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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Identity and Selfhood
Questions of identity frame, define, and drive Richard’s young life. Richard is continually confronted with the world’s expectations for him: his mother’s demands that he be a good Catholic, his father’s insistence on traditional Mexican masculinity, and assorted white people’s assumptions that he’s either a ne’er-do-well or an exception who needs to be a role model for other Chicanos. Richard rejects these claims on his selfhood wholesale: “I can be a part of everything, he thought, because I am the only one capable of controlling my destiny…Never—no, never—will I allow myself to become a part of a group—to become classified, to lose my individuality…” (152). However, he discovers that selfhood is more complicated than his early declarations of independence suggest.
Richard’s individualism is itself an inheritance. Though he expresses and understands his pride and masculinity differently than Juan Rubio, Richard gets his sense of the fundamental importance of these traits directly from his father. As he discovers when his father leaves the family, he is bound to his loved ones in ways he was only shielded from admitting when he was young and dependent. In fact, the only time he can maintain the illusion of independence is when he’s still a dependent. Growing up means understanding his deep connection to other people, and accepting the inevitable burden of that responsibility.
Richard’s identity is also complicated by the fact that he feels himself to live between two worlds. Raised in a family that espouses traditional Mexican ideals even as it slowly and uneasily acculturates to American mores, Richard has to create a sense of self that blends these disparate influences while making room for its own individuality. The novel’s title, Pocho, inflects all of these questions: a generic word for a class of people, and a Mexican term for an American phenomenon, it suggests the ways in which Richard is exemplary precisely because he—like every human—is distinct.
Learning and Friendship
Richard hungers to learn, and is thus often frustrated by the hypocrisy and small-mindedness of the people who are supposed to be teaching him: “All of them—the teachers and the sisters and the priest—they all lie to us sometimes” (71), he tells Mary—and indeed, many of Richard’s teachers teach him by negative example. Learning, Pocho suggests, is not a matter of listening to what you’re told, but discovering and thinking for yourself. To learn is to develop the power to create, deepen, and understand one’s own identity.
Richard’s deepest education comes from two places: books, and a wide and unlikely range of friendships. Unlike many of the people around him, Richard is interested in knowing and befriending people who are outside his cultural and social orbit. His first really close friendship is with a little Protestant girl, Mary, who tempers his willful independence with her own differently unbending demands for kindness and decorum. Richard’s friendships go on to cross the boundaries of age, race, and social class, and in refusing the limits of walls he doesn’t believe in, he comes to see the good and ill of all these groups with clear eyes.
Richard’s friendship with Ricky is especially notable this way. Ricky is an utterly prosaic, conventional kind of kid, whose biggest ambition is to have a good job and a nice car. Richard is continually frustrated by Ricky’s small-mindedness—for instance, by Ricky’s homophobic fear when Richard matter-of-factly tells Ricky that he loves him. However, Richard’s willingness to hang in there with Ricky, accepting him with his limitations, allows him to understand that Ricky really does love him, too—and that Ricky has also been doing the work to hang in there with Richard, in his own way. The education of friendship allows Richard to begin to see past his own assumptions about how people should be.
Masculinity and Femininity
Pocho is a novel about learning, discovery, and transformation, and one of the novel’s biggest metamorphoses is in the narrative’s approach to masculinity and femininity. The narrative begins with Juan Rubio’s story, and relates a lot of speedy lessons about the uncompromising machismo he espouses: A masculinity that asserts constant superiority over women, that despises gay sexuality while upholding intense sentimental bonding between men, and that is maintained through physical dominance. Richard, a sensitive and intellectual kid, develops a different kind of relationship with masculinity than his macho father, and comes to see the ways in which the traditions he finds oppressive are even more crushing to his mother and sisters. After a disagreement with his mother over whether she should have the right to call the cops if Juan Rubio hits her or her children, Richard goes out into the night and has an epiphany:
It was nighttime, and black under the figtree where he lay, and he suddenly sat up and said: ‘¡Mierda! ¡Es pura mierda!” And he 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).
To Richard, this new understanding of gender oppression makes him unable to be “wholly Mexican”: ideas of masculinity and femininity, for him, sit at the very roots of his culture.
The novel’s sensitive portrayal of the sufferings of its female characters hints at a greater evolution in Richard in his later life. There’s a sense that Richard, who wants to become a writer, is in some way narrating this story from later in life, and while the teenage Richard often can’t fully see the ways he’s harming or overlooking the women in his life, the narrator can. Prominent in this way is the story of Zelda, who loses all her power and becomes a toy for her male friends as soon as she becomes a woman. Womanhood, like cultural or national identity, brings with it a painful burden of expectation, and the individual has to struggle hard to become a self in the face of its pressures.
