Masculinities

Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront their Manhood (1996), a collection of essays edited by Ray González, frames issues of imperialist history, racism, migration, and embodiment of Latino masculinities. González’s anthology represents the first published intervention on Latino manhood where, in this case, authors/essayists are tasked with reflecting on their individual and collective manhood as Latinos. The project called upon a group of established authors to define and question expectations of themselves as Latino men. Authors analyzed their life experiences, from intimate relationships with fathers and romantic partners, to wider social norms and perceptions of them. Muy Macho also writes Latinos into the men’s movement, which had previously all but ignored issues impacting many men of color such as urban violence, poverty, and racism. González contextualizes Muy Macho in other writings on manhood and masculinity of its time, particularly Robert Bly’s Iron John, as well as works by men’s movement activists James Hillman and Michael Meade. Until relatively recently, questions of masculinities have focused primarily on uneven gender relationships and the subordination of women, with insufficient attention to the complex experiences of Latino men and the need to question expectations of virility linked to machismo. The definition of masculinities must include both actions and social institutions which support an uneven patriarchal structure as well as the multi-layered subordination of Latino men as colonized subjects due to the historical and economic development of the United States vis-à-vis Latin America and the Caribbean. These gendered political conflicts constitute the core of Latino masculinities. This particular cultural context of Latinos, especially the contested construct

of machismo, also inspired Muy Macho. González notes, “ … contributors to Muy Macho were asked to answer the question of whether Latino men must live with the macho, tough-guy image all their lives, or if there is room for redefining machismo” (González 1996: xiv). Authors grapple with gender roles based on tradition and Catholicism, as well as the cult of silence imposed on men, relating to non-heteronormative sexualities and desires. Muy Macho also treats questions of fatherhood, (im)migration, economic struggle, and the erasure of indigenous history in the US and Latin America. Though sometimes problematic in its presentation of gendered power between men and women, this initial, direct attempt to answer back to a history that damages both female and male gender development underscores the

vital role of literature and other expressive cultures as vehicles to articulate pain, inequality, and the need for change. The pain and stoicism associated with Latino manhood and machismo described

by the contributors to González’s anthology become even more acute when focused specifically on the question of gay identity. In contrast to the significant visibility of Latina lesbians such as Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Carla Trujillo, Achy Obejas, and others, gay Latino authors and activists receive far less attention. A recent intervention, Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Hames-García and Martínez 2011), sheds light on the culture of invisibility and deviance associated with Latino gay cultures and reinserts questions of sexuality into Latinos/as’ struggles for equality. The Gay Latino Studies anthology is useful for studies of masculinities in general because it advocates for greater attention to gender and sexuality in intersectional studies of people of color. In their discussions of portrayals of men and sexuality in expressive cultures, contributors note that gay and/or queer identities for Latino men must problematize heteronormative assumptions, essentializing discourses and traditional kinship structures that often frame Latino male sexualities. Indeed, sexuality and appropriate gendered behavior have become linked to the history of Latinos in the US via the Chicano and Nuyorican movements. Cultural critics and consumers must do the work of challenging heteronormative renderings to uncover hidden or obfuscated gay/queer Latino texts. In his essay “Carnal Knowledge: Chicano Gay Men and the Dialectics of Being,”

Richard T. Rodríguez further takes up heteronormative sexuality tied to Chicano identity through the construct of carnalismo, a Chicano cultural construct where the metaphor of flesh (carne) serves to unite Chicano brothers in a (heterosexual) nationalist family. In an attempt to broaden the scope of traditional carnalismo, Rodríguez asks the question: “What does it mean to promote a brotherhood that does not rely strictly on a gay or straight bond but rather aims to bridge the interests of Chicano men despite sexual identification?” (Rodríguez 2011: 118). Rodríguez poses this question as a means to advocate for recovery work which seeks to (re)read the gay aspects of existing literary and other expressive cultural texts not sufficiently studied to date. His analysis joins the previous work of Juan Bruce-Novoa (1986), “Homosexuality and the Chicano Novel,” and Ramón Gutiérrez (1993a) “Community, Patriarchy and Individualism: The Politics of Chicano History and the Dream of Equality.” Bruce-Novoa and Gutiérrez implore cultural critics to explore the fraught relationship between homosexuality and masculinity in Chicano social history. In his response to Rodríguez’s essay, and elsewhere, Daniel Enrique Pérez pushes Rodríguez’s exhortation for recovery work even further by calling for readings of expressive cultures that do not assume an a priori heterosexuality, unless specifically marked as gay, citing the ambiguous protagonists of Tomás Rivera’s … y no se lo tragó la tierra/ … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) and José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959). The call to end the silence of gay identities articulated by all of the above scholars dovetails with questions of presence and movements, both social and migratory, embedded in depictions of masculinity in literary production. Indeed, the masculine experiences narrated in Latino/a literary production under-

score the gendered positionality of Latino men at both the collective and individual

levels. At the collective level, men’s stories have engaged issues related to the relationship between Latinos/as and the US state. Additionally, nationalist social movements, particularly the Chicano and Nuyorican movements, define cultural nationalism in terms that privilege heteronormative and patriarchal paradigms, especially the traditional family structure. At the individual level, men’s stories have reiterated, as well as challenged, the masculinist gender norms described above. Many works depict men as heads of household, caring for but also dominating their families. Other works lay bare the internal struggles and racial and economic tensions that impact Latino men. These works seek to complicate portrayals of individual men as caught in traditional institutions, such as the state and the family-based community structure, just as are Latinas. Literature captures these tensions within the critical contexts of the relationship of Latinos/as to US imperial history, as well as to the spatial contexts in which they dwell, from migration narratives to experiences of rural and urban life. Latino men come to embody shifts in US politics and social construction, as well as ethnic and population shifts as the Latino population continues to hybridize.