| José Antonio Villarreal | |
| Birth Date: | 30 July 1924 |
| Birth Place: | Los Angeles, California |
| Death Date: | 13 January 2010 |
| Death Place: | California |
| Occupation: | Novelist |
| Genre: | Chicano literature |
| Movement: | Chicano |
| Notableworks: | Pocho The Fifth Horseman |
| Signature: | VillarealSignatureFromBookAutograph.jpg |
José Antonio Villarreal (30 July 1924 – 13 January 2010) was an Chicano novelist. Villarreal was born in 1924 in Los Angeles, California, to migrant Mexican farmworkers.[1] Like Juan Manuel Rubio in Pocho, Villarreal's father fought with Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution.[2] He spent four years in the Navy before attending the University of California, Berkeley in 1950.[3] He cited his influences as Spanish literature, Latin American literature, primarily Mexican literature; English literature, specifically James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Thomas Wolfe.
Born on 30 July 1924 to Mexican migrants in Los Angeles, when 3-months-old, his family moved to Santa Clara. Growing up in tents and boxcars with his uneducated, monolingual parents, he received elementary and secondary schooling; his community was a Mexican enclave, primarily Norteño, yet containing "people from every state". Invested in their oral histories, at six, he decided he wanted to be a storyteller. He entered first grade not knowing any English, but with the assistance of his teacher Ms. Uriell, who did not speak Spanish, he learned, progressively improving each grade thereafter. He skipped third grade. In 1950, he received his Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, English lecturer at the University of Santa Clara, technical editor for Aerospace Industries, and translator and editor for the Stanford Research Institute.
In 1976, Villarreal and his family in Guadalajara, Mexico, with him working as an editor in the literature department of the Jalisco Department of Bellas Artes.
Villarreal's novel Pocho (1959) is one of the first Chicano novels, and the first to gain widespread recognition. Pocho has been called the "pivotal transitional link between 'Mexican American' and 'Chicano' literature", both because of its strengths as a novel and because of its use in the rediscovery and recuperation of Latino literature in the 1970s.[4] Partially based on his childhood, the novel details the childhood of Richard Rubio, whose father Juan Manuel left Mexico in the post-Revolution exodus of 1910. As a first-generation American, Richard struggles with the conflicting values of his parents: his father's Mexican sense of honor, tradition, pride and masculinity and the more Americanized view of family and women's roles that his mother and especially his sisters adopt. Richard's father harbors a dream to return his family to Mexico, but his circumstances and choices keep him in the United States. Similarly, Richard does well in school and wants to go to college to become a writer, but he must become the man of the house after his father leaves the family; yet Richard himself leaves the family to join the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor. According to scholar Francisco A. Lomelí, the novel argues "that people of Mexican descent have a rightful place they can claim their own that is both Mexican and Anglo American, which Chicanos synthesize in varying degrees [and] accentuates, for the first time in a mainstream American literary scene, Hispanic characters as complex and multidimensional who, despite their individual flaws, possess depth and credibility".[5]
The Fifth Horsemen (1974) is Pochos prequel, ending with the death of Pancho Villa, beginning the latter. In 1976, he stated the next book, half written at that point, was to be The Houyhnhnms with protagonist Richard Rubio becoming Mike de la O post-war; such would have been followed by Call Me Ishmael, about his son at the University of Colorado and involved in Chicanismo. He also expressed interest in writing about Antonio López de Santa Anna and a travel book similar to James A. Michener's Iberia.