Many Parts of Pocho

Abstract

This chapter focuses on racial betrayal across José Antonio Villarreal’s life and work. It analyzes the overdetermined character of Villarreal’s semiautobiographical novel, Pocho (1959), into which protagonist and author are collapsed. Readings excavate two dynamic and interrelated fields of characterization: the queer figure of El Malinche who emblematizes assimilative desire and the masculinist figure of El Macho who has a revolutionary consciousness of colonial subjection. Pocho reveals rather than reproducing the dominant heteropatriarchal order from which minority and Chicano masculinity take their bearings, exposing the discontinuous character of author and protagonist.