For all of you my google-impaired friends, here goes a quote:
Today I finished Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta, who was a zealous Chicano attorney who defended a lot of political cases, who ran for L.A. County Sheriff in the '60's, and who subpoenaed every single judge in the State of California, essentially stating that they were all racist, especially with regards to choosing grand juries. (This happened when a prominent Chicano leader, Corky Gonzales, was on trial for conspiracy to incite a riot, which happened in the aftermath of the killing of a Chicano journalist, Ruben Salazar.) Zeta is actually the inspiration from which Hunter S. Thompson created Dr. Gonzo, a character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
But it is a deep, deep book, and reading it really helps in making sense of L.A.(not to claim that I have any sense of it, though I have to say, I know more than I did before) and history in general, and I cannot hope to do justice to it in the space of a pathetic little blog entry, but I will pull out snippets of what touched me.
La vida no es la que vivimos, la vida es el honor y el recuerdo. Por eso mas vale morir con el pueblo vivo, y no vivir con el pueblo muerto. Life is not as it seems, life is pride and personal history. Thus it is better that one die and that the people should live, rather than one live and the people die.) -- A sign hanging by the door in the chapel in Delano in which Cesar Chavez fasted, originally from an inscription marking where Lopitos was assassinated outside of Acapulco.
I don't think it's very relevant.
