El Paso’s Most Wild Friendship: Oscar “Zeta” Acosta and Hunter S. Thompson

It is National Best Friends Day, and while you might be thinking about texting your ride-or-die, El Paso gave the world one of the most legendary, chaotic, and complicated friendships in American literary history. One of the duo was born right here in the Sun City. The other immortalized him in one of the most iconic countercultural novels ever written. Together, they accidentally defined an era.

This is the story of Oscar "Zeta" Acosta and Hunter S. Thompson.

By Photograph credited to "Cashman Photo Enterprises, Inc." Published by Random House. - Originally published on the back of the dust jacket for the 1972 first edition of Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published by Random House. Scan via Hakes Auctions (original jpg). Cropped and retouched by uploader; see unretouched original in upload history below., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93129793

Who Was Oscar "Zeta" Acosta, El Paso's Brown Buffalo?

Oscar Acosta Fierro was born on April 8, 1935, in El Paso, Texas. His parents, Manuel and Juanita Acosta, had roots in Mexico, and El Paso was where their family first planted roots in the United States. The family later relocated to Riverbank, a small farming town in California's San Joaquin Valley, where Oscar grew up harvesting peaches and navigating a racially divided community that made him acutely aware of what it meant to be Mexican American in mid-century America.

He joined the Air Force after high school, later became the first person in his family to attend college, and eventually earned a law degree from San Francisco Law School. He passed the California Bar exam in 1966. From there, his life accelerated into something that reads more like fiction than biography.

By 1968, Acosta had moved to East Los Angeles and thrown himself into the Chicano Movement, becoming one of its most combustible and committed legal voices. He represented the East L.A. 13, a group of students and activists arrested following the East L.A. Blowouts, a series of walkouts protesting unequal conditions in the school system. He took on police brutality cases. He subpoenaed 70 Los Angeles County Superior Court judges, challenging the institutional racism baked into the grand jury selection process. In 1970, he ran for Sheriff of Los Angeles County and received more than 100,000 votes.

By Jacket design not credited - Scan via These Days LA, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=170208479

He called himself the Brown Buffalo, a self-deprecating reference to being, in his own words, "a fat, dark Mexican" with the resilient, stubborn strength of the buffalo. It was a name that stuck.

The Friendship That Changed American Literature

In 1967, Acosta met a journalist and author named Hunter S. Thompson. The two connected immediately, drawn together by a shared appetite for chaos, justice, and adventure that most people would run from. Thompson recognized in Acosta something he described years later with characteristic Thompson flair: "Yeah, that's him, folks — my boy, my brother, my partner in too many crimes."

In 1971, Thompson wrote a piece for Rolling Stone magazine called "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," investigating the death of Mexican American journalist Ruben Salazar and the racism of the Los Angeles Police Department. He used Acosta as a key source. While working on the article, the two decided they needed to get out of Los Angeles, away from any police surveillance, to talk freely. Their solution was to drive to Las Vegas.

That trip to Las Vegas became the foundation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson's most famous work and a pillar of gonzo journalism. In the book, Thompson fictionalized himself as journalist Raoul Duke and Acosta as his attorney, described as a "300-pound Samoan" and given the alias Dr. Gonzo.

There was just one problem. Acosta was not Samoan. He was a proud Mexican American man who had spent his entire career fighting for Chicano identity and visibility, and his best friend had just erased his ethnicity in front of the entire country.

The Friendship Gets Complicated

Acosta was furious. He initially refused to allow the book to be published. The dispute was not just personal. It cut to the core of everything Acosta had been fighting for. He had given his life to the argument that Mexican American identity mattered, that it was worth seeing, worth protecting, worth going to court over. And then the most famous literary account of his life described him as someone else entirely.

He eventually agreed to allow publication, but only after negotiating a publishing deal for two books of his own. The result was Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo in 1972 and The Revolt of the Cockroach People in 1973. Both are now considered foundational works of Chicano literature.

By L. Ashley - Scan via Evergreen, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=170203983

Thompson later described Acosta in a 1977 Rolling Stone tribute with his usual strange blend of insult and love, calling him "a stupid, vicious quack with no morals at all and the soul of a hammerhead shark." Artist Ralph Steadman, who knew both men well, explained that this was simply how Thompson showed affection: "His way of expressing love for people was to be both angry and insulting."

The friendship never fully recovered from the Fear and Loathing dispute, but it never fully broke either.

The 1998 Film and Benicio Del Toro's Doughnut Method

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The 1998 Terry Gilliam film adaptation brought the story to a new generation. Johnny Depp played Thompson (as Raoul Duke), and Benicio Del Toro played Acosta (as Dr. Gonzo). Del Toro committed to the role with a dedication that nearly ended his career before it started. He put on weight by eating sixteen doughnuts a day, and the physical transformation was so convincing that Hollywood producers who met with him afterward assumed he was living badly in real life. It took him years to shake the perception.

The Disappearance That Has Never Been Explained

In May 1974, Oscar Zeta Acosta traveled to Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico. His last known contact was a phone call to his son Marco. He told him he was "about to board a boat full of white snow." He was never seen again.

His body was never found. Theories about what happened range from a drug deal gone wrong to political assassination to a cartel confrontation. His son believed he was likely killed after mouthing off to dangerous people. Other family members believed he was "disappeared" because of his politics. Thompson investigated the disappearance and wrote a tribute in 1977, but even he could not arrive at a definitive answer.

Acosta was 39 years old.

Thompson's eulogy for his friend, underneath all its characteristic venom, captured something real: "When the Brown Buffalo disappeared, we all lost one of those high notes that we will never hear again."

El Paso's Complicated Gift to American Culture

Oscar Zeta Acosta was born in El Paso, left young, and built a life of fire and fury far from the Sun City. His name is rarely mentioned in the same breath as other El Paso legends. But the city that sat at the crossing of two countries, that understood from its own geography what it meant to live between identities, is where this story begins.

He was a lawyer, an activist, a novelist, a Chicano hero, and the real Dr. Gonzo. He was also a deeply flawed human being who struggled with addiction, ego, and the weight of a movement on his shoulders. That complexity is part of what makes him worth knowing.

On National Best Friends Day, the wildest bromance in American literary history belongs, at least in its origins, to El Paso.

For more on Acosta's life, the PBS documentary The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo is available to stream and is well worth your time.