Jos Antonio Villarreal And Pocho

A Spanish-speaking Californian struggles for self-illumination during the Depression Era

Fictionalized account of a Mexican family's experiences in the United States.

Fictionalized account of a Mexican family's experiences in the United States.

Jose Antonio Villarreal illuminates here the world of "pochos," Americans whose parents come to the United States from Mexico. Set in Depression-era California, the novel focuses on Richard, a young pocho who experiences the intense conflict between loyalty to the traditions of his family's past and attraction to new ideas. Richard's struggle to achieve adulthood as a young man influenced by two worlds reveals both the uniqueness of the Mexican-American experiences and its common ties with the struggles of all Americans—whatever their past.

A vexed figure inhabits U.S. literature and culture: the visibly racialized immigrant who disavows minority identity and embraces the American dream. Such figures are potent and controversial, for they promise to expiate racial violence and perpetuate an exceptionalist ideal of America. Swati Rana grapples with these figures, building on studies of literary character and racial form. Rana offers a new way to view characterization through racialization that creates a fuller social reading of race. Situated in a nascent period of ethnic identification from 1900 to 1960, this book focuses on immigrant writers who do not fit neatly into a resistance-based model of ethnic literature. Writings by Paule Marshall, Ameen Rihani, Dalip Singh Saund, Jose Garcia Villa, and Jose Antonio Villarreal symbolize different aspects of the American dream, from individualism to imperialism, assimilation to upward mobility. The dynamics of characterization are also those of contestation, Rana argues. Analyzing the interrelation of persona and personhood, Race Characters presents an original method of comparison, revealing how the protagonist of the American dream is socially constrained and structurally driven.

This book blends biography, history, and literary criticism in its analysis of Pocho (1959), José Antonio Villarreal’s evocative and semi-autobiographical novel about Richard Rubio, a Mexican American youth raised in a pastoral community in central California where people self-identified according to race, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Richard is the son of an Indigenous Maya mother and a Mexican, fair-skin father who fought in the 1910 Mexican Revolution as a cavalryman, placing Richard outside the town’s imposed and regulated ethnic identities. In spite of his varied ancestry, his American birth, and his probing intelligence, Richard’s Indigenous appearance casts him as a social outsider. Pocho was written over a nine-year period of vigorous creativity, and with Villarreal’s power of recall and imagination at their prime. In writing his inaugural novel, Villarreal drew inspiration from modern narratives (paintings, novels, films), and from ancient Greek tragedy to create a Mexican American version of its classical drama ancestor. This book’s critical approach to Villarreal’s literary work is intelligibly written so as to be of access to a broad and all-inclusive readership and institutions, from college and university professors, public libraries, and the general reader to students of US, Mexican American, and world literatures.

Uncovers the long history of how Latino manhood was integral to the formation of Latino identity In the first ever book-length study of Latino manhood before the Civil Rights Movement, Before Chicano examines Mexican American print culture to explore how conceptions of citizenship and manhood developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The year 1848 saw both the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S. Mexican War and the year of the Seneca Falls Convention, the first organized conference on women’s rights in the United States. These concurrent events signaled new ways of thinking about U.S. citizenship, and placing these historical moments into conversation with the archive of Mexican American print culture, Varon offers an expanded temporal frame for Mexican Americans as long-standing participants in U.S. national projects. Pulling from a wide-variety of familiar and lesser-known works—from fiction and newspapers to government documents, images, and travelogues—Varon illustrates how Mexican Americans during this period envisioned themselves as U.S. citizens through cultural depictions of manhood. Before Chicano reveals how manhood offered a strategy to disparate Latino communities across the nation to imagine themselves as a cohesive whole—as Mexican Americans—and as political agents in the U.S. Though the Civil Rights Movement is typically recognized as the origin point for the study of Latino culture, Varon pushes us to consider an intellectual history that far predates the late twentieth century, one that is both national and transnational. He expands our framework for imagining Latinos’ relationship to the U.S. and to a past that is often left behind.