Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity

2. Crazy for the Nation: Piri Thomas, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, and the Urban Outlaw

61  Crazy for the Nation Piri Thomas, Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, and the Urban Outlaw What the state fears [ . . . ] is an alternative system of legality or rationality, rather than the unbridled and formless motion of force that has yet to be subordinated. The “irrational” appears as such through the very rationality of the state from whose homogenizing drive connects the apparent particularity of national identities to the greater homogeneity of universal history. —David Lloyd,“Nationalisms against the State” As we have seen, Latina/o authors like Jesús Colón and Ernesto Galarza link the activism of the 1930s with the radical politics of the 1960s. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a new generation of Latina/o authors drew from these oppositional strands, further transforming them in their personal narratives. Piri Thomas, a Puerto Rican, and Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, a Chicano , are representative of this group in that their texts evidence direct engagements with insurgent nationalism.1 Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) and Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1989b) utilize narrative strategies that challenge the foundations of democracy and its political organization through the textual narration of their individual lives.2 Their works formulate new conceptions of what it means to be a revolutionary subject, while also revising concepts of community and national belonging. At the core of their challenges are the urban gangster and vato loco (crazy guy), both permutations of the familiar outlaw trope. Examining how they triangulate their multifaceted outlaw subjectivities allows us to comprehend how Acosta and Thomas pose alternatives to liberal political notions of self, community, and nation. While the term vato loco is used by Acosta in relation to Chicanos, my comparative framework is designed to identify connections between the vato loco and the urban gangster of Thomas’s work. While I am careful not to conflate these identities, I argue that Thomas’s Puerto Rican and black gangsters of the 1950s share commonalities with Acosta’s politicized 62 · CRAZY FOR THE NATION lowriders. The vato and gangster evidence similar desires to disrupt dominant hierarchies (often through violence). Likewise, both are alienated from mainstream identities and notions of respectability in Latina/o communities . Both figures also reject accommodation but often do so through investments in machismo. Moreover, Acosta and Thomas endow these individual figures with collective aspirations, largely by rehumanizing them through their first-person personal narratives. Although these representations do not offer pure, transcendent subjectivities , I suggest that the vato loco and gangster serve important purposes in Thomas’s and Acosta’s works. In their affirmations of the urban gangster and vato loco, they refuse to disidentify with the most despised and oppressed in their groups. Yet because both authors premise the vato’s and gangster’s critiques of mainstream subjectivity on discourses of masculinity , they reinscribe patriarchy and homophobia. I examine Acosta’s and Thomas’s triangulations to comprehend how their contradictory impulses attempt to counter racism and dehumanization through the complex personhood of manhood. Gangsters, Pachucos, Vatos, and Urban Alienation in the Postwar United States In contrast to rural outlaw traditions like those documented by Américo Paredes (1998), Acosta’s and Thomas’s politicized gangsters are critical to forms of opposition in the city. Historian David Gutiérrez (1995) observes that broad demographic shifts after World War II account for some of the changes in oppositional strategies employed by urban Chicana/os during the late twentieth century. Factors such as the higher percentage of U.S.born populations, access to better jobs, the rise of Latina/o middle classes, and shifts in economic production from agriculture to manufacturing brought waves of Chicana/os, Puerto Ricans, and other aggrieved minority groups to cities during and after World War II (161–65).3 While migration patterns that brought Puerto Ricans to the United States emerged out of different economic and political contexts (Operation Bootstrap, the Jones Act, and the industrialization of the island economy during the interwar years), the demographic shifts from rural settings on the island to urban locations in northeastern cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston produced similar cultural, political, and social changes. Not surprisingly, Latina/os did not experience seamless integration in cities, as they were often met with new and vehement forms of racism. CRAZY FOR THE NATION · 63 School and housing segregation, police intimidation, and voting disenfranchisement contributed to the marginalization of urban Latina/os during the postwar...