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. "Cantú here has put in play a thoughtful critical framework that calls for a reassessment of Villareal’s work and an accounting of its rightful place in Chicano/a letters. His monograph makes a convincing argument for the need for further scholarship on Villarreal’s works." Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, World Literature Today Roberto Cantú is Emeritus Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, and jointly Emeritus Professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the translator from English to Spanish of José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho (1994), and is the editor of several books, including An Insatiable Dialectic: Essays on Critique, Modernity, and Humanism (2013); The Forked Juniper: Critical Perspectives on Rudolfo Anaya (2016); and Mexican Mural Art: Critical Essays on a Belligerent Aesthetic (2021), among others. In 1990, Cantú received California State University, Los Angeles’ Outstanding Professor Award, while, in 2010, he was recognized at his campus with the President’s Distinguished Professor Award.