The Revolt of the Cockroach People

The further adventures of “Dr. Gonzo” as he defends the “cucarachas”— the Chicanos of East Los Angeles.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo" a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.

In this exhilarating sequel to The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Acosta takes us behind the front lines of the militant Chicano movement of the late sixties and early seventies, a movement he served both in the courtroom and on the barricades. Here are the brazen games of "chicken" Acosta played against the Anglo legal establishment; battles fought with bombs as well as writs; and a reluctant hero who faces danger not only from the police but from the vatos locos he champions. What emerges is at once an important political document of a genuine popular uprising and a revealing, hilarious, and moving personal saga."Acosta has entered counterculture folklore:"

-- Saturday Review of LiteratureBorn in 1935, Oscar Zeta Acosta was an activist in the Chicano Movement and an attorney. His friendship with Hunter S. Thompson provided fodder for that author’s best-known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Acosta was dramatized as the eccentric Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo. Acosta disappeared in Mexico in 1974 and is presumed dead.