Word: pocho
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...years ago, Richard Rodriguez published Hunger of Memory and earned himself the label "pocho." The word is used by Mexican Americans to denote someone who has forgetten where he comes from, someone who has neglected his past...
...Pocho's Progress" [April 28] is a parochial assessment of the Mexican-American minority...
...only "Catholic inspired," but also hampered by poverty and lack of information. "Tawdry taco joints" are everywhere in Southern California. The comment about "ebullient oles and accurately hurled wine bottles" stretches literary license. The word cholo is pejorative and equivalent to "nigger," "kike" and other racial epithets. Pocho is also derogatory, and so are pachuco, gringo-landia, and agringado...
Nowhere is the pocho's plight-or potential power-more evident than in the monotonous, sun-scabbed flatlands of Ea,st Los Angeles, where 600,000 Mexican-Americans live. At the confluence of the swooping freeways, the L.A. barrio begins. In tawdry taco joints and rollicking cantinas, the reek of cheap sweet wine competes with the fumes of frying tortillas. The machine-gun patter of slang Spanish is counterpointed by the bellow of lurid hot-rods driven by tattooed pachucos. The occasional appearance of a neatly turned-out Agringado (a Mexican-American who has adapted to Anglo styles) clashes...
...Nava defeats Smoot in the May 31 runoff, he will become the first Mexican-American ever to sit on the city school board. That, for the pocho, would be a major step from self-pity toward self-representation...