In 1956 he married Betty Daves, an occupational therapist at a hospital in Modesto, and started working his way through Modesto Junior College. While stationed in Panama, he found Jesus and became a kind of missionary, building his own homemade church near the base and baptizing the locals when he returned to the States, he lost the faith and fell back into his rowdy hard-drinking ways. Instead, he joined the Air Force, where he played in the band. He learned clarinet and got a music scholarship to USC, but did not wind up attending. And I have never backed off from a fight.”
I lost every single fight… I’ve been an outlaw out of practical necessity ever since. “As things turned out, I had to fight each of them that afternoon. All of this helped awaken his consciousness of race, expressed one day while walking down the street with his friends when he spontaneously spat on a pamphlet with a picture of the American flag. Acosta and his friends protested, but their parents made them march in the rearranged order. For his graduation rehearsal from Riverbank Grammar School, he recalls being lined up two by two the teacher then went back and not-so-subtly rearranged the students so that there were no interracial pairs. He developed crushes on a few white girls at his school, one of whom told the class that he ‘stank’, and most of whose fathers forbade him to date them. Some incidents from this time shed light on his future volatility. Oscar was also required to fully assimilate: work hard, stay in school, and speak only English, which explains his poor command of Spanish later in life. I guess that is where I became as nasty as I am.” When I was five he encouraged me to argue and fight with him. “He wanted me to compete more than anything else so he pushed me into competition with himself. His father encouraged competitiveness, as he wrote in an essay quoted by Ilan Stevens in his Acosta biography, Bandido:
Acosta has been portrayed on the big and small screen, by Benicio del Toro in Terry Gilliam’s hallucinatory adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and also in a vibrant new documentary by Philip Rodriguez for PBS, The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo (2018), which you can watch on LAPL’s streaming movie service Kanopy.Īcosta grew up on his family’s tiny farm in Riverbank, a rural community near Modesto that he recalls being segregated between Mexicans, Americans, and ‘Okies’. He disappeared during what was probably a drug run to Mazatlán in 1974 and has not been heard from since. Feeling that he should have gotten more than sidekick credit for his contributions to Thompson’s trademark style, Acosta got his own deal from Thompson’s publishers and wrote two fiery, highly recommended books: The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), about his youth and political awakening, and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), about his involvement with the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles.
Gonzo in what is acknowledged by all involved to be a fairly accurate portrayal of their drug-crazed trip to Vegas for a journalistic assignment. Thompson’s sidekick in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), fictionalized as Dr. Nowadays Acosta is better known to counterculture fans as Hunter S. County in 1970, representing the La Raza Unida party-he lost but did come in second, receiving over 100,000 votes for his cause of dismantling and reorganizing the sheriff’s department. school walkouts in 1968, successfully argued or brought attention to the court cases of many defendants associated with Movement actions, and even ran for sheriff of L.A. A radical, hard-living lawyer and activist, Acosta helped lead the East L.A. One of the most colorful figures of the Chicano Movement of the late 60s and early 70s was Oscar Zeta Acosta, a.k.a.