Our Little Life : A Novel with Other Archival Texts

Abstract

Our Little Life is the original title of José Antonio Villarreal’s groundbreaking 1959 novel Pocho, which shaped Mexican-American literature for decades. Pocho narrated the experiences of and challenges to the Mexican-American community in 1930s Silicon Valley through the story of Richard Rubio and his family, ending with the U.S.’s entry into World War II. With this new edition, author and editor Juan Velasco restores Villarreal’s original vision for his novel. Published in cooperation with the Villarreal estate, this edition of Our Little Life is based on archival materials from the Villarreal Special Collection at Santa Clara University.

Our Little Life offers a much longer version of the Pocho story that extends a further 100 pages into the postwar period and follows Richard Rubio’s return from war and the changing shape of Mexican-American life in the 1940s. This newly discovered manuscript reveals Villarreal’s attention to Rubio’s struggles with PTSD and his efforts to depict a community and a family’s struggles with identity, belonging, and survival in postwar California. Our Little Life is an important work of archival recovery that sheds new light on Villarreal’s authorship and his place not only in Mexican-American literature but in the twentieth-century American literary canon.

This first publication of Our Little Life includes a scholarly introduction that places this unpublished novel in the landscape of contemporary Mexican-American literary studies and offers a brilliant examination of how novels grow and change. The volume also includes materials from the Villarreal Special Collection that recontextualize the writer’s vision, editing, and marketing of this and later novels. Our Little Life will be of interest not only to everyone in Mexican-American literary studies, but also to scholars of postwar America, women and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, ethnic studies, and migration and border studies.