Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) offers a fictional dramatization of two of the Chicano Movement’s most defining historical moments: the LA student walkouts and the death of Ruben Salazar, a Chicano journalist. This essay analyzes how Acosta’s narrator and stand-in, Buffalo Zeta Brown, contests the criminalizing legal narratives about Chicanxs produced by courts in the aftermath of both events. As Brown navigates the legal networks that criminalize Chicanxs, he builds a narrative infrastructure that shapes counterstories of the community that are later dismantled when the courts attempt to violently neutralize the Chicano Movement’s early legal victories following the death of Roland Zanzibar, a stand-in for Salazar. The essay argues, analyzing Brown’s attempts to tell stories about Chicanxs in the courts and a candidate for public office, that the state insists on authoring the preconditions of Chicanx democratic participation in ways that betray the experiences of the protesters who inspire Acosta’s militants. Acosta illustrates how democratic participation only comes at the expense of authorship and underscores how, when democracy is in crisis, the novel serves as a flexible outlet for counterstories never authorized as fact by institutions charged with safeguarding the state’s monopoly on legal narrative.When the story [Brown] seeks to tell about Chicanxs conflicts with the stock narratives that the courts and their auxiliary bodies favor, authorship is revealed to be the cost of democratic participation.
The interpretation of documents holds together the center of Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines (2003). Presented as time-stamped vignettes detailing the life of laborers at a vineyard for an university assignment, the novel throws into question the distance between the experiences the characters have and those accessible to Leonardo, the ethnographer-in-training. In Crossing Vines, queer migrant characters such as Aníbal and Moreno develop a narrative agency over access to details that the government or ethnographer might solicit in these narrative gaps. Analyzing González’s use of character’s institutional and personal archives, such as Permanent Resident Cards/green cards, photographs, and Leonardo’s ethnography, I argue that despite offering competing narratives about migrant life, these documents methodologically limit how queer migrants are textually represented and interpreted. Crossing Vines critiques the institutional processes by which migrant stories are gathered, interpreted, and violently cross-examined to foreground the blurred lines between studying and surveilling migrant communities. Whereas Leonardo’s project and the inspection of green cards puts pressure on the migrants in the novel to disclose information to produce or cross-reference an institutional archive, González asks us to put the limitations of the documents under scrutiny. In representing what these archives cannot, Crossing Vines makes a case for the utility and centrality of fiction in attending to the often intentional oversights of institutional archives, including those in our own fields of study.
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