The New York Review of Magazines

Pocho.com

By Maria Soldevila

SINCE I came to New York from my home in the Dominican Republic, I’ve been fascinated by the intermarriage of Spanish and English. Surfing the Web one day, I found Pocho.com, a site with the motto “Spanglish is my language.” I dived into its pages, ready to immerse myself in Spanglish. But to my surprise, I discovered that almost every word in this electronic ’zine is written in English.

Even so, Pocho’s contents reminded me of the way Latinos sometimes feel in the United States—mixed and undefined. When I saw a caricature on the site of Presidente George W. Bush in a “cheguevaran” black beret with Texaco’s logo on it, I knew I was in the presence of satire with a distinctly Spanglish flavor— even without any text.

Before going any further, we need to pause and deal with this pocho thing. What does pocho mean? The magazine explains: “Pocho is a term used by Mexican nationals to call their Mexican-American or Chicano relatives to the North. It basically means ‘A Gringoized Mexican’.” This was emphatically not a compliment until Pocho’s founders started working hard to turn the word into a symbol of pride.

Pocho.com is the multimedia offshoot of a ’zine two buddies—cartoonist Eduardo López and Esteban Zul—put together for fun. After ten years, Pocho published its last print issue in 1998 and moved into cyberspace. It was an easy choice for the struggling entrepreneurs. Online publication is cheaper and can reach more people, including potential clients for López’s cartoons. It has become a combination of articles, pictures, comic strips and audiovisuals.

Isn’t that what magazines are about in this era of multimedia and short attention spans? The more I look at magazines, the more I see shorter stories and increasing numbers of illustrations. And, of course, every magazine now has to have a Web site with interactive features.

Years before the Internet was a big deal for anyone, López, whose pen name is Lalo Alcaraz, worked for a comedy group called Chicano Secret Service and Zul was a rapper with the band Aztlan Nation. They toured together, became friends and decided to collaborate on a Chicano magazine. They named it Pocho and put it on sale for $2 a month.

Besides being an outlet for political rebels who are freaking out because of the rightward alignment of this country, Pocho has opened doors for López and Zul to enter Hollywood and move into “the mainstream.” López’s signature cartoon, La Cucaracha, created for the ’zine, is now distributed by the Universal Press Syndicate and appears in sixty papers around the United States. And the Pocho partners are writing a screenplay about affirmative action for MTV.

But back to the magazine. At first glance, Pocho appears to consist mostly of cartoons. But as you navigate through its online pages, you find articles of piercing irony—as well as some shallow, not-so-comic commentaries. Pocho is a messy, crowded, colorful place where people can laugh, scream and complain. López likes to compare its “pochistic” sense of humor to Monty Python’s. It screams visually, too—yellow, red and black are the colors that stand out on nearly every page. If Pocho were a building, the visitor would need a thread like the one in the Minotaur story to be able to find the way out. Every page is different, and it’s easy to lose track of where you’ve been and where you are. If, however, you are, like Theseus, willing to face the beast and conquer the labyrinth of this satirical mess, you may enjoy the trip. I did.

One thing that kept bugging me, though, as I explored the site was the lack of Spanglish in a self-advertised Spanglish publication. “I think Spanglish is an attitude,” López explained. “It is not a good written language, and we’ve found it inadequate. Like pochismo, it is a philosophy.”

A review of a translation into Spanglish of the classic “Don Quixote de la Mancha” done by Ilan Stavans, a professor at Amherst College, is the only “pure” Spanglish I could find in the site. An excerpt:

“In un placete de La Mancha of which nombre no quiero remembrearme, vivia, not so long ago, uno de esos gentlemen who always tienen una lanza in the rack, una buckler antigua, a skinny caballo y un grayhound para el chase.”

What would Cervantes make of that? The “cover stories” of a recent issue also include a pochistic version of President Bush’s speech on immigration last January: “Fellow Americans, as your Chief Expletive I’m requesting that our Congressionals pass new legislatures to improve emigration..... uh, immigration.....uh, you know what I mean. We are a nation of emigrants and if it weren’t for emigration, many bird specialties would not be able fly south to warmer guesting spots in order to survival and contribution to our environment.”

Then there’s a piece about “The Mexterminator,” Pocho’s nickname for the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is an acidic, out-of-date, account of his voteseeking endeavors among Latinas.

There is also “news” about the hunt for the snipers who terrorized Washington, D.C., and Maryland. The article is sharply satirical—or, at least, it was in 2002.

Which brings us to a serious weakness of this e-magazine. Pochos, here’s the problem: When you tell a joke too many times, it gets old. López and Zul seem to be too busy to attend to the maintenance of the site. Many of the links to supposedly current stories are unavailable. And much of the material that is available should have been removed long ago and replaced with more current stuff.

One up-to-date feature of the e-zine is its cybercholo chat. Pochos and pochas—most of them humorous, but some of them totally humorless—get together in the cholo chat room to discuss Latino issues, gender issues, politics, sex or their favorite beers. In the chat room you can get a feel for what the readers are like: mostly young, educated, somewhat in touch with their roots but very much in tune with American mainstream culture.

One of the best things about Pocho is its editors’ ability to make fun of themselves and, at the same time, ridicule the establishment and any form of racism that may emerge from it. But there is evidence that—as so often happens with satire—some of Pocho’s readers just don’t get it. A warning at the bottom of every page reads: “Pocho.com is a site involving satire and parody, okay? Sheesh! We hate having to explain that to the humorless.”

In 2000, López and Zul received a grant from the Rockefeller New Media Fellowship that has enabled this nonprofit effort to go on, which is why the advertising space at Pocho is free. Pocho is expanding, and with it, el laberinto, the labyrinth. Who knows how much thread we will need to find our way back home? Possibly, mucho.