The Figure of the Vato Loco and the Representation of Ethnicity in the Narratives of Oscar Z. Acosta

As a number of critics have pointed out, the pachuco, the zoot-suited, calo-speaking urban gang member who appeared in barrios large and small from Los Angeles to Chicago in the 1940s, and his descendants, the vato loco - literally a "crazy guy" - and the lowrider, are persistent types in Chicano literature.(1) The use of these related types in Chicano writing varies considerably. In Jose Villarreal's Pocho, the pachuco is basically a figure of cultural degeneration. The vato loco Mario in Ron Arias's The Road to Tamazunchale (1973) is a Sancho Panza-like assistant who, to the degree that anything in the novel can be taken to have a stable representational value, embodies a down to earth humanism and good-heartedness. In the Hernandez brothers' series of comic book short stories Love and Rockets, the vato Speedy Ortiz is basically decent but caught up in codes of machismo and self-destructive behavior which ultimately cause him to commit suicide. Ortiz provides a specifically Chicano barrio "authenticity" which frames stories that would otherwise be grounded in a generic West Coast punk subculture despite the fact that most of the important characters of those stories set in the United States are Chicanas.(2) Tino Villaneuva's poem "Pachuco Remembered," in Hoy otra voz Poems, eulogizes the pachuco as a forerunner of the Chicano Movement. In all these cases, however negative or positive the author's portrayal might be, there is a general fascination with the physical, visual and verbal energies of pachuco or the vato loco. The pachuco, the vato and the lowrider are also useful to Chicano writers as visible figures of self-consciously asserted Chicano difference from both Mexican culture and "mainstream" United States culture. Nonetheless these types are problematic, if not actually negative, for many Chicano authors. The pachuco and the vato are not presented as merely anti-social or self-destructive but also, from the zoot suits of the 1940s to the bandannas and plaid shirts of the 1980s, as figuring a strident sense of difference constructed with cultural materials - language, clothing, music, dances, etc. - from substantially, if not predominantly, non-Mexican sources. The problem is not just that the pachuco and the vato represent for different writers an increasing deviation from or a corruption of a variously defined essential Mexican culture, but also that the sense of difference that the pachuco and the vato proclaim is culturally interactive and extremely fluid, resisting both assimilation and various cultural nationalist notions of origins, tradition and ethnic identity. Also, while the popular media has sensationally associated the pachuco and the vato loco with gang violence since, at least, the Sleepy Lagoon Case in the 1940s, Chicano writers have almost always treated the pachuco and the vato as extreme rugged individualists. This too obviously presents problems in using the pachuco and the vato to figure a racial or national unity instead of a strictly negative resistance.(3) Oscar Zeta Acosta, on the other hand, seizes upon this instability and individualism in The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973). Acosta uses the figure of the vato loco to articulate a possible Chicano identity even after he has ruthlessly deconstructed various essentialist or static models of Chicano identity in Revolt and his earlier book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972). Thus, the figure of the vato takes on unusual significance in Revolt, even given its general importance as a type in Chicano narrative. Buffalo Zeta Brown, the novel's narrator, articulates his obsessive involvement with the vatos in no uncertain terms: Right now the bastards are probably brewing up some molotov for tonight's action and here I'm being called the mastermind .... Those guys wouldn't do what I told them to do if their lives depended on it. They are vatos locos! Nobody tells crazy guys what to do.... It is they who have converted me and driven me to this brink of madness. …