Rodriguez, whose documentary about Acosta, “The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo,” aired on PBS in 2018, describes the books as sacred texts, elliptical and strange but revelatory in their candor. They offer a rare perspective from a period when very few Mexican-Americans were getting published. They are slippery and unclassifiable and, in places, wildly bigoted and misogynistic. They have become controversial classics, as canonical in Chicano literature as Thompson’s work is in any New Journalism syllabus. He had a voice.” Acosta went on to write two novels: “ The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo,” a semi-fictional account of his upbringing, published in 1972, and “ The Revolt of the Cockroach People,” a roman à clef about the Chicano movement, published in 1973. “I did it because I thought he was a good writer. “I did not have the idea to publish his autobiography because I was trying to mollify Oscar or get rid of him in some way,” Rinzler told me recently. “He has taken my best lines and has used me. “My God! Hunter has stolen my soul!” he told Alan Rinzler, the head of Straight Arrow Books, a division of Rolling Stone. He believed that Thompson had helped himself to Acosta’s sensibility and personality-and then erased his identity. Much of the dialogue in “Fear and Loathing” was reproduced verbatim from tape recordings that Thompson had made of his conversations with Acosta as an actor-participant in Thompson’s gonzo experiment, Acosta felt he had shaped the book in substantive ways. But, according to Acosta’s family and others close to him, the grievances were more far-reaching. cops and the whole California legal establishment he was constantly at war with,” Thompson later wrote, insisting that “the only thing that bothered” Acosta about the book was that Thompson had made him Samoan. “My only reason for describing him in the book as a 300-pound Samoan instead of a 250-pound Chicano lawyer was to protect him from the wrath of the L.A. Thompson said that it was too late to change the text, but he and Random House agreed to the latter request: the book went to press with a black-and-white photo on the back cover of Acosta and Thompson sitting in the bar at Caesars Palace, in front of two empty shot glasses and a saltshaker. He also wanted his name and his photograph to be clearly displayed on the book’s dust jacket. “By contrast, Hunter was playing in a ski resort.”Īcosta did not object to being portrayed as a drug-guzzling maniac. “That’s what you call big fucking huevos,” the filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez, who directed a documentary about Acosta, told me. Accounts of Thompson’s storied campaign for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, rarely note that Acosta did it first, and at far greater risk. In 1970, he ran for county sheriff on a pledge to dismantle the sheriff’s department. He was known to show up in court barefoot, often with a pistol and occasionally on acid he had the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli, printed on his business cards. In the course of his work on those and other cases, Acosta had subpoenaed more than a hundred Superior Court judges in Los Angeles County, intending to prove that the grand-jury system discriminated against Mexican-Americans.
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walkouts-in which as many as twenty thousand students walked out of several public high schools, to protest inequities in the educational system-and the “ Biltmore Six,” who were accused of setting fires in the Biltmore hotel in 1969 during a visit from Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. He had helped defend both the “ Eastside Thirteen,” who were indicted on conspiracy charges for their involvement in the East L.A.
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But, when Acosta received the manuscript, he was incensed-not about the accounts of drug use or criminal behavior but because Thompson had transformed him into a “300-pound Samoan.”Īcosta, a Mexican-American lawyer, was a high-profile figure in the Chicano civil-rights movement. Gonzo, who commits a variety of crimes while tripping on illegal drugs, and they wanted Acosta to agree not to sue for libel. Random House’s lawyers were concerned about Thompson’s depiction of Dr. Rolling Stone had published “Fear and Loathing” in two parts the previous fall, but by then Acosta was spending much of his time in Mexico, and he was unlikely to have seen it. Gonzo, the flamboyant sidekick to Thompson’s alter ego in the book, Raoul Duke.
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Acosta had accompanied Thompson on his reporting trips to Las Vegas he was the inspiration for Dr. Thompson’s “ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in 1972, Random House sent a copy to Oscar (Zeta) Acosta. Shortly before the publication of Hunter S.