Ilan Stavans - Bandido: The Death and Resurrection of Oscar Zeta Acosta

Oscar Zeta Acosta and the Chicano Experience

First published 1995 by IconEditions

Published 2021 by Routledge
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Copyright 1995 Ilan Stavans

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Designed by Alma Hochhauser Orenstein

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stavans, Ilan.
Bandido: Oscar Zeta Acosta & the Chicano experience / Ilan Stavans.
1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Acosta, Oscar Zeta. 2. Mexican AmericansWest (U.S.)Biography. 3.
Mexican AmericansWest (U.S.)Ethnic identity. 4. West (U.S.)Biography.
I. Title.
CT275.A186S73 1995
978'.0046872073'0092dc20
[B] 95-21741

ISBN 13: 978-0-3670-0264-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-0-3671-5251-2 (pbk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429032509

BANDIDO

DOI: 10.4324/9780429032509-1

Excess. Nothing works like excess. A few surviving photographs, part of a portfolio of Annie Leibovitz, show him as a Tennessee Williams type. He's obese, barefooted, dark skinned, and angryin todays world, an all-American character, at once extravagant and immoderate. His pants are baggy, his hair jumbled, his belt overused, his thumbs inside his pockets, his facial gesture openly defiant. He personifies a proto-mestizo, what the early twentieth-century Mexican thinker and educator Jos Vasconcelos envisioned, in Nietzschean terms, as el superhombre de hronce: a Bronze Superman. Somehow he reminds me of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, as played by Marlon Brando. A Stanley looking for his southern belle, his Blanche du Bois. A dynamic, vibrant Stanley, annoyed by pretensions of gentility. A flirtatious yet angiy Stanley. Zeta is in his undershirt, elegant suit pants, excited but probably a bit worried about his ulcers, with pronounced lines in his forehead. He is thirty-eight. Although worn out, he still champions a mysterious aura.!Qu cbula! What a crazy dude, a vato loco! He is finally ready to put away his ghostlike identity to emerge as a recognized name in mainstream culture, a desire he has nourished for decades. It's 1972, and once the photo study by Leibovitzwhom Zeta would call, in his rsum and in brief bios, not without a hint of pretentiousness, "my official photographer"has been taken, he will wait impatiently. Metaphorically, Leibovitzs lens is a mirror in front of which Zeta stands naked, contemplating the deterioration of his physical self. Has his life been plentiful? Does his entire existential journey make any sense? Has he made the most of his yo mexicano, his inner, south-of-the-border self? How has he been able to reconcile his rambunctious past with the future he hopes to achieve? How many more days are left in his private calendar? How many more LSD trips will he undergo? And where is he going now? He will survive only a couple of years more, no more. Nobody will be sure about his final fate. He will be involved in drug trafficking, and during a trip on a friend's boat, in June 1974, from Mazatln, a resort place on Mexico's Pacific coast, to Southern California, he will disappear, strangely and without trace. (The back cover of the 1989 paperback edition of his two published books mistakenly claim his death year to be 1971.) A