Dr. Gonzo's Carnival: The Testimonial Satires of Oscar Zeta Acosta

Chicano lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta (1935–1974?), a prominent figure in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and early 1970s, published two book-length narratives about the Movement that, along with his disappearance under mysterious circumstances, have contributed as much to his fame as his confrontational approach to defending activists in high-profile political trials. In the years since his disappearance, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo and The Revolt of the Cockroach People have attracted considerable critical attention.¹ In discussing these books, many critics have emphasized essentialist notions of authenticity, interpreting Acosta’s writing as ethnic autobiographical self-revelation; others have stressed his works’ ethical and moral indeterminacy and their apparently arbitrary nature. Both sets of critics have limited interpretive possibilities by reading these works as novels, autobiographies, or some hybrid of the two, misunderstanding the nature of Acosta’s critical project. I hope in this essay to take discussion of Acosta’s narratives in a new direction by placing them in the context of the author’s legal work and considering them in relation to the genres of grotesque satire and testimonio.²

The new vision I offer of what Acosta sought to accomplish in his treatment of identity and the law permits a “postpositivist realist” interpretation of his work and demonstrates that Acosta did not see the arbitrary nature of law as something he could use to his advantage. He advocated neither essentialist nationalism nor unstable and indeterminate identities. Rather, he supported a realist approach to justice and identity that rejected inadequate conceptions of both while articulating better alternatives. According to Satya Mohanty, a “postpositivist realist” approach to identity and values entails both a critical reconceptualization of objectivity and an analysis and accommodation of the sources of error, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of both essentialist and relativist responses to the problems of identity and justice.³

The first section of this essay examines Acosta’s satirical critiques of essentialist strains of nationalism in the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing primarily on his first book, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. Drawing from the tradition of the grotesque, in this book Acosta launches a critique of certain assumptions about authenticity and identity that plagued the Movement, without, however, denying the political salience and historical reality of social identities. I go on to demonstrate how Acosta’s writings combine important features of grotesque satire and the testimonio tradition. Testimonios, often presented orally and recorded (and sometimes translated) by “outsiders,” first gained attention during the Latin American revolutionary struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, when they were used to gain publicity and support for revolutionary causes. Acosta’s narratives not only record the Chicano Movement, they form an integral component and theorization of it. In the second section of this article, an understanding of Acosta’s relation to the testimonio tradition enables a fuller sense of his views on law and the legal system. Specifically, it becomes clear that Acosta’s rejection of the legal system as constituted was based on a more fundamental conception of “natural law.”⁴ I give special attention to the consequences of Acosta’s constructions of masculinity and the forms of abjection on which they depend. Acosta’s grotesque testimonios present his autobiographical protagonists as imperfect individuals; through their faults as well as their virtues, these figures allow us to see the truths of the revolution about which he wrote.

In making these arguments I hope also to defend genre criticism as a useful and compelling form of scholarship by demonstrating that it is more than mere taxonomy.⁵ Because literary genres arise within specific material and ideological contexts, they bear the imprints of those social formations. New ideological formations reorganize preexisting elements into forms appropriate to their own expression.⁶ Aspects of an author’s “message,” such as its urgency, its perceived political relevance, or its position vis...