Cockroach Dreams: Oscar Zeta Acosta, Legal Services, and the Great Society Coalition
Early in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s 1972 novel, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, his protagonist, Oscar Acosta, quits his job as a War on Poverty-funded Legal Services lawyer in East Oakland, California, dumping his law license in the wastepaper basket. His resignation precipitates his search for racial identity in Autobiography and eventual transformation into Buffalo Zeta Brown, the activist Chicano lawyer in Acosta’s sequel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). (1) Oscar’s abrupt departure enacts a double rejection. First, he rejects the liberalism that led him to take on “the enemy our president [Lyndon Johnson] so clearly described in his first State of the Union address” (Autobiography 22). Instead, especially in Revolt, Oscar/ Brown adopts a militant Chicano/a Cultural Nationalism at odds with the politics of integrationist Mexican American leaders affiliated with the Democratic Party. (2) Second, he rejects the professional aspirations…
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