The Trouble with Sauling Around: Conversion in Ethnic American Autobiography, 1965-2002

2. Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autofictions

ConverSion, deConverSion, and reverSion Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autofictions I finally gave up on Catholicism and admitted to Duane Dunham that he knew more about Jesus than I did. We went into the boiler room under the barracks and he called down the Holy Ghost to save me. I took Jesus as my saviour and became a Baptist right on the spot. oSCar ZeTa aCoSTa, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo I took to rising at 3:00 A.M. to pray and read my Bible. . . . But I was miserable. I hurt inside. I didn’t have the peace of mind that Jesus promised if we did his work. oSCar ZeTa aCoSTa, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo It is Christmas Eve in the year of Huitzilopochtli, 1969. Three hundred Chicanos have gathered in front of St. Basil’s Roman Catholic Church. Three hundred brown-eyed children of the sun have come to drive the money-changers out of the richest temple in Los Angeles. oSCar ZeTa aCoSTa, The Revolt of the Cockroach People ■ Being alert to “Sauling around” means being attentive to the complex and subversive aspects of conversion, particularly to indications of ambivalence in conversion experiences. For Malcolm X, “Sauling around” is manifested in his lingering nostalgia for preconversion activities as a sober NOI narrator; for Oscar Zeta Acosta, it is exemplified in his failed conversion to the Baptist Church. This failed conversion can be read in his two autofictions, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), as his failure to assimilate into mainstream American culture. It is pivotal in the texts because it governs his performance of a parodic imitatio Christi; it paves the way to Acosta finding his identity as a “Brown Buffalo,” or Chicano activist, including his participation in the politico-religious group Católicos por La Raza; and it serves as a microcosmic illustra1 2 3 4 60 ConverSion, deConverSion, and reverSion tion of the pitfalls of conversion qua assimilation. Moreover, Acosta’s post-deconversion reversion to Catholicism may be read as a form of “Pauling around.” Even while he rejects religion’s truth value, he continues to frame his experiences using religion. A religious narrative from “Sauling around” to “Pauling around” undergirds Acosta’s two autofictions: weak, nominal family Catholicism fails to provide a strong sense of ethnic identity; seeking an entrée to white society, Acosta converts to the Baptist Church; he then deconverts when that sense of belonging does not materialize; finally, he finds a solid sense of belonging (though not necessarily belief) in the Chicano movement Católicos por La Raza. Furthermore, the religious narrative in the two texts is bound closely to Acosta’s sexuality and his desire for women. His wish to assimilate into American life has much to do with his failed relationships with white, sometimes Baptist, girls. I argue that Acosta’s conversion to the Baptist Church was an unsuccessful means to get and keep the blond, blue-eyed, “pig-tailed belles” (Revolt 31) he had been coveting all of his early life. His deconversion and renewed adherence to a strongly political, Chicano Catholicism is accompanied by a new appreciation of and desire for Chicanas (albeit expressed in sexist terms). The “Sauling around” and “Pauling around” in Acosta’s two texts, then, illustrate the role of religious conversion as intensely social and often prescriptive. It sometimes promises rewards (ethnic assimilation , social inclusion, relationships) that it simply cannot deliver and, in Acosta’s case, actually served to accomplish the opposite of what it promised by cementing his feeling of exclusion from “white” America and paving the way to his identity formation as a Brown Buffalo , a name he takes from his identification with the brown shaggy beasts slaughtered almost to extinction. Acosta’s autobiographical persona seems to demonstrate that if you are Mexican American, Mexican American–style Catholicism is the religion that “fits” your culture (whether or not you actually believe in God) because it affirms a set of agreed-upon cultural markers (Our Lady of Guadalupe, Aztec survivals, respect for history). A sociological truism maintains that people are most likely to affiliate with the religion made accessible by their culture, class, ethnicity, and upbringing. I view this “fit” as a nonessentialist set of factors determining religious behavior. oSCar ZeTa aCoSTa 61 Similarly, the pre-1975 Nation of Islam carried a strongly prescriptive element: it is the...