Lessons from Gonzo History: ‘The Revolt of the Cockroach People’ by Oscar Zeta Acosta

Meet Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Esq. — aka the Brown Buffalo, aka Zeta, aka Dr. Gonzo — a self-described left-wing radical whose business card in 1970 read “Chicano Attorney,” declaring both his identity and his clientele at a time when proper lawyers did neither.

“The Revolt of the Cockroach People” (1973) is his roman à clef retelling of events in Los Angeles from 1968 to ’70 that might as easily have happened this past summer.

“I’m billed as the only revolutionary lawyer this side of the Gulf of Mexico,” says Acosta’s protagonist and alter ego, Zeta. “And it’s true: I’m the only one who actually hates the law.”

Acosta grew up picking fruit in the Central Valley, did a hitch in the Air Force, then went to law school. His time as a legal aid attorney in Oakland made him question the utility of working within the system, and in 1968 he moved to L.A. to join the growing Chicano Movement, which the LAPD “called more dangerous than the Black Panthers,” according to Hunter S. Thompson in his introduction.

“Even the most conservative of the old-line Mexican-Americans were suddenly calling themselves Chicanos and getting their first taste of tear gas at La Raza demonstrations,” Thompson wrote.

Acosta defended the Chicano 13 in the L.A. public school strikes when students demanded their history be incorporated into the curriculum and for a bilingual society, as stated (or at least implied) in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ceded what is now the Southwest to the United States. He did the same again for protesters arrested during an August 1970 march of 30,000 demonstrators, “the largest anti-war action taken by a single ethnic group in the USA,” according to historian Lorena Oropeza, until larger pro-immigration protests in 2006.

But this book is more about Zeta’s, or Acosta’s, self-doubts and evolution even as he represents El Movimiento. As an attorney, he is defending jailed protesters against the backdrop of Cesar Chavez and Vietnam, Kent State, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. He is also working in a system that, as an activist, he wants to dismantle.

This contradiction is on display when he asks other activists to picket City Hall while he tries a case. They don’t see the point in getting busted for nothing.

“There’s no law that says we can’t have a picket line,” Zeta says.

“Then why are your guys in jail?” a law student asks.

That moment is a distant mirror for what Bill Essayli, President Trump’s interim U.S. Attorney in L.A., told staff in June about what turned out to be his baseless pursuit of indictments against anti-ICE protesters — “F*** the (Department of) Justice Manual!” — according to The Guardian and four current and former prosecutors quoted in Bloomberg.

Essayli's sentiment should alleviate any doubts a reader may have about Acosta’s writing style. His sanguine deployment of slurs, profanity, and gratuitous sex scenes (doubtless demanded by anxious editors to boost sales) is more than language recreating his world — they are bolts of lightning hurled by an angry god to drive unbelievers into action.

Zeta tells a KMEX TV reporter, called Roland Zanzibar, about the Cockroach People. “You know, the little beasts that everyone steps on. … I found that some Chicanos in the city have a misconception of (whites) that we farmworkers could never have. They don’t quite realize they have an enemy while, in the country, the Chicano knows from birth he is a lowdown cockroach.”

Zanzibar is a stand-in for the real journalist Rubén Salazar, who was killed by police after a protest, leading to even larger protests. Acosta was later jailed for contempt of court, an experience he recreates by describing incarceration in downtown L.A. with a realism so raw it’s easy to believe someone treated like a cockroach might start acting like one.

But it is Zeta the litigator’s work at a coroner’s inquest that showcases Acosta the writer’s talent as an advocate.

Zeta represents the family of a Chicano kid who died in police custody, another reflection of real life. The police say he hanged himself in his cell, in the presence of other prisoners, only hours after his arrest and before he was charged. Acosta’s recreation of the autopsy is eyewitness trauma, written in a way that cannot be reprinted here. He captures what the dead boy was to his killers by detailing what he has become in death. He is no longer a person or even a symbol. He is a lost cause.

Zeta becomes something of a lost cause himself. After the inquest clears the police, he and a couple of vatos (guys/dudes/bros) mix up some Molotov cocktails in their empty whisky bottles and cruise the barrio looking for something to burn. Their talk turns to shooting a cop in revenge, any cop.

“But why does it have to be a cop? I’m for shooting any gabacho (foreigner/white) we see,” says one of his companions. “What difference does it make? You think the pigs give a s*** who we are? When they bust us or beat us, you think they ask who we are?”

Zeta steers them away from that path with an even crazier plan: Running for L.A. County Sheriff.

Acosta’s real-life crusade was to eliminate the department, a quixotic endeavor he relives in the novel. “Cockroaches from Hollywood and Venice, vatos from car clubs, elderly churgoers, nuns and hippies," all helped push his one-issue campaign. 

He wanted a new People’s Protection Department. “I would enlist the aid of the community to find ways to protect ourselves from the violence of our society. Obviously, the answer is not more tanks, helicopters, and tear gas.”

Sounds like defunding the police. Or at least de-militarizing it. 

Zeta loses the election in the book, as in life, where Acosta came in second with some 100,000 votes to the incumbent’s 1.3 million, but he beat out a serving police chief who also ran.

In the days that followed, Hunter Thompson took him on a road trip to Las Vegas for an extended interview, as Thompson reported in “Strange Rumblings in Aztlán” (Rolling Stone, April 29, 1971). He later memorialized their experience in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” casting Acosta as the original Dr. Gonzo, the eponymous inspiration for what became a different kind of journalism to report on a society confronting old challenges in new ways.