This is a searching examination of the life, work, and mysterious disappearance of the charismatic civil rights activist Oscar Zeta Acosta—a leading figure in the Chicano movement of the 1960s.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The inspiration for Hunter S. Thompson's notorious "Samoan" attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a quixotic campaigner for Los Angeles sheriff, the hard-living Chicano activist Acosta (b. 1936) remains shrouded in myth, thanks to his mysterious disappearance (drugs? U.S. agents?) in 1974. In this brief but probing biographical essay, Stavans (The Latino Condition) observes that the legacy of Acosta, who wrote The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, is more ideological than artistic. Indeed, Acosta symbolized the hopes and anxieties of his people; he adopted the appellation "Zeta," or Z, a reference to such forebears as Zorro and Zapata, as a sign of his hyphenated self. Combining interviews and analysis, Stavans reconstructs Acosta's struggles with obesity, his tangled affections for white women, his mental instability and his emergence as a writer who wanted attention for his people as Chicanos?or Brown Buffaloes (indigenous but nearly extinct)?rather than as rainbow "minorities." As the author notes, Acosta's concerns about identity and ethnicity presaged their emergence as mainstream national concerns.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
If Cesar Chavez was the martyr of the Chicano civil rights movement, Acosta may be its imp, its overweight, schizophrenic Merry Prankster, its desaparecido since June_ 1974, when he vanished between Mazatlan, Mexico, and Southern California. In Bandido, Stavans (who ruminated about "life in the hyphen" in The Hispanic Condition ) offers an appreciation, not a biography, of Zeta Acosta as force of nature and a deeply troubled human being. Stavans approaches Acosta through his writingsAutobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (both reissued by Random House in paperback in 1989) and unpublished work held by the University of California at Santa Barbara--and through interviews with relatives and friends. There is little detail about Zeta's work as a civil rights lawyer and political activist. Like many Acosta friends (including Hunter Thompson, who "borrowed" Zeta as the Samoan attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Stavans doesn't always "like" his subject but, in a way, that may be the point: Bandido is a kaleidoscopic, impressionistic portrait of key aspects of a mythical figure's ambiguous realities. An interesting, though not essential, purchase. Mary Carroll
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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