37 pages • 1 hour read
José Antonio VillarrealPocho
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Food
Food is a quiet but persistent symbol for culture in Pocho. The characters are aware of this food symbolism; kids of other races taunt Richard for being a tortilla-eater. However, they also are quick to gather around and ask to share Richard’s tortillas and beans when the Depression strikes and those humble foods start to look pretty good. Richard knows that he’s not going hungry because of the nature of his family’s traditional diet: Their food, like their tradition, is plentiful and lasting.
Mary’s uptight mother’s objection to Mary eating at Richard’s house is another instance of this symbolism. In her bigotry, she imagines that Richard’s family’s food must be somehow dirty and dangerous, and that Mary will get sick from it. Here, to eat is to take in something of another world—a powerfully physical way of crossing the imaginary walls of culture.
This food symbolism also appears in Richard’s Catholic heritage, in which eating is of fundamental importance. To eat, in the Catholic church, is to be in communion. When Richard begins to lose his faith, he expresses it by spitting out a half-chewed communion wafer. This kind of food is one he can no longer swallow.
Sex and Sexuality
The characters of Pocho all wrangle with the complexities of sex: as a giver of identity, a site of shame and joy alike, and, at bottom, a matter of life and death. Sexuality, in this world, is both strangely free and rigorously policed. Boys gather in barns for competitive masturbation games at the same time as girls live in terror of unwed pregnancy; priests tell Richard that masturbation is a terrible sin, but he hears in their voices a barely-concealed prurience; men are allowed to love each other, but not with any hint of physical passion.
Sex is a definer of social roles and an escape from them at once. One of the clearest examples of this comes in Consuelo’s story. Having for years believed that it is a wife’s duty to submit to her husband’s unpleasant desires, she begins in her 30s to discover her own sexual passion. At first she restrains it “so as not to disturb his concentration” and to avoid her own sense of shame, but at last the force of her desire overwhelms her and she has to respond to it (128). Here, sex has a lot to do with the force of the individual soul: the passions that even years of intense cultural shaming can’t fully kill.
However, this on its own isn’t enough. Richard takes up masturbation with gusto, and he eagerly pursues girls, but he feels that the importance that other boys give to these activities doesn’t quite satisfy his desire for something more. Sex, to him, is an irrepressible good, a big part of his identity—and an impetus, not an end. Richard can’t just use desire as an answer to his deeper longings.
Dirtiness
Dirtiness, in Pocho as elsewhere, represents shame and taboo. When Ricky wants to do a quick adolescent body-hair comparison, Richard refuses out of embarrassment over his dirty legs; Mary’s mother won’t let her bring a battered book that Richard rescued from the dump into the house. In both of these instances, the discomfort goes beyond the physical dirtiness. Richard’s unease at showing Ricky his legs has as much to do with worries about masculinity as it does with the actual dirt, and the “dirtiness” of the book to Mary’s mother is the dirtiness of an unfamiliar culture, not the grime of the dump. Mary’s mother’s words reinforce this point: “The idea, handling a dirty thing like that! You might catch something from it” (77). The contagion she fears is not physical sickness, but a loss of pristine middle-class Protestant identity.
Mary, in tears, counters her mother: “He said that no matter how dirty the pages were, the words on them made them like clean” (77). Ultimately, this is Pocho’s answer to cultural fears and taboos. The world is complicated; sometimes people experience others’ differences as dangerous and dirty; the important thing is to learn to read the words under the “dirt.”
