Pocho

The narrative now switches to the perspective of Juan Rubio’s son Richard as he makes his way home from his first confession. He’s a sensitive and thoughtful boy, interested in plants and animals and the big questions of life. He’s confused in the wake of his confession: The priest got angry with him when he agreed that he liked to “play with himself,” and that he also played with his sister. When he asks his mother why, she’s confused too—until Richard realizes that the priest meant “play with” the way that some older girls once played with him, when they took all their clothes off. His mother is furious with him, and Richard is confused and frightened. Richard thinks back on many incidents of fear and shame around sex: for instance, believing that something terrible had happened to his mother while she was giving birth, thinking a spider might have bitten her.

Richard’s happiest times are with his father:

He loved his mother. She was always there when he needed her and her arms and her songs were warmth and comfort and security, but with his father it was a different thing, because pleasure is far different from security (42).

Through his father’s friendship with the families who come through town to pick fruit, Richard gets a sense of Mexican culture. He also learns about death when a visiting friend dies of peritonitis. State officials take his coffin away, refusing to allow his family to bury him. Richard sees the man’s ghost in the backyard that same night: “[H]is face was very white, because he did not have any blood. He did not talk and Richard did not talk, but he knew don Tomás wanted him to put him back in his grave” (45).

The Depression sets in, and a local barn that has fallen into disrepair becomes a headquarters for an Unemployed Council. This well-intentioned body falls into petty squabbles (often along racial lines) and is at last taken over by a Communist leader who arrives from San Francisco. This man rallies the locals for a hunger march on Sacramento. Richard is impressed by this, and by the wide range of people who come to the meetings; he observes “hobos” courteously taking only a little of the free dinner, and befriends some black immigrants from the Southern states.

Civil disobedience gets a foothold: The people of Santa Clara overturn and raid a food truck, and Richard and his father join in a farm workers’ strike for higher wages, during which they fight with the police. Richard must then defend Juan Rubio’s friend Victor, who kills a police officer. Richard bravely refuses to admit to the police that he saw anything. After this, the eventual hunger march seems like small potatoes to the young boy.

The chapter begins with a confrontation between Richard and his mother. Consuelo is concerned for Richard: She can see that he loves books and education more than anything, but soon he’ll have to leave school and work. She offers him a vision of a future in which he can have a nice house and support his family, but Richard rejects this: “I have to learn as much as I can, so that I can live...learn for me, for myself” (64). Consuelo is confused and saddened by this—and all the more so when Richard confesses that he has doubts about God.

Later, Richard observes as the children playing on his street, led by a tough little girl named Zelda, bully a couple of new kids, Ronnie and Mary, who are Protestant and therefore outsiders. Richard tries to stop Zelda, but she runs him off; Juan Rubio beats him for running from a girl, and sends him back outside, where Zelda roughs him up.

The new children keep to themselves after this, until the school librarian introduces Mary and Richard. Richard shocks Mary with his disrespectful and weirdly adult conversation, but she nevertheless befriends him.

Mary visits Richard’s home, and the two discuss books, learning new languages, and their shared ambition to be writers when they grow up. Richard often offends Mary’s sensibilities with his insistence on directness—for instance, calling horseshit “horseshit” and not “manure,” as Mary’s mother would insist. Despite their differences, Mary declares, “[Y]ou and I are going to be best friends” (76).

Mary returns home and describes her time at Richard’s house to her parents. Her uptight, snobbish mother isn’t impressed, wishing to preserve a separation between her family and the neighborhood “riff-raff”; her father is more indulgent. Mary, for her part, declares that she is going to marry Richard one day.