Early in Oscar Zeta Acosta's 1972 novel, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, his protagonist, Oscar Acosta, quits his job as a War on Poverty-funded Legal Services lawyer in East Oakland, California, dumping his license in wastepaper basket. His resignation precipitates his search for racial identity in Autobiography and eventual transformation into Buffalo Zeta Brown, activist Chicano lawyer in Acosta's sequel, The Revolt of Cockroach People (1973). (1) Oscar's abrupt departure enacts a double rejection. First, he rejects liberalism led him to take on the enemy our president [Lyndon Johnson] so clearly described in his first State of Union address (Autobiography 22). Instead, especially in Revolt, Oscar/ Brown adopts a militant Chicano/a Cultural Nationalism at odds with politics of integrationist Mexican American leaders affiliated with Democratic Party. (2) Second, he rejects professional aspirations led him to get his license in order to prove that even a fat brown Chicano like me could do it (Revolt 24). Living communally with his clients and helping them bomb courthouse, Brown declares he's the only revolutionary lawyer this side of Florida Gulf ... I'm only one who actually hates law (214). Oscar/Brown's transformation from Democrat to Cultural Nationalist, from upwardly-mobile professional to grass-roots agitator, mirrors of many Chicano/a activists from same period. Many of them began their and professional careers as members of Viva Kennedy Clubs helped elect John F. Kennedy or as paid organizers in Johnson-era Community Action Agencies. (3) The most notable of these militants was Rodolfo Corky Gonzalez, professional boxer turned Democratic insider turned Chicano activist and poet, whom Brown defends against weapons charges in Revolt. As this essay will demonstrate, however, both Autobiography and Revolt are indelibly marked by Acosta's early identification with Democratic Party, in ways overlooked by critics interested in his role as a pioneering radical lawyer and Chicano writer. Specifically, Acosta's work is shaped by his beginnings as a poverty lawyer, associated with one of President Johnson's signature domestic programs. Incorporated into Community Action Program in 1966, Legal Services marked beginning of federally-funded legal representation for poor, connecting and expanding hitherto fragmented and underfunded network of private Legal Aid across United States. In first eighteen months of program's establishment, Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) created a system of and lawyers about size of United States Department of Justice and all of its US Attorneys' offices (Johnson 73), encompassing over 800 in poor neighborhoods, including Oakland office where Oscar begins to practice law. Critics tend to argue a fundamental shift occurs between Autobiography and Revolt, as Acosta's protagonist learns to challenge liberal conceptions of justice and legality; in Ramon Saldivar's terms, Oscar/Brown embraces a view of justice as something cannot be achieved within present institutions (97). Brown's activist turn in Revolt, however, is less a rejection than a realization of principles inspired Legal Services program. Although in quitting Legal Services Oscar/Brown rejects routine concerns of welfare clients with which most OEO-funded lawyers were absorbed in order to focus on what he calls political (Revolt 256) cases, he does so in order to embrace a model of radical lawyering strikingly resembles outlined by program's early theorists. In line with overall orientation of Community Action Program, Legal Services lawyers were supposed to challenge local welfare bureaucracies to make them more responsive to their clients' needs, a challenge Oscar evades throughout Autobiography but takes up in Revolt. …