Toward a Willful Rereading of The Revolt of the Cockroach People

Abstract

A touchstone of Chicano letters, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta’s 1973 novel The Revolt of the Cockroach People is emblematic of a Chicano community’s coming of political age during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the opening church movidas of Gloria Chavez and Duana Doherty, characters modeled partly on historical fi gures, have gone largely unexamined. This essay proposes a “willful” conceptual reading practice as a way of discerning otherwise overlooked Chicana activism. I demonstrate how disparate depictions of Chicana protesters in La Nueva Chicana poetics, the Católicos por la Raza Papers, and Acosta’s novel refl ect philosopher Sara Ahmed’s idea of “willfulness”—a resiliency deemed deviant but also possibly a reclaimed style of politics. Reconsidering Revolt alongside interrelated cultural texts expands our understanding of oppositional agency and the specifi c discursive sites that challenged and accommodated cultural biases of early Chicana activism linked to criminal deviance, vilifi cation (feminist baiting and lesbian stigmatization), and invisibility. I argue that the concept of willfulness renders legible the dynamism of Chicana feminism-in-nationalism within movimiento discourses that might allow us to bridge gulfs between movement-era literature and the activist archive, misogyny and Chicana feminisms, heteronormativity and queerness, faith-based activism and secular social protest.