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Cockroach Aztlán: Oscar Zeta Acosta's Queer Take on the Indexical Trace and Chicano Nationalism

In 1971, Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz took Oscar Zeta Acosta’s portrait for the cover of his first novel Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. The photograph that ended up on the front cover shows Acosta from the waist up, wearing nothing but an undershirt, his arms crossed like a tough guy staring down the barrel of Leibovitz’s camera (fig. 1). The back cover of the hardback edition, however, shows Acosta in a number of different poses (fig. 2). Making lewd hand gestures and pulling faces, Acosta is the confident and cocky fictional Chicano hero that he writes about in his novels come to life, and standing tall, his thumbs hooked nonchalantly in his belt loops, Acosta is, as Latino studies scholar Ilan Stavans puts it, ‘‘the bronze superman,’’ the rebel leader of the new Chicano nation (1). But, Acosta is also a figure of gentle vulnerability. Pictured half-undressed and semi-exposed, Acosta seems poised on the verge of revealing himself to the American public. Capturing both the strength and the tenderness of this new, larger-thanlife activist hero and literary celebrity, Leibovitz would be given the tonguein-cheek ‘‘honor’’ of being named Acosta’s official photographer in the preface to Autobiography, which would come out the following year. I begin with Acosta and Leibovitz’s photography session to demonstrate Acosta’s ability to masterfully and vicariously manipulate indexical media— those media that share a causal relationship to their referents and that are often associated with objectivity and realism—in order to reveal the multifaceted nature of Chicano masculinity. Though the photograph of Acosta that made the book’s cover shares much with both the mass media’s stereotypical representation of the Chicano male as a ‘‘bandito’’ and with literary critics’ conventional analysis of Acosta’s hyper-masculine persona, the images that grace the back cover suggest altogether different visions of the author. By reframing