In this first of his two first-person Chicano memoirs, the persona assumed by oscar zeta acosta
bows in with a suitably Beat gesture of selfexposure: “I stand naked before the mirror,” a body
of “brown belly” and “extra flesh.” Evacuation becomes a bathroom opera of heave, color, the moilings of fast-food leftovers. Hallucinatory colloquies
open with “Old Bogey,” James Cagney, and Edward
G. Robinson. His “Jewish shrink,” Dr. Serbin, becomes the therapist as accuser, a Freudian gargoyle.
Glut rules—“booze and Mexican food.” Abandoning his San Francisco legal aid work he plunges into
traffic as though his own on-the-road luminary. He
mocks City Lights bookshop as “a hangout for sniveling intellectuals,” throws in a reference to Herb
Caen as the coiner of “beatnik,” thinks back on his
marijuana and first LSD use, and offers himself as
“another wild Indian gone amok.” Acosta so monitors “Acosta.” Despite his avowals otherwise, The
Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo gives grounds, as
it were, for thinking it a fusion of either Chicano
Beat or Beat Chicano authorship.
As his “brownskin” odyssey, in his own phrasing, unfolds, this same play of styles becomes even
more emphatic. The Beatles’s “Help” spills its
harmonies and plaintiveness on to Polk Street.
His friend Ted Casey tempts him with mescaline.
Heroin, or powdered mayonnaise, as he calls it, appears at a Mafia restaurant where he stops for food.
Women, his exlover June MacAdoo, Alice, and her
friend Mary all weave into his sexual fantasies even
as he frets, with reason, at his own male prowess.
The diorama is motleyed, as comic-cuts weave between illusion and fact.
So it is, too, on July 1, 1967, that “Acosta”
announces himself “the Samoan,” a brown hulk,
the author as harlequin. “I’ve been mistaken
for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Arabian,” he witnesses, adding
un-politically correct and ruefully, “No one has
ever asked me if I’m a spic or greaser.” Is this not
“Acosta” as human multitext, Latino lawyer yet
Latino outrider, Chicano yet also Beat? Certainly,
Chicano and Beat influences collude and compete
throughout. On the one hand the narrator looks
back to his Riverbank boyhood with its gang allegiance and fights against the Okies: “I grew up
a fat, dark Mexican—a Brown Buffalo—and my
enemies called me a nigger.” He heads into a “future” of the Pacific Northwest with the hitchhiker
Karin Wilmington, a journey busy in allusion to
timothy leary, Jerry Garcia, and The Grateful Dead, which takes him into the Hemingway
country of Ketchum, Idaho. Both come together
as he circles in memory back into his Panama
years, his onetime Baptist–Pentecostal phase
seeking to become a “Mexican Billy Graham.”
As he then weaves his way back to Los Angeles the itinerary gives off all the eventfulness of
a jack kerouac trajectory: characters like Scott
(“a full time dope smuggler and a salesman for Scientology”) or the waitress Bobbi to whom he describes his family as “the last of the Aztecs”; the
odd jobs, car crashes and blackouts in Colorado;
the remembrance of detention in a Juarez Jail and
of a border official telling him, “You don’t look like
an American you know”; and, almost inevitably,
the pathway back into California along the iconic
Route 66. Chicano adventurer–author, it might
be said, elides into Beat adventurer–author, Oscar
Zeta Acosta as both chicanismo’s own vato loco and
Beat’s own Chicano warrior.
Bibliography
Lee, A. Robert. “Chicanismo’s Beat Outrider?: The Texts
and Contexts of Oscar Zeta Acosta.” The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, edited by Kostas Myrsiades.
259–280. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
A. Robert Lee