Oscar
Zeta Acosta
Burton M. Moore, Andrea Cabello (Editor)
Floricanto Press
By Burton Moore

This is the most complete biography of the late civil-rights Chicano leader, Oscar Zeta Acosta, who led the aspirations of the Mexican American people through the courts and the media to expose racial discrimination, police abuse, and the daily trespasses of the inalienable rights of poor people in the barrios. Oscar Zeta Acosta, alias the Brown Buffalo, made history in the awakening of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles and served as a catalyst for change and hope for the community. The book is well researched, and the author interviewed many of the participants in the events of the late 60's, as well as documented Acosta's successful fight to change the Catholic Church. His legacy, wrapped in a puzzling and conflictive personal trajectory, still remains adrift and misunderstood. The impact of his advocacy, though, is crystal clear, he changed forever the courts, the jury system, and the civil rights of the Mexicans.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
By Hunter S. Thompson
Synopsis written by Shermakave Bass

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Brown Buffalo's fateful trip, a quarter-century since "witnesses" saw him board a boat and head out into the ocean. And twenty-five years later, his disappearance is still unresolved. No death certificate, no letters home, no clues, no body. Over the years, the fabled Dr. Gonzo of Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- a real-life attorney whose on-the-street and in-the-courtroom persona was as surreal as his Brown Buffalo alter-ego -- has become something of an American Loch Ness monster. His legacy lives through various unsubstantiated sightings, through his writings, and through the bizarre theories that still abound regarding "Whatever Happened to Oscar Acosta"?
Journalist Raul Duke and his lawyer Dr Gonzo drive from LA to Las Vegas on a drugs binge. They nominally cover news stories, including a convention on drug abuse, but also sink deeper into a frightening psychedelic other world. As Vietnam, Altamont and the Tate killings impinge from the world of TV news, Duke and Gonzo see casinos, reptiles and the American dream.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas began as a paperback that was then made into a movie starting Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.

· Other written works of Oscar Zeta Acosta can also be found in:

Literary Intersections of Masculinity and Race: Contemporary Writing by U.S. Men
John Christopher Cunningham

Beat Generation: Critical Essays
Kostas Myrsiades (Editor)

Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays
David Fine (Editor)