Pocho

Introduced like a gunslinger in a Western, Juan Rubio at first seems like an almost mythic figure. A colonel for the famous Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution, he is the picture of traditional Mexican masculinity: tough, virile, philandering, patriarchal, proud—and unafraid to cry. However, the pressures of his immigrant life challenge everything that he believes.

Juan Rubio’s traditional values collide with the American world in which he finds himself raising his family after he’s forced to flee Mexico. As his children and his wife acclimatize to this new culture and its different rules, he feels himself increasingly redundant and disempowered. At last, he feels he can no longer live with his wife’s new ideas about her role in the household, and leaves to make a new life for himself with a much younger woman.

Juan Rubio and Richard have a complex relationship. Juan Rubio both adores his son and demands his obedience; Richard points out that Juan Rubio has always treated him like a man, even as a child, and should therefore expect Richard to stand up for himself. The bond between father and son remains even when Juan Rubio leaves: There’s a sense that the two are perhaps the most alike not in spite of, but because of, their deepest differences.

Innocent, selfish, tough, and deeply religious, Consuelo is Juan Rubio’s wife and Richard’s mother. At first a model of Mexican womanhood, Consuelo finds herself trapped between worlds when she follows her philandering husband to California.

She is in many ways dedicated to old-world values, but influenced by American culture, she begins to stand up to her husband when he cheats or becomes violent. She also discovers her own sexuality—a force deeply repressed in her by silence and shame.

Consuelo can never quite reconcile the two sides of her life, and the conflict between her Mexican and American thoughts and feelings helps to create the rift between her and Juan Rubio that eventually breaks up their family.

Consuelo attaches all her love to Richard, idealizing him and telling him point-blank that she loves him more than her many daughters. Richard loves his mother deeply, but comes to feel this unreflecting worship as a stifling demand. He is able to understand her, though, and tells his sisters to try to do the same: for Consuelo is not fully able to understand herself.

Mary is one of Richard’s earliest friends—and, she calmly maintains, his future wife. The daughter of an uptight Protestant family, Mary is curious, accepting, and loving, but also has her own firm will, and doesn’t take any guff from Richard. The two of them share a love of books and develop a genuine friendship, sharing the first real exchange of ideas that Richard finds in the world. When, at age 12, she moves to Chicago with her family, she tells Richard that she’s going to marry him one day. While Richard finds this ridiculous, he’s also deeply moved and touched; there’s a sense that Mary’s calm conviction and steady love are a truly important force in his life, and that her prophecy just might come true.

Zelda is the neighborhood bully: a terrifying girlchild who beats the snot out of anyone who challenges her. She rules a pack of boys (including Richard) with an iron fist. As the gang of kids reaches adolescence, she becomes a sexual outlet for the boys she used to lead. Eventually, she falls in love with Richard, and while the two date for a long time, Richard never really cares for her the way she does for him. Villarreal’s portrait of Zelda is a sympathetic reading of the difficulties of being a woman in the society he portrays: Zelda loses all her power as soon as she gains her sexuality. 

Ricky is Richard’s buddy. A conventional-minded descendent of Italian immigrants, he frustrates Richard with his unthinking prejudices and his focus on money to the exclusion of all else. The unlikely friendship between the two boys somehow runs deeper than their differences, though: Ricky truly cares about Richard, even if his way of expressing it suffers from homophobia and stupidity. Through Ricky, Richard comes to understand a subtler and more difficult kind of love than the meeting of minds he finds in Mary.