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The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo," a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.
Written with uninhibited candor and manic energy, 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 tile 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 ribald, surreal, and unmistakably authentic.
Written with uninhibited candor and manic energy, 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 tile 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 ribald, surreal, and unmistakably authentic.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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About the author
Oscar Zeta Acosta
3 books101 followers(April 8, 1935 – disappeared 1974) was an American attorney, politician, minor novelist and Chicano Movement activist, perhaps best known for his friendship with the American author Hunter S. Thompson, who included him as a character the Samoan Attorney, Dr. Gonzo, in his acclaimed novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews
July 23, 2008
I read this book, many years ago, and i try to get others to read it. I loved it back then, it was different from the other chicano literature i was reading, in fact it was never mentioned, but i found it and i thoroughly enjoyed it. Yeah, he is a big character, and his writing is ecstatic, and sometimes i do think it is better that fear and loathing, but its probably the mexican in me saying that, but i do recommend this book to others, i think the last chapter says a lot, it affected me very much, when he goes to el paso and juarez, how he is not accepted by the whites in this country, and when he goes to mexico, he is not accepted by the browns over there, he ends up saying that he is at home, but no one wants him, so who or what does he call home?, or his family at that? its still the same today, nothings changed, i can't go into mexico without being called a pocho and i can't walk around up north without being called a wetback, but i'm trying acosta, i'm trying, you got me riled up and i am continuing this tradition, no one can shut me up, for i've been here for years, thank you senor, wherever you are, thank you.
January 21, 2020
Such a great book. And so revealing about his life. Sad that he experienced so much racist hatred and so much bigotry at such a young age. He was the classic example of the Hurried Child when it comes to anxiety and how the body rebels, in his case with bleeding ulcers. But wow, what a life, so accomplished, so much achievement. Its tragic he was murdered. He was a brilliant, brilliant man and he should have lived longer. RIP Oscar.
November 11, 2008
the only book i will review, this book is important to me for reasons most people won't understand. it makes me proud of my culture as a CHICANO in america and gives me an identity i did not know i had. this book should be read by every mexican american, and appreciated because it is one of the most important books on the regards of chicano literature, also the revolt of the cockroach people is bad ass, another important book. Oscar Zeta Acosta is the shiiiittt!
August 25, 2014
This book is vile! and disgusting! and yet it's like a distant relative whose spirit you see and you go 'he's cool'.
February 28, 2013
When Oscar appears before a judge in Mexico facing the charges of “those nasty things, vile language, gringo arrogance, and americano impatience,” (193), we see a confluence of labels that the narrator has taken upon himself, shaken from himself throughout the novel: he is a lawyer without a license, an educated man who cannot speak the language of his father, an American without papers to prove it, a long-haired Californian who is not a hippie, one who decries corruption in Mexico yet has done his fair share of corruption in the States. Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo is a story of identity, but not the search for it; it is a story of the mélange of a man's identity confused by color/race, class, materialism, drugs, religion and nationality. Though I expected some of the centeredness and nationalistic identity that would be iconic in Revolt of the Cockroach People, this is instead a tale of wandering, not of quest, a story told in sound and fury but without the weightiness of place, family, manhood, or people, signifying the nothingness of a man with no direction. This is a story that can only be told within a context of the temporary freedom enabled by $200 and cheap gas prices of the 1960s. Instead of moving toward an identity, Acosta flees from it, never really reaching a plateau where he or the audience can appreciate history or future, where he can simple or believingly say, "I am THIS."
Whereas we might hope that lessons learned in life lead to some semblance of learning, of maturation, of identity-formation, the flashbacks and references throughout the novel only demonstrate a multitude of influences which might have gelled one day to some semblance of stability, but both the genre and the material instead create the dissonant cacophony of the tumult that may represent the late 60s or the beats (I'm not claiming that Acosta is representative of the Beats, however). We have here an unstable, isolated, suspicious narrator who makes no healthy choices whatsoever for us to trust him – neither physically, emotionally, socially, professionally – as he gives us a snapshot of the nascence of one man’s participation in what would become the 1960s LA Chicano movement. We have a man who bridges the cultural division of the 60s in multiple ways, with the best conclusion being that being excluded from society and prejudged does not allow one the right to condemn another. At best we see a novel in which Acosta uses biotherapy (and not in healthy ways) to unravel the mysteries and obsessions that plagued him in his life with characters as closely resembling people who play major roles in his life: suppressed, marginalized members of society.
Though I believe Acosta's later work bears importance in Chicano literature based on the level to which people use identification with ethnicity to define who they are as individuals, here the narrator rejects any claim of allegiance to any people until the end, and instead battles the effects a recurrence of victimhood and unworthiness. Acosta's roller coaster, insatiable hunt for acceptance in life from others and through his writings (and his writing about writing) points to the need to bridge alliances rather than to focus on what separates ethnicities and people. There are brief moments in the novel where the narrator shows where stability is – or was -- part of his existence, but these flashbacks are briefer and flatter than other flashbacks, and in every instance, the stability was because of an authority outside his own independent nature. His recollection of his childhood when his father would make the children stand in formation are minimal and distant, more distant than his tales of budding sexuality for example, and his recollection of his Air Force years are even more fleeting. It's those points in his life where transition takes place that he spends most of his energy – high school academics and music; religious conversion (where he vacillated between Catholicism and Protestantism), and his journey through law school and his short stint as a Legal Aid attorney (which he hated, abhorred, and avoided all responsibility except when he could cajole a witness to lie for a woman who sought a temporary restraining order). The narrator seems to exult in this lack of stability, too much like talking to my friends and acquaintances who have dependency problems, who make lofty claims and lack the skill sets to realize these claims.
The lack of identity is further shown with his habit of name-dropping, though part of the road trip genre as he simultaneously decries those who do the same.
• “Hastings, the internationally famous law school that hired only senile experts to teach anyone who didn’t have quite the money for a school with real class” (49).
• “Seven years later, in the spring of '67, I ran into Tim Leary at Golden Gate Park” (100).
• “Charlie Fisher isn’t impressed with famous people. He has tons of bread stored in the Republican bank of Devil's Lake, North Dakota, so he didn't need anything Timothy had to offer” (101).
• “These guys weren't the world famous fags they are today. In fact, most of them were alive then. Even Tim Leary was still on this earth. He hadn't learned to walk on water at the time” (100).
• “Tibeau brought some famous people in, but I don't know” (140).
• “I worked as a copy boy for the S.F. Examiner from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, then took evening classes at S.F. Law (a school that graduated both Governor Brown and Charles Gary whose most famous client, Huey Newton)” (171).
And in Ketchum, he appropriates the excessive masculine personae of legendary Hollywood actors such as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and Steve McQueen, all of whom play war heroes, out-law heroes, and loners, quintessential American men struggling against a hostile world.
The level of disconnect across the narrative is really disconcerting: There is Acosta the anarcho-libertarian Chicano raised in California's Riverbank/Modesto and who makes his name as a Legal Aid lawyer in Oakland and Los Angeles after qualifying in San Francisco in 1966. There is the Air Force enlistee who, on being sent to Panama, becomes a Pentecostal convert and missionary there (1949-52) before opting for apostasy and a return to California. There is the jailee in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in 1968, forced to argue in local court for his own interests in uncertain street Spanish after a spat with a hotelkeeper. This disconnect is again reflected in the mass name confusion throughout the novel:
• Henry Hawk – known in pop culture as the cartoon chicken hawk from the American Looney Tunes series opposite Foghorn Leghorn
• Girlfriend Jane Addison confuses Oscar’s mother Juanita with the name Jennie (and both Jane and Juanita have the initials JA and JA)
• Signed his father’s name for credit when his father was in the Navy
• Claimed to know Hemingway, and that Hemingway knew him as “Brown Buffalo” and that’s the name Mary Hemmingway would remember him.
• “Some person, or beast for all I knew, had signed each warrant for my arrest with the code name of Debby.”
What we have in this text is not an autobiography of a man who sees himself as Chicano, though he uses that label when it's convenient. As a person, as a man, this is also one who cannot find satisfaction in anything he attempts. He is overweight, and knows it, yet consumes junk food as his only staple. He is a drunkard, excessively drinking since high school, and has no issues about staying drunk for days on end (apparently his primary calorie influx is Budweiser?). He is sexually unsuccessful, spending as much time describing his masturbation as he does talking about real his time with women, looking, ogling, fantasizing more than simply working on healthy contacts. His writing is in fits and jumps and uses his short legal career mostly as a pretense to impress publishers in anticipation of a book deal later on, a story of a writer who understands that he should be writing, but has been running away from writing all his life. In addition to the publication attempts, we learn he has taken writing classes, but complete his first novel only after he leaves class, and then the professor refuses to give feedback because he is no longer a student. He makes a pilgrimage to Hemmingway's grave, (dropping names again), but this is only accidental because of his wanderings to Ketchum, and he learns nothing about writing from the experience.
There is racial/national identity in the novel, but Acosta always presents this in terms of "other" -- Chinks and fags, women as ex-lovers and non- lovers, southerners, Okies, Niggers, Mexicans, all encountered through his life and now contra all his faked personas as he travels to Idaho and south. Yet nowhere do we see him embrace any real identity for himself except as the Brown Buffalo.
"I've been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Arabian" he witnesses, adding ruefully, "No one has ever asked me if I'm a spic or greaser" (68).
And how many times do we see him claim to be Samoan when it conveniences him, avoiding a real identification, one that would complicate his identification with those around him, but would be more honest? It's not just his peculiar physiology though, that confuses those around him. It's the act of performance that he has mastered across his life that confuses us. Dancer and dance here keep us entertained, but ultimately dissatisfied. Who is this man that spends as much time with references to Tim Leary, Jerry Garcia, and The Grateful Dead, who calls himself the "Mexican Billy Graham," who publically claims that "My family is the Last of the Aztecs" ? (140).
Just as he runs from the responsibilities of the legal profession, just as he runs from the law when crashing his car, he runs from any identification with the stereotype, machismo Chicano male. His movement along the road is like his is both purposeful and aimless, confident and unsure, free and irresponsible. Acosta depicts Oscar as an aggressive explorer “hammering and kicking," even plunging "headlong over the mountains” to find his origins (71) yet he also casts him as an impotent, lost man-child who leaves a beer-can trail in case he cannot find his way home. His “wilted penis” (71) contradicts his representation of his masculinity and membership in either any Chicano or Anglo-American patriarchy.
The bravado of the final chapter’s forewarning of Cockroaches aside, Oscar is finally honest enough with his brother when he bemoans that
One sonofabitch tells me I’m not a Mexican and the other one says I’m not an American. I got no roots anywhere. …
I came here to find out who I was, can’t he understand. …. So I’ve got to find out who I am so I can do what I’m supposed to do. (196)
Of course, this is just the preface for his work where he actually does stand and establish his identity as a Chicano man within the melee of the Chicano movement in Revolt of the Cockroach People. But this is still prefatory. Almost inevitably, given a journey text as Kerouac-mythic as actual, the pathway back into Los Angeles becomes the hallowed, iconic Route 66. He speaks of a time soon to come when he will become "Zeta," as taken from the last letter of the Spanish alphabet and, as The Revolt of The Cockroach People confirms, also from the name of the hero in the movie Las Cucarachas. For the moment, however, he gives as his temporary working certificate of identity:
What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice. (Acosta 1989a, 199).
Only in the last five paragraphs do we have a declaration of who he is as a man, “My name is Oscar Acosta …. We need a new identity. A name and a language all our own.” But even in this manifesto he cannot find himself. He declares that he may be the messiah, once in a century who is chosen to speak for his people, but immediately he continues his name-dropping habit to associate himself with the famous and successful – Moses, Mao, Martin. “Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices” (199).
He calls for a new identity, “Is that so hard for you to understand?” that is neither this nor that, but a new breed, a “Brown Buffalo” by choice. Even here we only hear of promises for a new identity, “some time later I would become Zeta …” but that is another story.
Work Cited
Acosta, Oscar Zeta. Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print
Whereas we might hope that lessons learned in life lead to some semblance of learning, of maturation, of identity-formation, the flashbacks and references throughout the novel only demonstrate a multitude of influences which might have gelled one day to some semblance of stability, but both the genre and the material instead create the dissonant cacophony of the tumult that may represent the late 60s or the beats (I'm not claiming that Acosta is representative of the Beats, however). We have here an unstable, isolated, suspicious narrator who makes no healthy choices whatsoever for us to trust him – neither physically, emotionally, socially, professionally – as he gives us a snapshot of the nascence of one man’s participation in what would become the 1960s LA Chicano movement. We have a man who bridges the cultural division of the 60s in multiple ways, with the best conclusion being that being excluded from society and prejudged does not allow one the right to condemn another. At best we see a novel in which Acosta uses biotherapy (and not in healthy ways) to unravel the mysteries and obsessions that plagued him in his life with characters as closely resembling people who play major roles in his life: suppressed, marginalized members of society.
Though I believe Acosta's later work bears importance in Chicano literature based on the level to which people use identification with ethnicity to define who they are as individuals, here the narrator rejects any claim of allegiance to any people until the end, and instead battles the effects a recurrence of victimhood and unworthiness. Acosta's roller coaster, insatiable hunt for acceptance in life from others and through his writings (and his writing about writing) points to the need to bridge alliances rather than to focus on what separates ethnicities and people. There are brief moments in the novel where the narrator shows where stability is – or was -- part of his existence, but these flashbacks are briefer and flatter than other flashbacks, and in every instance, the stability was because of an authority outside his own independent nature. His recollection of his childhood when his father would make the children stand in formation are minimal and distant, more distant than his tales of budding sexuality for example, and his recollection of his Air Force years are even more fleeting. It's those points in his life where transition takes place that he spends most of his energy – high school academics and music; religious conversion (where he vacillated between Catholicism and Protestantism), and his journey through law school and his short stint as a Legal Aid attorney (which he hated, abhorred, and avoided all responsibility except when he could cajole a witness to lie for a woman who sought a temporary restraining order). The narrator seems to exult in this lack of stability, too much like talking to my friends and acquaintances who have dependency problems, who make lofty claims and lack the skill sets to realize these claims.
The lack of identity is further shown with his habit of name-dropping, though part of the road trip genre as he simultaneously decries those who do the same.
• “Hastings, the internationally famous law school that hired only senile experts to teach anyone who didn’t have quite the money for a school with real class” (49).
• “Seven years later, in the spring of '67, I ran into Tim Leary at Golden Gate Park” (100).
• “Charlie Fisher isn’t impressed with famous people. He has tons of bread stored in the Republican bank of Devil's Lake, North Dakota, so he didn't need anything Timothy had to offer” (101).
• “These guys weren't the world famous fags they are today. In fact, most of them were alive then. Even Tim Leary was still on this earth. He hadn't learned to walk on water at the time” (100).
• “Tibeau brought some famous people in, but I don't know” (140).
• “I worked as a copy boy for the S.F. Examiner from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, then took evening classes at S.F. Law (a school that graduated both Governor Brown and Charles Gary whose most famous client, Huey Newton)” (171).
And in Ketchum, he appropriates the excessive masculine personae of legendary Hollywood actors such as Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and Steve McQueen, all of whom play war heroes, out-law heroes, and loners, quintessential American men struggling against a hostile world.
The level of disconnect across the narrative is really disconcerting: There is Acosta the anarcho-libertarian Chicano raised in California's Riverbank/Modesto and who makes his name as a Legal Aid lawyer in Oakland and Los Angeles after qualifying in San Francisco in 1966. There is the Air Force enlistee who, on being sent to Panama, becomes a Pentecostal convert and missionary there (1949-52) before opting for apostasy and a return to California. There is the jailee in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in 1968, forced to argue in local court for his own interests in uncertain street Spanish after a spat with a hotelkeeper. This disconnect is again reflected in the mass name confusion throughout the novel:
• Henry Hawk – known in pop culture as the cartoon chicken hawk from the American Looney Tunes series opposite Foghorn Leghorn
• Girlfriend Jane Addison confuses Oscar’s mother Juanita with the name Jennie (and both Jane and Juanita have the initials JA and JA)
• Signed his father’s name for credit when his father was in the Navy
• Claimed to know Hemingway, and that Hemingway knew him as “Brown Buffalo” and that’s the name Mary Hemmingway would remember him.
• “Some person, or beast for all I knew, had signed each warrant for my arrest with the code name of Debby.”
What we have in this text is not an autobiography of a man who sees himself as Chicano, though he uses that label when it's convenient. As a person, as a man, this is also one who cannot find satisfaction in anything he attempts. He is overweight, and knows it, yet consumes junk food as his only staple. He is a drunkard, excessively drinking since high school, and has no issues about staying drunk for days on end (apparently his primary calorie influx is Budweiser?). He is sexually unsuccessful, spending as much time describing his masturbation as he does talking about real his time with women, looking, ogling, fantasizing more than simply working on healthy contacts. His writing is in fits and jumps and uses his short legal career mostly as a pretense to impress publishers in anticipation of a book deal later on, a story of a writer who understands that he should be writing, but has been running away from writing all his life. In addition to the publication attempts, we learn he has taken writing classes, but complete his first novel only after he leaves class, and then the professor refuses to give feedback because he is no longer a student. He makes a pilgrimage to Hemmingway's grave, (dropping names again), but this is only accidental because of his wanderings to Ketchum, and he learns nothing about writing from the experience.
There is racial/national identity in the novel, but Acosta always presents this in terms of "other" -- Chinks and fags, women as ex-lovers and non- lovers, southerners, Okies, Niggers, Mexicans, all encountered through his life and now contra all his faked personas as he travels to Idaho and south. Yet nowhere do we see him embrace any real identity for himself except as the Brown Buffalo.
"I've been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Arabian" he witnesses, adding ruefully, "No one has ever asked me if I'm a spic or greaser" (68).
And how many times do we see him claim to be Samoan when it conveniences him, avoiding a real identification, one that would complicate his identification with those around him, but would be more honest? It's not just his peculiar physiology though, that confuses those around him. It's the act of performance that he has mastered across his life that confuses us. Dancer and dance here keep us entertained, but ultimately dissatisfied. Who is this man that spends as much time with references to Tim Leary, Jerry Garcia, and The Grateful Dead, who calls himself the "Mexican Billy Graham," who publically claims that "My family is the Last of the Aztecs" ? (140).
Just as he runs from the responsibilities of the legal profession, just as he runs from the law when crashing his car, he runs from any identification with the stereotype, machismo Chicano male. His movement along the road is like his is both purposeful and aimless, confident and unsure, free and irresponsible. Acosta depicts Oscar as an aggressive explorer “hammering and kicking," even plunging "headlong over the mountains” to find his origins (71) yet he also casts him as an impotent, lost man-child who leaves a beer-can trail in case he cannot find his way home. His “wilted penis” (71) contradicts his representation of his masculinity and membership in either any Chicano or Anglo-American patriarchy.
The bravado of the final chapter’s forewarning of Cockroaches aside, Oscar is finally honest enough with his brother when he bemoans that
One sonofabitch tells me I’m not a Mexican and the other one says I’m not an American. I got no roots anywhere. …
I came here to find out who I was, can’t he understand. …. So I’ve got to find out who I am so I can do what I’m supposed to do. (196)
Of course, this is just the preface for his work where he actually does stand and establish his identity as a Chicano man within the melee of the Chicano movement in Revolt of the Cockroach People. But this is still prefatory. Almost inevitably, given a journey text as Kerouac-mythic as actual, the pathway back into Los Angeles becomes the hallowed, iconic Route 66. He speaks of a time soon to come when he will become "Zeta," as taken from the last letter of the Spanish alphabet and, as The Revolt of The Cockroach People confirms, also from the name of the hero in the movie Las Cucarachas. For the moment, however, he gives as his temporary working certificate of identity:
What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice. (Acosta 1989a, 199).
Only in the last five paragraphs do we have a declaration of who he is as a man, “My name is Oscar Acosta …. We need a new identity. A name and a language all our own.” But even in this manifesto he cannot find himself. He declares that he may be the messiah, once in a century who is chosen to speak for his people, but immediately he continues his name-dropping habit to associate himself with the famous and successful – Moses, Mao, Martin. “Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices” (199).
He calls for a new identity, “Is that so hard for you to understand?” that is neither this nor that, but a new breed, a “Brown Buffalo” by choice. Even here we only hear of promises for a new identity, “some time later I would become Zeta …” but that is another story.
Work Cited
Acosta, Oscar Zeta. Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print
November 14, 2025
Zeta, The Brown Buffalo, born Oscar Acosta, was, and remains, a genuine motherfucker. In the history of social justice, as THE precedent setting lawyer for Chicano representation in courts of law, and for his prodigious, legendary-but-true ability to swallow, inhale, insert, or otherwise (by any means necessary!) get booze and drugs into his bloodstream in amounts so capacious that mortal men could die from a single bead of his sweat secreting into their frail, pasty constitutions, he stands alone.
And yeah: he was the other guy in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I forget his name (I know he’s referred to as the Samoan; he's Mexican American) in that, sure, legendary novel, and I can’t be bothered to look it up. He is Gonzo/HST’s lawyer friend, relegated now to a one-dimensional caricature by a pen not his own. Here’s the rub: Zeta was the better writer. The better storyteller. The better shit-talker, yarn-spinner, and all-around raconteur of his time and milieu. Like I said, he was the motherfucker.
This is his genesis story, and parsing fact from fiction is not only pointless, but to miss the point entire: Zeta was mass, force, energy; constant reinforcer of Newtonian Physics and dictates of thermodynamic law. Thompson was a window shopper, a LARPer that could drop into whatever stream of the counter-or-subculture he could get paid for by Rolling Stone to ‘drop the real dope of the inside as one living it’ load of absolute bullshit. Look at Hell’s Angels, for chrissakes! a book I actually enjoy more than a little. That WAS Thompson's thing, method acting reconfigured for the page. That's fine, but the distinction is critical: Zeta was a full tab of acid to HST’s pneumatically packaged, ‘lab-measured to the milligram,’ artificially-flavored and brokedick weed gummy.
Far more importantly, Zeta changed the course of history for Chicano’s, thereby altering the events of American history from within and against the system. He didn’t tune in and turn on just to drop out—he tuned-in fully switched-on and broke INTO the institutional structures honky ass hippie trainspotters were content with criticizing and doing fuckall about. This, his first of two total books he wrote before he was disappeared off the planet, is his genesis story. Early on and throughout, Acosta confirms that all he ever wanted to be in life was an author. He saw that as his true calling, and he considered himself a writer foremost and before anything. Beyond all the fucking and drugs and drink and shit talk, Brown Buffalo is the first testimony of a man living in OPPOSITION LOUDLY. Whatever Zeta’s human psycho-epicurean inclinations may have been, he TRIED. Rather than grab an acoustic and squawk “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming...” with no shoes on in the fucking mud (inviolable truth: the greater portion of the white hippie youth movement didn’t do or achieve anything; the ‘counterculture’ was nothing more than the permission they NEEDED TO NOT WEAR SHOES. The end. Roll credits and cue reborn Christianity and Boomer yuppiedom, you motherfuckers), Zeta became a lawyer and rewrote or established laws we still enjoy today.
Bearing all this in mind, wouldn’t it be, at the very least, illuminating to hear from the fabled mad lawyer himself, the one relegated to comic sidekick by a costume/uniform-wearing hack handsomely remunerated to subsume others’ experiences and tell them as his own? I swear to you, Acosta slings his narrative with the charm and shagginess of that guy at the bar that, for reasons known only to God and Bear Owsley, is the most gregarious, outrageous, brilliant, and verbose container of The Light you just became instant best friends with. For life. The breathing, guzzling embodiment of “Cortez the Killer’s” second solo. Like a motherfucker.
____________________________
(Hey RP! I got carried away; eat shit. And happy birthday, you garbage crone X)
And yeah: he was the other guy in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I forget his name (I know he’s referred to as the Samoan; he's Mexican American) in that, sure, legendary novel, and I can’t be bothered to look it up. He is Gonzo/HST’s lawyer friend, relegated now to a one-dimensional caricature by a pen not his own. Here’s the rub: Zeta was the better writer. The better storyteller. The better shit-talker, yarn-spinner, and all-around raconteur of his time and milieu. Like I said, he was the motherfucker.
This is his genesis story, and parsing fact from fiction is not only pointless, but to miss the point entire: Zeta was mass, force, energy; constant reinforcer of Newtonian Physics and dictates of thermodynamic law. Thompson was a window shopper, a LARPer that could drop into whatever stream of the counter-or-subculture he could get paid for by Rolling Stone to ‘drop the real dope of the inside as one living it’ load of absolute bullshit. Look at Hell’s Angels, for chrissakes! a book I actually enjoy more than a little. That WAS Thompson's thing, method acting reconfigured for the page. That's fine, but the distinction is critical: Zeta was a full tab of acid to HST’s pneumatically packaged, ‘lab-measured to the milligram,’ artificially-flavored and brokedick weed gummy.
Far more importantly, Zeta changed the course of history for Chicano’s, thereby altering the events of American history from within and against the system. He didn’t tune in and turn on just to drop out—he tuned-in fully switched-on and broke INTO the institutional structures honky ass hippie trainspotters were content with criticizing and doing fuckall about. This, his first of two total books he wrote before he was disappeared off the planet, is his genesis story. Early on and throughout, Acosta confirms that all he ever wanted to be in life was an author. He saw that as his true calling, and he considered himself a writer foremost and before anything. Beyond all the fucking and drugs and drink and shit talk, Brown Buffalo is the first testimony of a man living in OPPOSITION LOUDLY. Whatever Zeta’s human psycho-epicurean inclinations may have been, he TRIED. Rather than grab an acoustic and squawk “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming...” with no shoes on in the fucking mud (inviolable truth: the greater portion of the white hippie youth movement didn’t do or achieve anything; the ‘counterculture’ was nothing more than the permission they NEEDED TO NOT WEAR SHOES. The end. Roll credits and cue reborn Christianity and Boomer yuppiedom, you motherfuckers), Zeta became a lawyer and rewrote or established laws we still enjoy today.
Bearing all this in mind, wouldn’t it be, at the very least, illuminating to hear from the fabled mad lawyer himself, the one relegated to comic sidekick by a costume/uniform-wearing hack handsomely remunerated to subsume others’ experiences and tell them as his own? I swear to you, Acosta slings his narrative with the charm and shagginess of that guy at the bar that, for reasons known only to God and Bear Owsley, is the most gregarious, outrageous, brilliant, and verbose container of The Light you just became instant best friends with. For life. The breathing, guzzling embodiment of “Cortez the Killer’s” second solo. Like a motherfucker.
____________________________
(Hey RP! I got carried away; eat shit. And happy birthday, you garbage crone X)
October 6, 2013
I found this book lying around in a dingy used book shop in Jammu and bought it for Rs. 30. Partly because I needed to know the story of The Great Brown Buffalo, but mostly out of the grief I felt for the state in which lay the autobiography of one of the most interesting characters the sixties managed to puke out. OSCAR ZETA ACOSTA! The infamous attorney Dr. Gonzo to Hunter S Thompson's Raoul Duke! Whom he gazed upon in complete awe and famously exclaimed “There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
This book drills a hole in the brown head of that crazy, schizophrenic and perpetually inebriated chicano lawyer and invites anyone (who dares) to take a look inside. And if you have the right kind of mind, you might even appreciate the twisted mechanisms in there driving this big Spanish hell-on-wheels. At the same time the book makes you shed a tear for the sad and lonely brown buffalo roaming the land in search for his identity and ultimately finding out he has none.
A book for any serious sixties counter-culture fiend. Drugs, sex, hippies, Hells Angels, Hunter Thompson, Tim Leary.. the whole package.
This book drills a hole in the brown head of that crazy, schizophrenic and perpetually inebriated chicano lawyer and invites anyone (who dares) to take a look inside. And if you have the right kind of mind, you might even appreciate the twisted mechanisms in there driving this big Spanish hell-on-wheels. At the same time the book makes you shed a tear for the sad and lonely brown buffalo roaming the land in search for his identity and ultimately finding out he has none.
A book for any serious sixties counter-culture fiend. Drugs, sex, hippies, Hells Angels, Hunter Thompson, Tim Leary.. the whole package.
December 7, 2017
Oscar Acosta was a famous Chicano lawyer from San Francisco most famous for his side kick appearance as "Dr Gonzo" in the writings of Hunter S Thompson. His book is about race, sex, drugs, politics, and his own search of identity.
I read Acosta's autobiography because I was interested in finding who he really was since we only gets a partial picture from what we can read from Thompson.
Overall the book was enjoyable, raw and unapologetic. Acosta seemed to be more interested in becoming a writer than practicing law as he reminds readers often about his failed ambition. Nevertheless he left an interesting testimony of what was the Chicano culture in the 50's and 60's.
Some chapters lacks cohesion from time to time but the flashbacks of his childhood memories were well written. The last chapters about Texas and Mexico were my favorites.
There is something chilling in the fact that he disappeared in 74', a year or two after this book was published.
I read Acosta's autobiography because I was interested in finding who he really was since we only gets a partial picture from what we can read from Thompson.
Overall the book was enjoyable, raw and unapologetic. Acosta seemed to be more interested in becoming a writer than practicing law as he reminds readers often about his failed ambition. Nevertheless he left an interesting testimony of what was the Chicano culture in the 50's and 60's.
Some chapters lacks cohesion from time to time but the flashbacks of his childhood memories were well written. The last chapters about Texas and Mexico were my favorites.
There is something chilling in the fact that he disappeared in 74', a year or two after this book was published.
September 25, 2017
One of the best autobiographies I have ever read -- not only addresses the issues of racism and poverty, but is laugh out loud funny. Very talented writer, too bad he did not write more books. For readers not familiar with him, he is Hunter Thompson's side kick in the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
May 20, 2020
3
This was an interesting book to listen to but I also felt discourage and disgusted with the contents of how the author see women. I don't know if it is some form of feminism but I really despise when women are degraded in such a disturbing way. But I do have to remember that this was written during the days where women were oppressed.
It still hurts and disturb me to know that men see women as symbol of pleasure and a "plaything"
This was an interesting book to listen to but I also felt discourage and disgusted with the contents of how the author see women. I don't know if it is some form of feminism but I really despise when women are degraded in such a disturbing way. But I do have to remember that this was written during the days where women were oppressed.
It still hurts and disturb me to know that men see women as symbol of pleasure and a "plaything"
January 7, 2023
It’s hard to describe such a unique piece of literature! Acosta grapples with deep philosophical questions through his batshit drug addled journey for identity. Incredibly funny, deeply introspective and dark; one of the best recommendations I’ve ever gotten! (Of course a poet would recommend something awesome!)
August 31, 2021
Decent prose, but sloppy organization and focus.
September 22, 2008
I don't quite know what to say about this book. There are a lot of different voices running through each chapter, bouncing through the pages with energy and urgency. And by a lot, I of course mean just one, that of Oscar Zeta Acosta, the self-proclaimed Brown Buffalo. Acosta is a Chicano. And from what I can gather from the many Chicanos in my own life, being a Chicano is emotionally confusing. One is both here and there, Mexican and American, Aztec and Spanish, traditional and nonconforming, ashamed and proud...well, you get the point.
Acosta is many people and has many narrative voices. He is a mad mesh of Kerouac at his most urgent, Bukowski at his most belligerent, and H.Thompson at his most thoughtful. This is a manic tale of wandering, which has become a trademark theme of the 'counterculture' writers in the 1960s, but in this narrative, something feels different, and I think it largely has to do with Acosta being a Chicano. He is exceptionally lost in this world, and I feel empathy for Acosta that I simply don't feel for the Beat writers of his generation, who appear more pathetic than poetic. Acosta's voice is earnest, a man whose mind goes in thousands of directions, but whose aimlessness longs to be focussed and sharpened. And in his case, sharpened for a revolution. I was also surprised by Acosta's tenderness and vulnerability.
In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, "[Acosta] was too weird to live and too rare to die..."
Acosta is many people and has many narrative voices. He is a mad mesh of Kerouac at his most urgent, Bukowski at his most belligerent, and H.Thompson at his most thoughtful. This is a manic tale of wandering, which has become a trademark theme of the 'counterculture' writers in the 1960s, but in this narrative, something feels different, and I think it largely has to do with Acosta being a Chicano. He is exceptionally lost in this world, and I feel empathy for Acosta that I simply don't feel for the Beat writers of his generation, who appear more pathetic than poetic. Acosta's voice is earnest, a man whose mind goes in thousands of directions, but whose aimlessness longs to be focussed and sharpened. And in his case, sharpened for a revolution. I was also surprised by Acosta's tenderness and vulnerability.
In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, "[Acosta] was too weird to live and too rare to die..."
April 24, 2017
Bought this book because of my interest in Hunter S. Thompson's bombastic traveling companion and sometime lawyer. What I found was a raw, revealing look at a man uncomfortable in his own skin and trying to find his identity while feeling caught between two worlds. It appealed to me greatly, especially his madcap misadventures and grouchy gut. I can relate to both. Oscar Zeta Acosta was definitely a unique human being, one who grew up to embrace his role as an activist for oppressed minorities. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the Chicano experience in the early-to-mid 2oth century or the counterculture movement.
January 28, 2019
You have to respect the sheer amount of ecstatic energy in the narrative. It’s tempting to call it a Chicano Fear & Loathing, but really, who knows who most influenced who here? My main takeaway though is just what a great job Benicio del Toro did of getting this guy on film.
December 16, 2021
It's difficult to say what I think of this book...I have recently been trying to rate books holistically, not just based on the end. The end was satisfying, important, and beautiful, but it took me months to get to because of how many deep discomforts and questions about incongruities the book raised for me. Maybe those things are mostly good. Some of it was still just hard to read because it seemed repetitive, the supporting characters were constantly rotating but almost identical, and much of the plot felt stagnant. And yet the moments that shone shone brightly. Definitely a trudge of a book, but with vital and important moments. Big project, also interesting to have read this "autobiography" in conversation with other pieces of evidence of his lived experience his Uncollected Works. Overall, I wouldn't consider it a must-read, but valuable.
March 16, 2024
Nunca creí que vería reflejado un sentimiento tan profundo y personal en un libro. Estoy seguro que cualquier latinx nacido en un país extranjero al de sus orígenes familiares puede llegar a conectar con esta historia en mayor o menor medida.
“Los idiotas que se conforman con las apariencias están ciegos. Por amor de Dios, yo jamás me he visto o sentido inferior a ningún hombre. Ni a ninguna bestia. Mi único error ha sido tratar de identificarme con una persona, una nación o determinado período de la historia…”
“Los idiotas que se conforman con las apariencias están ciegos. Por amor de Dios, yo jamás me he visto o sentido inferior a ningún hombre. Ni a ninguna bestia. Mi único error ha sido tratar de identificarme con una persona, una nación o determinado período de la historia…”
September 22, 2022
ZETA , ZETA Chicano Lawyer representing all the Brown Buffalo of during the 60's /70 era of the Chicano revolution right here in East L.A. Think of Robbin Hood an anarchist within the system which oppressed sub culture of Mexican Americans of long trodden results of the manifest destiny the struggle to get ahead from marginalized by poverty, illiteracy. Oscar Zeta Acosta " Brown Buffalo" will always be a testament to stand against any and all adversaries whom antagonize against equality for all.
September 10, 2023
A true storyteller.
May 13, 2018
I have never seen a textbook mention him. I am a Hunter Thompson fan, but I feel Acosta should be remembered for more than just being Thompsons friend and lawyer. He was an activist and he died (or at least disappeared) for his beliefs. He had the education and opportunities to choose an easier path in life, but he had a higher calling then self gain and personal success. His writing style offers no apologizes, and he makes himself venerable with his honesty, openness, and self examination. The cause is more important to him then his existence or a need to make himself out to be more than he really is. So many authors do the opposite (i.e. Hemmingway). Some of my favorite excerpts include the following:
"One sonofabitch tells me I'm not a Mexican and the other one says I'm not American. I got no roots anywhere."
"What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice."
These particular passages"" struck me to my core. I am half Mexican but born in Detroit. I remember struggling with this identity issue as a kid. I don't know that I ever resolved it or just stopped giving a shit.
A couple of more I enjoyed:
"What value is life without booze and Mexican food?"
"Would she mind being unfaithful just this one time."
The combination of self indulgence while giving your life to a cause was difficult to process at times, but in the end it all made sense. It is truly up to the reader to decide what Acosta's life meant to them. PBS has recently aired a documentary on Oscar, I am including a link to a preview.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=...
"One sonofabitch tells me I'm not a Mexican and the other one says I'm not American. I got no roots anywhere."
"What I see now, on this rainy day in January, 1968, what is clear to me after this sojourn is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice."
These particular passages"" struck me to my core. I am half Mexican but born in Detroit. I remember struggling with this identity issue as a kid. I don't know that I ever resolved it or just stopped giving a shit.
A couple of more I enjoyed:
"What value is life without booze and Mexican food?"
"Would she mind being unfaithful just this one time."
The combination of self indulgence while giving your life to a cause was difficult to process at times, but in the end it all made sense. It is truly up to the reader to decide what Acosta's life meant to them. PBS has recently aired a documentary on Oscar, I am including a link to a preview.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=...
September 13, 2018
"Juarez in the morning, when you have two cents in your pocket and been ordered out of town at gun point, is as depressing a city as you can find."
Can I get an amen? This is a heck of a read, and one I had never heard of! I picked this up because it was mentioned in a book I just finished reading, "There There" by Tommy Orange, and I'm glad that I did! It's really two stories, Oscar's childhood and his adventure after quitting being a Legal Aid lawyer in Oakland and hitting the road to find himself. I didn't really like the childhood pieces, but I thoroughly enjoyed the road trip! Very much like his buddy Hunter S., and just as irreverent! It's also the trip where he first meets Thompson! Lots of drugs, madness, and terrible behavior. He was one bad buffalo, and forever tormented by Procol Harum's - "A Whiter Shade of Pale"!
On a personal note, there are some strange connections between the buffalo and me! We were both born in El Paso, Texas. We were both in Boy Scout Troop 42, though in different cities. And he once got sent to Hamilton Air Force Base - which is here in Novato, my hometown! And we didn't 'meet' until 2018! Mi hermano!
Can I get an amen? This is a heck of a read, and one I had never heard of! I picked this up because it was mentioned in a book I just finished reading, "There There" by Tommy Orange, and I'm glad that I did! It's really two stories, Oscar's childhood and his adventure after quitting being a Legal Aid lawyer in Oakland and hitting the road to find himself. I didn't really like the childhood pieces, but I thoroughly enjoyed the road trip! Very much like his buddy Hunter S., and just as irreverent! It's also the trip where he first meets Thompson! Lots of drugs, madness, and terrible behavior. He was one bad buffalo, and forever tormented by Procol Harum's - "A Whiter Shade of Pale"!
On a personal note, there are some strange connections between the buffalo and me! We were both born in El Paso, Texas. We were both in Boy Scout Troop 42, though in different cities. And he once got sent to Hamilton Air Force Base - which is here in Novato, my hometown! And we didn't 'meet' until 2018! Mi hermano!
February 16, 2019
What a ride! What a man! I read the 2018 edition published by The Tangerine Press. This one has an introduction by Ilan Stavans and an afterword by Marco Acosta. The flag bearer of counter culture, Acosta writes with intelligence, wit, brutal honesty and recklessness. As Hunter.S.Thompson (yes, he does make an appearance in the book) puts it, "he was too weird to live and too rare to die." The book is a search for identity, but the man is a universe by himself. A unique beast such as the Brown Buffalo is way beyond such measly concepts that govern mere mortals. The only jarring note is the mealy mouthed afterword by his son Marco.
May 30, 2019
-(Intro)-And when he roared into your driveway at night, you knew he was bringing music, whether you wanted it or not.
-He interrupts conversations like a man without culture.
-I have never had an accident with another car. True, I have rolled three cars on three different occasions, but those were Acts of God, as we lawyers say. And besides, I was drunk. Surely no man would blame me personally for what a foreign substance does to my body...
-He interrupts conversations like a man without culture.
-I have never had an accident with another car. True, I have rolled three cars on three different occasions, but those were Acts of God, as we lawyers say. And besides, I was drunk. Surely no man would blame me personally for what a foreign substance does to my body...
February 25, 2013
Only slightly less manic than his cohort Hunter S. Thompson, Acosta is the real-life Lawyer character made famous in 'Fear and Loathing'. Their writing styles are so similar that one must've had a major influence on the other. The question is, which one? Either way, stuff by both of these guys take me back to so much Henry Miller and Bukowsky.
February 4, 2018
While culturally important, this novel provides a laborious, vulgar, crude, expletive-riddled, passionately offensive, and jumbled look into the experiences of a Chicano lawyer-turned-junkie-turned-Civil Rights Leader. It is not a novel that I plan on reading again, but I do appreciate the experience while it was happening.
December 28, 2017
Crazy book about someone that didn't fit it in anywhere. In a way I relate to him as I also feel unidentified with the culture of my place of origin and the country I live in today. I am happy I read this at the perfect time in my life.
July 23, 2008
The Autobiography of Oscar Zeta Acosta. This book had me riveted from the first few pages and I consumed it in record time. Disturbing and fascinating look into the real life "Dr. Gonzo"
January 27, 2014
A rollicking wonderful journey of self discovery or a narcissistic, drug fueled maniacal road trip through the southwest.
September 17, 2016
Interesting and entertaining; the writing reminds of a mix of Hunter Thompson and Bukowski (but better than Bukowski).
September 18, 2022
Identiteetin etsiminen voi olla koko elämän mittainen matka. Oscar Zeta Acostalle ensimmäinen puoli matkaa oli kasvaa kolmannen luokan kansalaisena kalifornialaisessa pikkukaupungissa, Toisen Maailman sodan jälkimainingeissa. Toinen puoli matkaa alkaa kun havahdutaan, että ollaan kuljettu kilometrejä harhaan. Yhteiskunta ei olekaan valmistanut nuorta meksikonamerikkalaista lakimiehen alkua ammatin ja kansalaisena olemisen haasteisiin. Rasististen ja epäedullisten rakenteiden läpi hän on päässyt asemaansa vain kovuudella, sumutuksella, luikuripelillä ja tuurilla. Eräänä aamuna hän jättää lakimiehen työt ja huristaa autollaan halki erämaiden ja vuorien. Luvassa on huuruista menoa ja hulvatonta egotrippailua. Hän esiintyy milloin intiaanipäällikkönä, milloin samoalaisena ja milloin viimeisenä Asteekkina. Acosta inhosi hippejä melkein yhtä paljon kuin Beatnickkejä, mutta kyllä hänen matkansa toinen osio edustaa klassista oravan pyörästä jättäytymistä ja itsensä etsintää, tosin ilman valkoisen etuoikeutetun nuorison turhamaisuutta. Etsintä ei tuota tulosta rajan eteläpuolellakaan, missä häntä kohdellaan jenkkinä, mutta avaa tien oivallukseen, joka määrittää Acostan loppuelämää. Chicano-identiteetistä, joka ei ole meksikolainen enempää kuin amerikkalainen, tulee hänen elämäntyönsä kohde.
Mielenkiintoinen ja hauska lukukokemus. Kiinnostavaa on etenkin Acostan hahmon ristiriitaisuus ja rehellisyys. Hän kuvaa itseään toisaalta kovan elämän koulimana, toisaalta hyvinkin haavoittuvaisena ja heikkona; Toisaalta päättäväisenä ja varmana mutta sittenkin täysin ajelehtivana ; Viattomana ja naiivinakin, mutta toisaalta kyynisenä ja säälimättömänä.
Mielenkiintoinen ja hauska lukukokemus. Kiinnostavaa on etenkin Acostan hahmon ristiriitaisuus ja rehellisyys. Hän kuvaa itseään toisaalta kovan elämän koulimana, toisaalta hyvinkin haavoittuvaisena ja heikkona; Toisaalta päättäväisenä ja varmana mutta sittenkin täysin ajelehtivana ; Viattomana ja naiivinakin, mutta toisaalta kyynisenä ja säälimättömänä.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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