Oscar Zeta Acosta - Life and Career

Life and Career

Acosta was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in a small San Joaquin Valley rural town named Riverbank, California near Modesto, California. Acosta's father was drafted during World War II, so he had to take care of the family.

After finishing high school, Acosta joined the U.S. Air Force. Following his discharge, Acosta worked his way through Modesto Junior College; becoming the first member of his family to get a college education. He attended night classes at San Francisco Law School and passed the California Bar exam in 1966. In 1967, Acosta began working as an antipoverty attorney for the East Legal Aid Society in Oakland, California.

In 1968 Acosta moved to East Los Angeles and joined the Chicano Movement as an activist attorney, defending Chicano groups and activists, such as the S.O.S., Brown Berets member Carlos Filafasofa, and other underserved members of the East L.A. barrio. His controversial defense earned him the ire of the LAPD, who often followed and harassed him.

In 1970, Acosta ran for sheriff of Los Angeles County against Peter J. Pitchess, and received more than 100,000 votes. During the campaign, he spent a couple of days in jail for contempt of court, and vowed that if he were elected, he would do away with the Sheriff's Department as it was then constituted. Acosta, known for loud ties and a flowered attaché case with a Chicano Power sticker, didn't come close to Pitchess' 1,300,000 votes, but did beat Everett Holladay, Monterey Park Chief of Police.

His first novel, Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, was published in 1972, followed in 1973 by The Revolt of the Cockroach People, a fictionalized version of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium.

In the summer of 1967 Acosta met Hunter S. Thompson, who would in 1971 write an article on Acosta and the injustice in the barrios of East L.A. for Rolling Stone titled "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan". This article also discusses the murder of Los Angeles Times columnist Rubén Salazar. When working on the article, Thompson and Acosta decided a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada was in order, so that they could discuss Salazar and racial injustice in L.A. openly. A write-up of the trip has now been immortalized by the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

As Hunter Thompson wrote in "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat", the legal department of the publishers of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas stated that they could not publish the book unless clearance were given by Acosta, due to the obvious references to the attorney. When written for permission, Acosta refused - on the grounds that he did not want to be referred to as a "300-pound Samoan". He did, however, understand that having this reference substituted by his name would mean the book could not be published on time, so he promised clearance provided that his name and picture would appear on the dustjacket.