Pocho

Richard returns home from football practice one day to find, as usual, the family home filthy. His sister Luz is talking to a boy outside. He summons her in to help clean up the house, and when she resists, he slaps her and threatens to fight the boy. That evening, he and his family sit down for their first proper meal in ages, and Richard reads aloud to them from a translation of Crime and Punishment—feeling that this may be his last chance to communicate with them in a deeper way.

The family discusses the way their town is beginning to change. For instance, now that it’s 1940, the soldiers who were once persona non grata in Santa Clara have become the toast of the town. More and more Mexican families are moving in, too. In their desperation to assimilate, the young Mexican immigrants have created a culture of their own: pachuco culture, with the boys in slick black and the girls in short skirts. Richard is curious about the pachucos, but finds that the girls’ flashy dress doesn’t have much to do with how these kids behave: “[W]hat was under the scant covering was as inaccessible as it would be under the more conventional dress” (150). He finds, too, that these kids have suffered real racial hate, in a way he has mostly avoided in cheerfully diverse Santa Clara.

Richard befriends some pachucos, but they dislike his friendships with kids who aren’t Mexican. Richard politely evades their disapproval, recommitting himself to his independence.

One night, after a dance, some of Richard’s new friends recruit him for a fight. They hand him a bicycle chain and drive out to a rendezvous in an orchard on the edge of town. They win the fight, and one of the older boys, Rooster, offers Richard his real friendship and protection.

Richard and his old friend Ricky get in trouble with the police one night when they’re out trying to steal decorations for Ricky’s new car. Mistaken for pachucos, they’re arrested and questioned for assaulting two white girls. Richard stands up to the police; impressed, the initially belligerent cops offer to recruit him in a few years. Richard is disgusted. This is his first direct experience of prejudice, and it turns him thoroughly against the police. It also breaks some of his trust with his friends. Because he spent so long in the interrogation room, they suspect that he might have ratted on them.

Richard meets Cirilo’s niece, Pilar, on a visit to Cirilo’s house with Juan Rubio. Richard enjoys Pilar’s traditional Mexican demeanor: “He was seeing his mother as she had been long ago” (164-65). The two have a friendly chat; Richard doesn’t realize that Juan Rubio is eying Pilar as a future bride for him.

One day, Richard comes home to find his sister Luz in a flat-out fight with their father. Luz has returned home very late, and Juan Rubio accuses her of promiscuity. She replies that what she does is none of his business. Juan Rubio hits her, and when Consuelo tries to stop him he throws her across the room, and then takes an ax to the furniture. Richard tries to hold him back, and Juan Rubio knocks his son unconscious.

When Richard comes back to consciousness, Juan Rubio is making plans to leave the family. The two men embrace, and Richard feels torn: He’s both glad and devastated that his father is leaving.

Consuelo immediately begins performing the housewifely activities she’d been neglecting, showing all her solicitude to her son. Richard tries to hold it together, but finds this appalling, and can’t be warm with her. He explains: “I have not gone with my father because you need me more—that is why. I love you both, but I do not love one of you more than the other, and if it fell upon his lot to need me, then I would go to him” (171).

Richard lays down the law: While he’ll stay and look after his family, he will no longer go to church with his mother. Consuelo weeps, but accepts this. Having her son near her is more important to her, in the end, than her beliefs about the security of his soul.

Richard gets a job in a factory to support his family, and feels his freedom slipping away. It will now be much harder for him to go and make an independent life. He imagines himself getting older and older in this town, becoming like the old guys standing on street corners talking about the good old days. Trying to shake himself out of this rut, he takes some evening classes in writing, and makes a circle of liberal white friends—one of whom, “a Marxist, became very middle-class when he found Richard in bed with his extremely pretty wife” (176).

He also maintains his relationships with his pachuco friends and his high school friends. He and his high school buddies discuss joining the military, and the conventional Ricky scolds Richard for no longer going to church and for hanging out with a gay couple. Richard is still frustrated with Ricky, but has also come to understand that Ricky really loves him, and the two maintain their half-comprehending relationship.

Things are harder for their friend Thomas, who’s Japanese, and whose family has lost their ranch and is about to be sent to an internment camp. There has been awkwardness between him and his friends since Japan joined the war; Thomas notes that Richard is “the only one of the guys who hasn’t made me feel like I bombed Pearl Harbor” (183). As he prepares to leave, they affectionately wrestle and reaffirm that he’s one of the group. Richard also sends his pachuco buddies to beat up some other boys who attacked Thomas, but he regrets this; he shouldn’t get involved in anything surrounding this war he doesn’t believe in.

Richard is beginning to feel suicidal, trapped in his life, and finds himself driving dangerously, tempting fate. However, he’s still scared to die. He imagines achieving some kind of Nirvana, some kind of spiritual detachment, but that won’t do either: “[T]hough I know it and think of it as the only panacea, I fear to be unalive” (180).

Word arrives that Juan Rubio wants a divorce: He wants to marry Pilar, the girl to whom he introduced Richard, infuriating Consuelo. Listening to her outrage, Richard at last makes up his mind that he can’t stay in the household any longer. He enlists in the Navy, promising to send money home. On his first day as a new sailor, lying in his bunk, he thinks of all the people he has loved, and comes to a final realization: “[F]or him there would never be a coming back” (187).