Pocho

The chapter opens with a fight between Juan Rubio and Consuelo. It’s a fight founded on a misunderstanding: Consuelo is upset because she believes that Juan Rubio has been cheating on her, while Juan Rubio is angry because he hasn’t cheated on her, but he feels it’s not her right to even ask him what he does outside the home. In discussing this fight with his mother, Richard shockingly learns that domestic violence is a police matter in the US: “It was inconceivable to him that there were people who would interfere with a matrimony—with the affairs of a man and his woman” (93). Richard defends his father and the traditional mode, but then the reality of his mother’s situation breaks on him: Tradition truly imprisons his mother and sisters. The force of this truth is huge: “[H]e knew that he could never again be wholly Mexican, and furthermore he could never use the right he had as a male to tell his mother that she was wrong” (95).

Richard turns 12, and confronts a few other hard truths. While he likes to think that he’s a man now, he knows deep down that he’s scared of everything. Regardless, he daydreams about being a cowboy with a white horse. His father tells him that they’ll soon return to Mexico, and that he can have a horse there. Consuelo reminisces about her own horseback riding, and then about her and Juan Rubio’s early lives together in their home country. Juan Rubio’s memories are less sunny, and he remembers his anger with corrupt priests and his hatred of the oppressive Spanish. Richard is confused; they have many Spanish friends in the US. Juan Rubio explains to Richard that his objection to the Spanish was not because they were Spanish, but because they were in power, and abused their power. Richard feels a new understanding of his father. He ends the chapter moved and cheered both by this deeper connection, and by his parents’ shameless flirting; they’re getting along again.

As Richard grows up, his hunger for reading only intensifies. He’s a good student, and his teachers and his father encourage his love of books—though Juan Rubio also sometimes throws those same books out the window.

Richard goes to watch some amateur boxing matches in an empty barn, and finds himself reluctantly roped into a fight with his friend Thomas, which he summarily loses. However, he puts up a good enough show that the referee offers to take him on and train him. Richard resists this, annoyed, but the referee persists: Boxing, he says, is one of the only ways a person with a Mexican background can get ahead. Richard is unimpressed, and vows that he’ll obey no one’s rules but his own.

Richard has a new friend, also called Richard, but nicknamed Ricky. He’s the only kid in town brave enough to repeatedly challenge the terrifying Zelda, the neighborhood bully. Though Ricky has smarts, bravery, and charisma, Richard feels himself pulling away from his friend: Their values are starting to diverge. Ricky is mostly interested in style and money, and Richard greatly dislikes his anti-Semitism. The final fracture in their relationship comes when Richard casually and unsuspectingly mentions to Ricky that they love each other. Ricky can’t hear this as anything but a dangerous approach to “queerness,” which annoys Richard: “Aw, forget it, Ricky. You’re gonna be a kid all your life—just watch” (113).

The teenage boys in the neighborhood have all discovered masturbation (competitive public masturbation, even). Richard resists at first, but at last decides that a writer needs to have a lot of experiences, tries it himself, and quickly becomes an enthusiast. He enjoys reporting this sin during confession, and has an obscure sense that the priest gets a prurient charge from hearing these stories. Afterward, he stands up and walks away during Communion; he no longer believes in the way that the Church wants him to, but escape is not so easy: When his father falls ill, he blames himself, and superstitiously refrains from masturbating until Juan Rubio is well again (though he plays catch-up afterwards).

Meanwhile, Zelda is growing up, too, and the boys she leads start to harass her. At last, they bully her into having sex with all of them. After that, she removes herself from the group:

It was understood now that she did not belong in the way she had, and it was only on occasions when she especially missed the old joyfulness of their camaraderie that she joined them somewhere, usually at the Rubio barn, and paid with her body for their company (119).

Chapter 7 returns to Juan Rubio’s perspective. He goes on a visit to his friends Cirilo and Macedonia, who discuss their plan to move a couple of miles further inland and buy some land of their own. Juan Rubio thinks sadly of his life in Mexico, where “people were poor but [...] had not been destitute” (123), and where a village spirit prevailed; in California, everyone is very poor and very worried. Juan Rubio has been trying to help; he recalls hosting a family of white Dust Bowl refugees, who disappeared after he extended them his credit at the grocery store. He doesn’t resent this, reserving his anger for the “Awkies” who undercut Mexican workers’ wage demands with farmers. At last, he departs to take Consuelo to the movies.

The narrative switches into Consuelo’s perspective as they return from the movie. It was about the Mexican Revolution, and she was unimpressed: She remembers that time only for its bloodshed. She’s happy to be out with her husband, though, and still finds him handsome. She reflects on how their life together has changed lately. After years of simple endurance, she’s come to truly desire sex, and has been having a hard time restraining her impulses, which she feels as shameful.

The couple discuss buying a new house. Juan Rubio sees this as an investment that will later allow them to start a business in Mexico, but the narrative states, “[H]e was fashioning the last link of events that would bind him to America and the American way of life” (129).

At last, the narrative returns to Richard. He finds that even sex can’t shake his feelings of dissatisfaction, and he rebels against his father, insisting that he has to live his own life, and that his father, who has always treated him like an adult, can’t have it both ways and demand a child’s obedience. Juan Rubio is responsive, but tells Richard that he’s going to have to accept that his destiny is family, even if he finds that disappointing or boring. Sadness overcomes Richard from what he sees as his father’s capitulation to an unlived life.