Chicanx Counterstories: Legal Narrative in Oscar Zeta Acosta’sThe Revolt of the Cockroach People

Abstract

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.