Turn on, Tune in and Drop out in East Los Angeles: Reflexive Nationalism and Urban Space in Oscar Zeta Acosta's The Revolt of the Cockroach People

Oscar Zeta Acosta's second novel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, illustrates the diverging factions within the resistance movement of Chicanas/os during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas rural Chicanas/os were fighting peacefully for higher wages and an improvement of their working conditions, urban activists aimed to revolutionize class and race relations, drawing on violence if necessary. Acosta's novel focuses on the activism of the West Coast, particularly the members of the urban resistance in East Los Angeles. Their experiences illustrate how difference is inscribed into, and simultaneously reproduced by, the city, creating conditions that lead to the emergence of resistance. This article aims to elucidate the reflexive nationalism promoted by the protagonist of the novel, a mode of critical thinking about the nation which enables a possible means of counter-hegemony for urban Chicanas/os and which takes transnational connectivities into consideration.