ABSTRACT
Oscar Zeta Acostaa wrote a number of short stories of various quality, hoping to place them either as a collection or interrelating them and thus approaching the volumes as a novel. "Perla Is a Pig" was Zeta's only published piece of short fiction and has great value in tracking his existential odyssey. Zeta's story is about his by then favorite topic: racial exclusion. It contains an underlying critique of the Mexican character that refuses to accept otherness. Racial exclusion and resistance began to take a fair amount of his attention. He was consciously shifting from a purely aesthetic to a more politically oriented approach to writing. Zeta introduces apocalyptic elements: the protagonists feel they inhabit an island a la Robinson Crusoe or, even better, William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
