Alfredo Mirandé - Hombres y machos : masculinity and Latino culture

Several years ago I was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation research fellowship to carry out a study of Latino men and the role of the father in the family. I took a leave of absence from my job at the University of California at Riverside and was in residence as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. I was a professor of sociology and ethnic studies at the time and had written a number of books and articles on the Chicano experience and the Chicano family and gender. Indeed, one of the factors that led me to undertake this study was the experience of co-authoring a book about Mexican women in the United States with Evangelina Enrquez.

La Chicana proved to be very successful and we each took a great deal of pride and satisfaction in the product; it was like a child that resulted from a dynamic, volatile, and incredibly stimulating relationship. When we undertook the project we were certainly not prepared psychologically for the daily conflict and tension that would ensue. We noted in the preface to the book that while the Aztec codices detail a neat division in the social order and in the roles of men and women, they do not provide a prescription for harmony between the sexes (Mirand and Enrquez 1981, ix).

There was never any question at the outset of this endeavor that we had an inherent respect for our undertaking and for each other; but, alas, we had failed to anticipate the tension and lack of harmony that could arise when two modern-day members of the opposite sex decide to undertake a book together about one sex (1981, ivv).

To say that there was a lack of harmony is undoubtedly understated. The truth is that we fought constantly about the book. Our relationship became a microcosm of the larger societal issues and tensions that we were describing, a story within a story.

While working on La Chicana, I learned many important lessons. But by far the most important lesson I learned was that as a man I was obviously limited in my ability to understand the Chicana experience. When I used the word chingar or chingada, for example, I was only able to do so in a somewhat clinical and detached way without fully understanding its symbolism for women. Though Evangelina and I agreed that the verb chingar was an important one for Mexicans, we responded differently to the word. I was fascinated by the word because it contained numerous and diverse meanings, but it was not a term that I found personally offensive or repugnant. Chingar is an aggressive form of sexual intercourse with numerous connotations of power. A man might say, for example, me chingaron!, meaning I was fucked over, screwed, or had; or he might say with admiration that someone was chingn or chingona, meaning they were important or had power. In Mexican folklore La Chingada was the Great Whore, our symbolic mother who represented the thousands of Indian women who were raped, violated, and otherwise demeaned by the conquering Spaniards.

I learned that for Evangelina and other women these words were powerful cultural metaphors that elicited very negative images of women as abject, passive, inert creaturesindeed, as passive objects of male sexuality. For women, the imagery was so powerful that in every instance in which a man was controlled or subjugated, he metaphorically assumed the female, passive role. But I also learned that, if one looked more closely, it appeared that many of the prevailing stereotypes about la mujer had their counterparts in stereotypes about Latino men. If the woman was not the weak, passive, self-sacrificing, abject figure that we had been led to believe she was, then perhaps the man was not the all-powerful and unquestioned lord and master of the household, as he is often depicted in traditional social science literature and popular conceptions. In a very real sense, in rejecting stereotypes about Chicanas we were beginning to reject stereotypes about men, or at a minimum, to entertain the possibility that Chicano men might also be stereotyped not only by the dominant society but by ourselves. Finally, I learned that because of my academic and personal experiences I might have some special insights into the topic of Chicano/Latino men.