Oscar “Zeta” Acosta: The Uncollected Works

About the Book

Oscar “Zeta” Acosta: The Uncollected Works gathers unpublished stories, essays, letters, poems and a teleplay written by Acosta (1935-1974), the legendary Chicano attorney, political activist and writer. All of these works were written between the early 1960s and shortly before his mysterious disappearance in Mazatalán, Mexico, in 1974.

Through these writings Acosta reveals a variety of personae: a leader troubled by issues of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity; a man who saw himself as a Robin Hood of Mexican Americans; an unstable yet genial wanderer who joined Hunter S. Thompson in a search for the American Dream. Acosta realized that democracy is about speaking out, about feeling uncomfortable, about defining others and oneself through the prism of race and history.

With the publication of Oscar “Zeta” Acosta: The Uncollected Works, the complete picture of a crucial player in the Chicano Movement—described by others as “our Thomas Aquinas” and by himself as “the Brown Buffalo”—finally emerges.