New flash non-fiction: ‘Livin’ la Vida Pocha’

For years, I’ve had a fascination with my Mexican-American heritage and how little I am connected to it–how there is little more to that heritage now than the surname, Careaga. Some thirty years ago, when I first learned there was a term for people like me, pocho, or pocha in the feminine (see more about the terms below), I started writing short pieces, mostly non-fiction or maybe autofiction, about coming to terms with this lost identity and claiming this pocho identity. “Livin’ la Vida Pocha,” published in Issue 4 of the outstanding literary magazine In Short: A Journal of Flash Nonfiction, is the first of these pieces I’ve had published. I’m working on others, so stay tuned.

My attempt with this piece is to express my mixed feelings about my cultural identity and assimilation into the Great American Melting Pot in a direct, deeply personal style. I hope you like it. Many thanks to In Short founder and editor-in-chief Steph Liberatore for her support of this piece and for her edits, which improved the piece greatly.

More about ‘pocho/pocha’

For those unfamiliar with the term, here’s some background about pocho or pocha from Wikipedia:

“The term originally referred to fruit that was spoiled or rotten, as well as to plants and individuals that appeared to be in poor health.^[1]

“Earl Shorris, an American writer and critic, defined pochos as Americans of Mexican descent ‘who [had] traded [their] language and culture for the illusory blandishments of life in the United States’. He further observed that they were ‘doubly-marginalized’: denied equal treatment by their birth country and regarded as inferior by their ancestral nation.”^[2]

The pocho lives on the cultural and racial line … utterly unprotected, [and] despised on every side: too Mexican for the Anglos and too agringado (assimilated into America) for the Mexicans.^[3]

I’ve written about the term a couple of times on this blog. I included Jose Antonio Villarreal’s 1959 novel Pocho in my post about “Five great classic Hispanic novels,” calling it “the quintessential novel about the ‘pocho‘ experience as it was during the Great Depression” (we’ve been around for a long time). In “‘American Fiction’ and what stories get told,” a post ostensibly about the Academy Award-nominated movie based on Percival Everett’s excellent novel Erasure, I riffed on the movie’s theme about “what makes a Black book” and expanded that to include other ethnic identities, e.g., the pocho. I wrote:

Off and on over the years, I’ve been toying with a piece that may one day become a memoir, or at least an essay, about my experience as a man of Mexican heritage in the United States. The idea is to write about my experience as that of a pocho, as someone who has been so fully assimilated into the dominant Anglo culture as to lose much of my Latinx identity. Just about everything in my life besides my surname is so fully Anglocized that it is indistinguishable from the crowd here in middle America. (There’s also an old novel called Pocho by Jose Antonio Villarreal that discusses this tension as the author experienced it in Depression-era California.)

My story would not necessarily reflect the experiences of many Mexican-Americans in the U.S. today. Certainly not the stereotype. I’m a second-generation Mexican-American, yes, but also a Midwesterner who has lived in New England. I don’t speak Spanish, although I studied Spanish my senior year of high school to meet the foreign language requirement. (In college, I took 13 hours of French, which I preferred to Spanish.) Spanish wasn’t spoken in the home. My skin is lighter than many people of Mexican heritage. And so on.

Should my experience or my story to decide what counts as the Mexican-American experience, or even the pocho experience? I certainly would like for my perspective to be a part of that experience, but it is not a representative story. I’m not the quintessential Chicano.

And yet, my experience and the idea of this diluted identity is very much a part of the Mexican-American experience in the U.S. It may not be the dominant story of the experience, but is part of a broader tapestry of experiences that may be woven together to provide a greater meaning to this aspect of American life.

So you can see, I’ve thought about this a bit.

Stay tuned for more writing about my personal pocho experience. “Livin’ la Vida Pocha” is just the beginning.

And since this song is probably already playing in your head, might as well watch the Ricky Martin video here or below.