Beyond machismo pdf

Toward New Masculinities: A Chicana Feminist Intersectional Analysis of Latinos’ Definitions of Manhoods

In Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir, A Place to Stand (2001), the author re- lates the painful childhood memory of visiting his father in jail. Five- year- old Jimmy does not understand why his father is in this place of chaos and restriction and why his father cannot leave with him and his mother at the end of the visit. Baca is caught in a world of emotion and pain that haunts him for the rest of his life. Even in adulthood, he is unable to articulate the pain of leaving his father behind in a cage.

Baca lacks words both literally and metaphorically because in his world, men do not talk about emotions, and because he is illiterate until his early twenties, when he learns to read and write during his own incarceration. Even after he becomes a writer, his discourse about pain, love, and emo- tion remains limited because of the restrictions dictated by what it means to him to be a man. These restrictions limit his interactions with and ex- pressions of love toward his brother, his mother, and the rest of his family. Not until he writes his memoir do those he loves learn what he felt as a child, as a young man, and as a mature writer. Through self- education by reading books and in practicing the use of words, Baca acquired the dis- course and vocabulary that enabled him to articulate what it means to “be a man.”

Jimmy Baca is like many of the young Latinos we interviewed for the Latino Masculinities Study. They too had limited terms for defining man- hood until, through education, reading, and relationships with women and, in a few cases, with other men, they discovered the power of words. These resources provided them with the opportunity to explore their feel- ings through written language and conversation. Here we examine the respondents’ answers to the question, “What does the word ‘manhood’ mean to you?” With the answers to this question, a world of doubt, pride,

Hurtado, Aída, and Mrinal Sinha. Beyond Machismo : Intersectional Latino Masculinities, University of Texas Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsc/detail.action?docID=4397289. Created from ucsc on 2020-06-22 00:00:46.

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Toward New Masculinities 55

apprehension, fear, love, and potential change opens up as these young men tell us what they see as their gendered positionings in the world.

In this chapter, we examine the Intersectional Identities of the sub- sample of respondents who identified as feminist and who declared their class background while growing up as working class or poor. As one of our intentions in this book is to explore the possibility of dismantling machismo and of constructing new masculinities, the intersection of pro- gressive feminist identification and economic deprivation in young, edu- cated Latino men is a possible identification node where the disruption of previous definitions of manhood is likely to occur. We begin our analy- sis by reviewing the research on machismo to identify the components that scholars use to delineate the contours of machista behaviors and be- liefs. We then turn to our interviews from the Latino Masculinities Study (LMS) to answer the following questions: (1) How do educated, young Latino men who identify as feminist and grew up as working class or poor define manhood? (2) Do their definitions of manhood include the differ- ent dimensions of machismo identified in the scholarly literature? (3) If not, what other dimensions are present in their definitions? (4) Whom do they admire as men, and what are the characteristics that they find admi- rable? (5) Do these characteristics include machista elements as outlined in the scholarly literature? We conclude by exploring the possibility that young Latino men are constructing new masculinities that go beyond machismo.

The Predominance of Machismo and Its Definitions

According to the Mexican philosopher Octavio Paz (1961, 31), who wrote the classic treatise on machismo, Mexican masculinity dictates that a man be “a hermetic being, closed up in himself. . . . Manliness is judged ac- cording to one’s invulnerability to enemy arms or the impacts of the out- side world.” Machistas, according to Paz, “must never show weakness nor emotion because such blunders could crack the machismo mask, an opening which enemies would exploit. To the extent that a man opens up and shows emotion or weakness, he becomes less of a man” (as cited in Strong et al. 1994, 19). Paz identifies a second dimension of machismo: “the adroit wielding of power, usually physical in nature, to dominate women” (Strong et al. 1994, 20) and sometimes other men. Machismo involves men displaying a hypermasculinity that thrives on power and domination and that is threatened by weakness (Mirandé 1997). Within