Acosta's Moment of Clarity

I wanted to jump off of what Virginia discussed about Acosta’ identity. He talk about how his life’s “single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation and with any part of history” (199). These three identities—individual, country and history—are symbolic of Acosta’s pervading struggles throughout the novel.

Individually, Acosta is insecure and stalling in life. Physically, he is a fat brown man with health problems in a skinny, white world where the prejudices are obviously stacked up against him. Internally, his quest to find out who he really is has left him restless. Acosta states how “I can make any kind of face you ask. After all, I’ve been a football player, a drunk, a preacher, a mathematician, a musician, a lawyer… and a brown buffalo” (197). His insecurities (and the vanities that accompany them) have accompanied his jumping around from job to job in life with no real purpose. Culturally, Acosta is a man split between his Mexican and American heritage. While born American, he has always been on the outside as a “wetback” or “spic.” He is “neither a Mexican or an American. I am neither a Catholic or a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a brown buffalo by choice” (199). Instead, he classifies everyone else into their ethnicities to disassociate himself from them to attempt to find pinpoint his own identity. Historically, Acosta’s discontent with his cultural (mis)identity was resonating with other Mexican-Americans. He had tried to fit in with different jobs, by turning to drugs, and by taking a road trip to get away, but the times had not changed. While he could relate to Dylan’s music, Acosta is frustrated with the era in which he lives.

The exact moment when all of Acosta’s internal struggles collide and intertwine is the sole moment of clarity (and arguably, the climax) in the novel. By actively taking control of the Chicano revolution in L.A., Acosta finds the life-long answer to his multi-faceted identity problem. For him, it is as if a “bomb explodes in my head. Flashes of lightening. Stars in my eyes. I see it all before me” (196). He alludes to the future and to an inspiration for changing the times. His ultimate decision of identification of a brown buffalo finds a balance between his internal individual, cultural, and time crises. By fully endorsing and accepting the brown buffalo and the movement it symbolizes, Acosta finally finds himself. For the first time in the entire novel, he is not longer listless, but afire with purpose.