Thursday, October 30, 2008
Acosta - a brown buffalo?
Throughout the book the author classifies people based on their race, sexual orientation and nationality, making those things seem the most important features of a person. He even classifies himself right from the title - Brown Buffalo. He is big and brown and that is all we need to know about him. On page 86 he explains the reason for naming people: "The name was not meant as an insult. It was simply a means of classification... Everyone in the valley considers skin color to be of ultimate importance. The tone of one's pigmentation is the fastest and surest way of determining exactly who he is." The irony of those words is that they are right after he describes the difficulty others have with classifying him. Some considered him Mexican, others - easterner and so on. The only thing that was true for all those "classifications" was that nobody classified him as the same as themselves. The Mexicans thought he was easterner, the easterners - that he was Mexican. It seems that they were naming him not to classify him for who he is but rather for what they don't want to be. Acosta seems to be doing the same thing - he only names people with names that don't refer to himself - fag, jew, etc. So what I was wondering is whether by naming himself a brown buffalo he is not just disassociating himself from brown fat people?
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3 comments:
That's an interesting way to look at his self-classification. I would have taken it the other way, that by casting himself like he casts others, he then gives himself a concrete identity of who, and what culture, he represents. This association, however, could work with your idea of disassociation. It is interesting that, while born in the United States, he never speaks of himself as American. Instead, he associates himself with brown and fat people, while concurrently disassociating himself from American society.
Acosta was also classified as an African-American and was called "Jigaboo". Acosta is mistaken due to his skin color during the summer- "when brown buffalos ran practically naked in the sweltering heat of the San Joaquin Valley" (85). Acosta uses a fake name and calls himself Somoan when he is on the run. Acosta acquires the feeling of confusion about his identity after years of people mistaking his ethnicity.
I think it is interesting that Acosta constantly mentions the fact that people around him cannot determine his cultural identity from simply taking a look at him. Acosta mentions that people have labelled him a variety of nationalities, but he seems to pride himself in the fact that no one has ever called him a spic or a greaser. It becomes evident throughout the story that he does not feel bad about the fact that he is almost too grotesque (his physical attributes) to be part of the norm, but he does characterize himself as being different than everyone else. Perhaps Acosta is tryng to hide his own insecurities in his own autbiography?
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