Loving Pedro Infante tells the story of Teresina Ávila, or Tere, a divorced thirtysomething teachers' aide in Cabritoville, New Mexico. Tere has a mother who's always there for her, a best friend she can tell anything to, a string of romantic failures, and mixed feelings about her job, but what really defines her life is her passion for Pedro Infante, the long deceased Mexican movie star. In meetings of the Pedro Infante Club de Admiradores Norteamericano #256 (for which Tere takes the minutes), in trips to the El Colon movie theater to see Pedro's classics on the big screen, and in weekly VCR Pedro-athons with her best friend, Tere escapes from her day-to-day problems by studying, analyzing, and reveling in every nuance of Infante's life and films.

For those who don't know him (and be warned: Chávez has some harsh words for you), Pedro Infante was an actor and singer who enjoyed the same status in Mexico that Elvis Presley had in the United States – and, like Presley's, his legend has grown since his premature death (in a 1957 plane crash). He made several dozen movies in the 1940's and 50's, in which he played characters tragic and comic, but always romantic. Tere and her friends, especially Irma (also known as "La Wirms"—host of the Pedro-athons) superimpose Pedro's roles onto their own lives, so that every situation they encounter and every emotion they experience is seen in light of how Pedro would have handled it, or how he did handle something similar in a movie. At times they'll go even farther, and look at recurring patterns in Infante's life as a way of understanding abstract issues in their own—for example, Infante's predilection for young blondes becomes a metaphor for the problems plaguing Chicanas' self-images.

Over the course of the novel—which is closer to a stream-of-consciousness string of anecdotes than a linear story—Tere meets, falls in love with, and tortures herself over a married man named Lucio Valadez. Although wealthy, ambitious, and enamored of his young daughter, Lucio doesn't have much to recommend him. He makes Tere miserable, tells her again and again that he doesn't love her, and breaks up with her repeatedly only to call whenever he's feeling lonely. Consequently, Tere's life reads like a soap opera, and one that she intentionally perpetuates. It's hard to sympathize with the pain Lucio causes her, when she can list all the reasons why he's bad for her and then beg him to take her back anyway. Part of the problem here is that Lucio never comes alive for the reader; for all that we hear Tere wailing about him, we rarely see the man and almost never hear him speak. We get no sense of what attracts her to him, and so her suffering over him seems both misguided and unnecessary, a drama she invents to keep herself from getting bored.