OSCAR ZETA ACOSTA (1935-I974)

Oscar Zeta Acosta was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1935 but moved with his family to Riverbank (now part of Modesto), California, at the age of five. After attending Oakdale Joint Union High School, Acosta turned down a music scholarship to the University of Southern California, instead enlisting in the United States Air Force (as a member of the Air Force Band), primarily so that he could continue to be involved with an Anglo woman whose parents disapproved of him. After their relationship ended a year later, Acosta sought solace in religion, converting from Catholicism to the Baptist faith and becoming a preacher. Shipped to Panama in part because of his overzealous attempts to convert other Catholic soldiers, Acosta became a minister at a leper colony and was honorably discharged from the air force in 1956. After a suicide attempt prompted by his loss of faith, Acosta met Betty Daves in a Modesto hospital and married her shortly thereafter. In 1965, the then-divorced Acosta began studying law at night at San Francisco Law School and became an attorney for the East Oakland Legal Aid Society. Two years later, he quit his law practice to wander around the Southwest in search of a vision; after being briefly jailed in Mexico, Acosta assumed a new identity — Buffalo Z. Brown — and became a political activist in Los Angeles and a leader of the Chicano Movement. In 1969, he met his second wife, Socorro Anguiniga. After unsuccessfully running for Los Angeles County sheriff (as an independent, on an anarchist platform) in 1970, Acosta befriended Hunter S. Thompson and accompanied him on the trip that would be preserved for posterity in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In June 1974, he disappeared in Mazatlan, Mexico and was never seen again.