Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's American Odyssey

By the time Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo was published in 1972, a number of narratives had already employed the road trip to explore the chaotic 1960s American culture and traverse national and international boundaries in the hope that--as Jack Kerouac put it in On the Road (1957)--"we would finally learn ourselves" (280). Whether on the page, the movie screen, or blaring from the radio, numerous artists used the road trip narrative to express the idea that traveling through the nation is like having a ticket to enlightenment. Further, the road trip's transnational scope enabled Anglo-America to experience nonwhite individuals, communities, and "foreign" countries such as Mexico as alternatives to (or, to use Acosta's phrasing, an "escape" from) western modernity and, for artists, as sources of creative inspiration (31). Sal Paradise's assertion in On the Road that true knowledge of the self is hidden somewhere "among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity" (280) reminds us how firmly entrenched nineteenth-century objectives for mobility ate in the countercultural postwar road narrative, whether for the Beats or the hippies. As in nineteenth-century frontier narratives, static representations of non-Anglos as primitive others act as mirrors for Anglo superiority and progress in the twentieth-century road trip, even as these "primitives" supposedly model "authentic," "natural" living that Anglos might use as an escape from their own modern lives. The timeless "fellahin" in On the Road are easily accessible to "Americans on a lark" (280)--indeed, they are "Just across the street [from where] Mexico began" (274)--yet they are still perceived as so distant and "foreign" as to mark for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty the boundary of their journey, "the end of the road" (276). Ironically, Sal's and Dean's reactions to Mexico anticipate Acosta's protagonist Oscar's initial reactions to Mexico and Mexican identity for he, too, essentializes, exoticizes, and is "blinded with love" for the "old women with ancient Indian faces" and "old men with sombreros" (Acosta, Autobiography 188-89); in other words, he relates to Mexicans in Juarez as if they are Kerouac's "fellahin."(1) Critics such as Rachel Adams and Ramon Saldivar also note Acosta's disconcerting representation of Mexico, but differentiate him from Kerouac and other Beat precursors because, at the end of Acosta's novel, his protagonist "translates the feeling of displacement that stimulates him to travel into the basis for alignment with a political movement" (Adams 71).(2) I understand the impetus to highlight Acosta's call for collective solutions to the identity crisis his protagonist and other Chicanos face, and the text's (supposed) final rejection of individualism. However, contrary to interpretations of The Autobiography that emphasize a turn to collectivist politics, I propose that Oscar never abandons American individualism for a collective political movement because he disavows nationalism or nativism of any type as false consciousness. Oscar cannot regard identity--his, the Chicano community's, or "American"--in separatist terms, which is why his commitment to the Chicano militants and the Chicano movement dissolves so quickly. This is true for Acosta as well. Even in The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973), which documents Acosta's involvement in the movement after he returns from his solipsistic road trip, and which ostensibly charts his move to Chicano militancy, the contradictory position he takes earlier in The Autobiography asserts itself. Thus, the more important split between Acosta and his Anglo literary counterparts is not that his protagonist develops a newfound affiliation with a political movement at the novel's close but rather that Oscar develops a syncretic, complex understanding of Chicano and, therefore, American identity while on the road. …