Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's American Odyssey

Abstract

By time Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo was published in 1972, a number of narratives had already employed trip to explore chaotic 1960s American culture and traverse national and international boundaries in hope that--as Jack Kerouac put it in On Road (1957)--we would finally learn ourselves (280). Whether on page, movie screen, or blaring from radio, numerous artists used trip narrative to express idea that traveling through nation is like having a ticket to enlightenment. Further, trip's transnational scope enabled Anglo-America to experience nonwhite individuals, communities, and foreign countries such as Mexico as alternatives to (or, to use Acosta's phrasing, an from) western modernity and, for artists, as sources of creative inspiration (31). Sal Paradise's assertion in On Road that true knowledge of self is hidden somewhere among Fellahin Indians of world, essential strain of basic primitive, wailing humanity (280) reminds us how firmly entrenched nineteenth-century objectives for mobility ate in countercultural postwar narrative, whether for Beats or hippies. As in nineteenth-century frontier narratives, static representations of non-Anglos as primitive others act as mirrors for Anglo superiority and progress in twentieth-century trip, even as these primitives supposedly model authentic, natural living that Anglos might use as an escape from their own modern lives. The timeless fellahin in On Road are easily accessible to Americans on a lark (280)--indeed, they are Just across street [from where] Mexico began (274)--yet they are still perceived as so distant and foreign as to mark for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty boundary of their journey, the end of road (276). Ironically, Sal's and Dean's reactions to Mexico anticipate Acosta's protagonist Oscar's initial reactions to Mexico and Mexican identity for he, too, essentializes, exoticizes, and is blinded with love for old women with ancient Indian faces and old men with sombreros (Acosta, Autobiography 188-89); in other words, he relates to Mexicans in Juarez as if they are Kerouac's fellahin.(1) Critics such as Rachel Adams and Ramon Saldivar also note Acosta's disconcerting representation of Mexico, but differentiate him from Kerouac and other Beat precursors because, at end of Acosta's novel, his protagonist translates feeling of displacement that stimulates him to travel into basis for alignment with a political (Adams 71).(2) I understand impetus to highlight Acosta's call for collective solutions to identity crisis his protagonist and other Chicanos face, and text's (supposed) final rejection of individualism. However, contrary to interpretations of The Autobiography that emphasize a turn to collectivist politics, I propose that Oscar never abandons American individualism for a collective political movement because he disavows nationalism or nativism of any type as false consciousness. Oscar cannot regard identity--his, Chicano community's, or American--in separatist terms, which is why his commitment to Chicano militants and Chicano movement dissolves so quickly. This is true for Acosta as well. Even in The Revolt of Cockroach People (1973), which documents Acosta's involvement in movement after he returns from his solipsistic trip, and which ostensibly charts his move to Chicano militancy, contradictory position he takes earlier in The Autobiography asserts itself. Thus, more important split between Acosta and his Anglo literary counterparts is not that his protagonist develops a newfound affiliation with a political movement at novel's close but rather that Oscar develops a syncretic, complex understanding of Chicano and, therefore, American identity while on road. …