Pocho

“Juan Rubio said nothing, and suddenly the lieutenant said excitedly, ‘Wait! You cannot possibly be Juan Manuel Rubio? The Colonel Rubio?’ ‘The ex-Colonel Rubio, but at your service never the less, Teniente. You know of me?’”

The events of the first few pages have a cinematic quality. The weathered Colonel walks anonymously into town, shoots a man in a bar, sleeps with a young prostitute, gets apprehended, and is at last dramatically recognized. Here, the initial sense is that this mysterious charro is more than he seems—and his identity means he can literally get away with murder. There’s a sense that this is a world of distinctly masculine codes of power and conduct.

“He was suddenly filled with such hopelessness that he was inarticulate. His beloved general was to die—perhaps already he was dead! And all the dead in the struggle had died for nothing, and the living who had followed him would live also for nothing. But, no! He could not allow himself to believe such a thing! Such a monstrous thing should not be even thought by him!”

This passage is a good example of free indirect speech—words that, while not directly attributed to a character, nevertheless appear in their voice. The crusty Juan Rubio’s inner voice is surprisingly passionate and emotive: Though his outside behavior is steely and cruel, he has a lively heart. It seems that his patriotism and his loyalty to his comrades-in-arms are his profoundest feelings.

“A man should grow old strongly—old age should be a positive sort of thing, not anything like this. And yet, believe me, Juan Manuel, you too, will grow old. That is, I suppose, what makes it bearable in the end. Things have a way to equalize themselves.”

The General’s speech to Juan Rubio foreshadows an eventual defeat. Juan Rubio’s passionate idealism and individualism can’t stand up to the forces of corruption and indifference that are taking over his beloved country in the wake of colonialism. 

“And Juan Rubio was apart from them, rocking in his grief. He was on his knees, holding his head in his hands, and he cried unrestrainedly, as a child would cry. And as he cried he was afraid, and this was the first time; for although he had known fear, it had been momentary, and this was an intelligent fear, for himself and for humanity, but mainly for himself. The death of an immortal showed most clearly the unalterable fact that everyone must die, himself included. He had never really believed this before now. But his grief was as short as it was intense, and from now on there would be an ache and an emptiness and occasionally a dull moan, but this thing was over and in a sense he was free.”

Juan Rubio’s grief over the death of Pancho Villa reveals another dimension to his machismo—in this world of ball-comparisons and wife-abandoning, it’s still manly to cry. It’s also a moment of true change for him. Juan Rubio has built his identity and his ideals on unbending ideas of honor and patriotism—but it turns out that the man who symbolized the epitome of these characteristics to him is mortal. 

“His every sense responded to life around him. He thought the robin and the rabbit were God’s favorites, because they were endowed with the ability to make play out of life. And, as young as he was, things were too complex for him.”

This introduction to young Richard’s inner life draws a sharp contrast between him and his gunslinging father from the previous chapter. Richard first appears wandering through the beauties of the outdoors, confused by the legalism of his first confession and full of big questions about the universe; his images of nature and of God favor joy. Where Juan Rubio has intense masculine certainties, Richard has sensitivity and questions.

“You remember the Mangini girls when I was little and we lived in the other house? You liked them because they were good to me and always took me with them when they went out into the empty lot to get milkweed for their rabbits. When we were out in the fields, they took my trousers off and played with my palomas and laughed and laughed. Then they took their clothes off, and hugged me and rolled around in the grass. And they would say they wished I was older but if I was older they could not play with me like that. And you know? The big ones had hair on their body, except that one of them had only a little bit.”

In the wake of his first confession, Richard innocently makes another first confession to his mother. The beginning of the story of Richard’s childhood is a genuine fall from innocence, and another example of the contrast between Richard and his father. In this Edenic image of rolling around naked in a field, the women, not the boy, are the knowing, driving forces. Consuelo’s violent anger at hearing this story is Richard’s sad introduction to the adult world of sex.

“He could almost hear his father say, when she timidly sought his reaction to such a possibility, ‘Make nuns of all the females if that will make you happy—let the boy be, for he is on earth for other things!’ And Richard smiled that he would be spared that, at least. Then he suddenly felt a responsibility so heavy as to be a physical pressure, and first he became sad that his lot was a dictate and that his parents believed so strongly in the destiny, and then he was angry that traditions could take a body and a soul—for he had a soul; of that he was certain—and mold it to fit a pattern. He spoke out then, but not in anger, saying things he sensed but did not really understand, an uncomprehending child with the strong desire to have a say in his destiny, with the willful words of a child but with the knowledge and fear that his thoughts could not possibly come true.”

Richard’s conflict with his family’s traditions and beliefs appears here. His way of imagining his own life stems from his father’s independence and pride—but Richard’s way of applying those traits will be alien to his parents. The difficulty is in a different understanding of the same concepts: a translation problem.

“Sometimes I read things in books that show me teachers are wrong sometimes. I guess they think we’re too dumb to know about two sides to a story. Like Benedict Arnold was an Englishman, to begin with, and he wasn’t really a traitor—to the English people he was a kind of a hero, and things like that. All of them—the teachers and the sisters and the priest—they all lie to us sometimes. I don’t know why, but they do, and it makes me feel real dumb. The Father tells us the Protestants are all going to Hell, and it’s wrong for us to even go into a Protestant church, and I bet your preacher tells you we’re all wrong. They can’t all be right, and I don’t like them to always tell me that they know everything, that’s all.”

Richard’s choice of Benedict Arnold as an example here is telling. In a novel called Pocho, the sense of treachery to a nationality as a matter of perspective comes off especially loaded. Richard’s questioning puts him in a sort of borderland: He’s not separate from his family’s Mexican culture or his American upbringing, and not fully acquiescent to either culture’s assumptions.

“‘I don’t know why,’ said Richard, ‘but I like the smell of horseshit.’ ‘Richard!’ she exclaimed. He was surprised. ‘Well, what do you call it, then?’ he asked. ‘Manure,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to always be vulgar.’ ‘That’s something else,’ said Richard, ‘and I’m not vulgar. Manure is something you use to make things grow. I ought to know, because my father works on ranches. When you’re talking about ranches, you say manure, but when you’re talking about horses doing it, it’s—the other.’ ‘Mother says we should never use that word.’ ‘You have to use it, Mary—or else how are you going to say it when you want to talk about it? They got a word to explain things like that, when it is all right to use a word and when it isn’t, but I don’t understand it too good yet. Something about a relative.’ ‘I don’t care,’ said Mary. ‘I’m just not going to talk about it.’”

In Mary, Richard finds a true friend. This discussion between the two exemplifies their mutual strong wills: Richard’s insistence on plain speaking, accuracy, and truth runs up against Mary’s sense of propriety—and later, her sense of kindness, when she objects to Richard calling her brother a snob. Mary’s decisive love for Richard does not involve bending to his will. In their different ways, the two are similarly brave, willing to cross social boundaries to befriend each other while also holding their own space.

“Sometimes at night, when I am lonely, I find pleasure in thinking that I am better than these people. And I know how wrong I am, because no man is better than another, any more than every man is equal, simply because we are all different from each other. Every one of us has his own meaning of the word ‘better’—his own meaning of any word. So I have fought that feeling all my life, even though I was always taught I was superior to those around me.”

The tormented Joe Pete teaches Richard both directly and by example. Joe Pete’s striving for humility is driven by his pride—his desire to distance himself from the arrogance and cruelty of his aristocratic family. However, his efforts are not enough to save him from his own pain, or to save Genevieve from his abuse. Joe Pete both explicates and embodies human complexity for Richard.

“‘There are but three things that I can say I have learned for myself. First, I know that one should never discuss matters of sex with one’s parents. Second, one should not, on penalty of going to Hell, discuss religion with the priests. And, last, one should not ask questions on history of the teachers, or one will be kept in after school,’ he said. ‘I do not find it in me to understand why it is this way.’”

Richard’s tragicomic summation of his learning to date clearly sets out the novel’s through-lines. The very places that Richard hopes to seek truth—and that present themselves as the vessels of truth—are in fact locked doors. This passage also demonstrates the novel’s sense of the paradoxes of knowledge: Family and sex, the Church and God, school and a real education, are all inextricably linked and impossibly separate at the same time.

“Then suddenly, clearly, he saw that she, too, was locked up, and the full horror of her situation struck him. He thought of his sisters and saw their future, and, now crying, he thought of himself, and starkly, without knowledge of the words that would describe it, he saw the demands of tradition, of culture, of the social structure on an individual. Not comprehending, he was again aware of the dark, mysterious force, and was resolved that he would rise above it. 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.”

Richard’s coming-of-age as a man also involves a new sense of what it is to be a woman. His initial incomprehension of his mother’s objections to beatings suddenly blossoms into the understanding that she’s trapped in exactly the same way that he feels trapped—only more so. Like Joe Pete in his examination of pride, Richard realizes that separation is always an illusion. Yet, this understanding is the very thing that he feels severs him from being “fully Mexican.” Again, Richard feels his identity as a painful paradox.

“‘But all your friends are Spanish!’ he exclaimed, in a questioning tone. ‘That is all there is here,’ said Juan Rubio, ‘but these people are different—they are also from the lower class, although some of them take on airs here. They are people who were stepped on, much the same as we were in our country. That is the wonder of this country of yours, my son. All the people who are pushed around in the rest of the world come here, because here they can maybe push someone else around. There is something in people, put there only to make them forget what was done to them in other times, so that they can turn around and do the same thing to other people.”

Juan Rubio’s explanation of his attitude toward the Spanish lays the groundwork for a new understanding between him and Richard. This discussion comes in the chapter in which Richard, having just turned 12, decides that he has become a man. Here he learns that his father’s revolutionary past was not just for fun but founded on deep philosophical convictions. Richard begins to find answers to some of his questions at home, and some of the confusion of his earlier childhood begins to clear.

“Everything had another way to it, if you only looked hard enough, and he would never be ashamed again for doing something against the unwritten code of honor. Codes of honor were really stupid—it amazed him that he had just learned this—and what people thought was honorable was not important, because he was the important guy. No matter what he did and who was affected by his actions, in the end it came back to him and his feelings. He was himself, and everything else was there because he was himself, and it wouldn’t be there if he were not himself, and then of course, it wouldn’t matter to him. He had the feeling that being was important and he was—so he knew that he would never succumb to foolish social pressures again.”

Richard’s scorn for the values of the adult world around him involves an individuality that verges on solipsism. Where his father’s sense of self derives from adherence to an unbending code of machismo, the teenage Richard refuses to admit to any standard but his own. However, this independence is never fully real: Richard will have to reckon with the forces that formed him and the forces that surround him, whether he likes it or not.

“Like the others, Richard became a slave to this practice, and now he dreaded to have to perform his bathroom functions, for although he knew about the phenomenon of reproduction, his over-imaginative mind negated his intelligence, and he had horrible visions of a dripping, deformed creature someday crawling out of the plumbing to claim him for a father in the eyes of the world.”

In his description of Richard’s newfound love of masturbation, Villarreal uses a droll, almost formal tone to give a sense of both the silliness and the seriousness of teenage sexuality. Richard’s unease about masturbation emerges in a fantasy of a terrible toilet-child crawling out of the sewers to judge and shame him: a clear image of how his imagination is still a kid’s, even if his body is growing up. 

“She did not know whether it was a sin to think of these things or not, because no one had ever spoken about sex to her in her life. She had been told on her wedding day by an aunt of her husband that she should submit to anything intimate he should want to id. It would be unpleasant all her life, her aunt said, but it was the lot of all women to satisfy the desires of their man [...] And then, after bearing twelve children, at the age of thirty-four (she remembered thinking that crazily), she felt that of which she had been unaware, and it took all her strength of will to lie still under her man, so as not to disturb is concentration, and in the darkness, with her head alongside his, she distorted her features in desire for the culmination of a mystery that drew her closer and closer, and that she somehow dreaded and succeeded in avoiding.”

Consuelo’s surprising sexual awakening provides a note of contrast in a chapter about disappointment and settling. As Richard challenges his father’s choice to live a life focused on family and tradition, his mother’s secretive discovery of sexual pleasure from within those boundaries suggests that the world is more complicated than Richard imagines. Her scruples, her heritage, or her religion can’t stifle the independent force of Consuelo’s desire.

“He was disappointed, and suddenly afraid, that a man who had lived such a life as his father could call this existence happiness. And he cried in his fear of this thing—this horrible, inexplicable, merciless intangible—that held humanity in its power; that made such men as his father go out every morning before sunup to harvest tomatoes, spinach, peas, or fruit, with fingers stiff from the early-morning frost and bodies tortured by the midday heat, to return after dark and eat and, too tired to love, sleep [...] And they regained a portion of their long-lost self-respect, and were proud because they were feeding their families and their children would grow and raise their families. This was happiness!”

Richard’s horror over his father’s resignation to a life centered on work and family is also a response to his father’s training. As Richard observes, Juan Rubio has taught him to be a man—and their shared vision of masculinity is to do with self-respect. However, Richard’s idea of what self-respect might mean is moving farther and farther from his beloved father’s plans for him.

“She loved his sensitivity and the gentleness he showed her, for she had never had such attention or encouraged it, but she was aware that he was capable of great cruelty. Only her closeness to him enabled her to see that part of his character, and she was the first to recognize it. Richard himself was not yet objective enough to discover this fault in his makeup.”

As she softens through her love for Richard, the tough, aggressive Zelda reveals herself to be an excellent judge of character. Here the narrative reveals some of the pitfalls that await Richard. While he believes he’s questing for some unknown greater life, he can’t quite see even himself clearly. There’s a sense of foreboding in Zelda’s ability to perceive Richard’s cruelty before he can.

“In this new routine, Richard lost part of the restlessness that had tortured him for so long. He still felt the need for that unknown; that substantiality that had eluded man from the beginning of time, but it lost its importance for the present. He was young, and the time for the pursuit of the esoteric would come soon enough. When the day came that he married Zelda, he would be forced to find himself, for Richard was certain that he could never revolve his whole life around marriage.”

Richard begins to sense that his pursuit of an unknown “realer” life is going to demand that he look within himself, but he’s not all the way to understanding this as much yet. His indifference to the seriousness of Zelda’s feelings demonstrates how little he can see of what’s right in front of his nose.

“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…. I will not become a follower, nor will I allow myself to become a leader, because I must be myself and accept for myself only that which I value, and not what is being valued by everyone else these days...like a Goddamn suit of clothes they’re wearing this season or Cuban heels...a style in ethics [...] He thought this and other things, because the young are like that, and for them nothing is impossible; no, nothing is impossible, and this truism gives impetus to the impulse to laugh at abstract bonds.”

Richard’s belief in his own independence will run up against the hard reality of prejudice in this chapter. Largely sheltered from serious racial hatred, the young Richard still believes that it’s entirely up to him whether he’s considered part of a group or not. As Richard grows older, both the narration and the narrative call his ideas of independence into question more explicitly.

“He was amazed at his naïveté. Hearing about Mexican kids being picked up by the police for having dome something had never affected him in any way before. Even policemen had never been set aside in his mind as a group. In Santa Clara, where he knew the town marshal and his patrolmen, and always called them by their first names, he did not think of them as cops but as people—in fact, neighbors. One evening had changed all that for him, and now he knew that he would never forget what had happened, tonight, and the impression would make him distrust and, in fact, almost hate policemen all his life. Now, for the first time in his life, he felt discriminated against. The horrible thing that he had experienced suddenly was clear, and he cried silently in his bed.”

Richard’s harrowing experience with the police teaches him that he can’t just consider himself separate from society and make it so: Society doesn’t allow that. Here, the knock-on consequences of discrimination become clear. Adding insult to the deep injury of his own dehumanization, Richard also experiences an uncomfortable reframing of his own past friendly relationships. 

“Forgive me, my father, he thought. Forgive me because I cannot really talk with you, and for my transgressions against you. And I am sorry your life is very nearly spent. Soon, he knew, his father would be with another woman, for it was impossible that he should live without one. And he was happy for that, but, in spite of his intelligence, he was deeply hurt that he should have a woman other than his mother. He could never understand that part of himself—how he could feel in two distinct ways about something, with each feeling equally strong. This was one of the things he could not discuss with his father.”

Richard’s internal farewell to his father is a last glimpse of the qualities that both unite them and keep them eternally apart. Richard understands his father’s inability to adjust to their assimilated life, and also to see his behavior as painful. This more complicated emotional reality exposes one more way that the father and the son can’t connect—even as it allows Richard to let his father go.

“But slowly the temporary aspect of the situation was giving way to permanency, and he was frightened because the whole thing was getting out of hand, and he himself was more and more responsible for it. [...] And he knew he could still say, I don’t give a Goddamn about any of them—let them take care of themselves! But by now it was not true even if he could verbalize such thoughts. It would be a different thing, his leaving them. If the deed was to be done, in fact, he must leave in spite of his concern and love for them—in spite of his now strong belief that he should remain. The desire to go away must of necessity be stronger. And his emancipation would be all the more dear for it, he thought.”

Richard must face the reality of his own connectedness. It isn’t possible for him to believe any longer that he is fully separate from his family. To leave them will be a real choice. Though it’s still a choice he’s going to have to make, he has learned the real cost, value, and meaning of making one’s own life.