Reassessing Pocho Poetics

Abstract

This essay examines Américo Paredes’s first collection of poetry, Cantos de adolescencia (1937), alongside his second poetry anthology, Between Two Worlds (1991), in light of materials from the recently opened Américo Paredes archives. Whereas current scholarship celebrates Paredes’s hybrid poetics, anti-imperialist diatribes, and transnational allusions, Paredes’s poetic corpus, when seen in its entirety, reveals itself to be undergirded by contradictory trajectories that revolve around his semi-autobiographical poetic persona, the pocho. I show how Paredes’s attempts to symbolically empower the dispossessed pocho through antithetical representations—ultranationalist, transnationalist, and highly masculinist—ultimately render this figure ideologically inchoate. His discourses on Mexican American identity thus demand a reassessment of the pocho as an icon for Chicana/o literary and cultural studies.