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The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico

2020; Duke University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8647098

1527-1900

Nora E. Jaffary,

Latin American and Latino Studies

With lively detail and sensitive analysis, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera confronts in The Origins of Macho the significant questions of how men constructed masculinity in colonial Mexico and whether such constructions resemble the current stereotype of “the explosively violent, virile man who dominates women and other men” (p. 1).Her central conclusion is that colonial masculinity little resembled modern machismo. Despite sporadic evidence of men with violent tempers who displayed strong emotions, Lipsett-Rivera finds that “the ideal to which men aspired . . . was one of emotional control” (p. 1). Interestingly, in the colonial period men were encouraged to exhibit traits that scholars have heretofore presented as principally associated with femininity. As children and youths, men were taught to demonstrate emotional control, submission, and deference. They experienced the curtailment of bodily mobility and personal liberty, learning instead to embrace silence, obedience, and composure. As well as being warned against stomping their feet or stretching their legs out when sitting, directives went right down to admonitions that they should eat “modestly without gluttony, refraining from gnawing on bones, chewing loudly, or banging the table” (p. 23).Besides the requirement of controlling emotions and bodily behavior, Lipsett-Rivera also discovers that the primary element of gender literacy involved men's apprenticeship in navigating their positions within Mexico's social hierarchy. While men experienced a “merry camaraderie” with others who occupied social positions roughly equal to themselves, masculinity constantly required them to display either deference or defiance toward those who clung to positions above or below them on the social ladder (p. 143). Correct apprehension of others' social status required deep socialization in the indications of rank, which included bodily carriage, speech, clothing, occupation, geographic location, and knowledge of kin networks. Successful responses to such “squabbling for rank” meant knowing when to assert superiority and when to acknowledge submission (p. 143). The bishop of Puebla, Diego Osorio, successfully undermined Viceroy Juan de Leyva de la Cerda's superiority by entering Mexico City in a carriage pulled by six mules with bareheaded coachmen. Their lack of head covering constituted an attack on the viceroy's legitimacy and authority (p. 85). (Osorio was seemingly a successful exhibitor of masculinity, for soon thereafter the crown chose him to replace Leyva de la Cerda, the latter recalled to Spain on charges of corruption.)For a source base, the text draws most heavily on criminal judicial cases (570 of them), supplemented by the use of doctrinal and educational literature, the writings of diarists, some travel accounts, and, occasionally, visual evidence from early postindependence illustrations. Lipsett-Rivera organizes her book around an introductory framing chapter followed by six thematic discussions: childhood, youth, and education; sexuality; work; male spaces (at home and in public); male social lives (both amicable and confrontational); and the changes in masculinity wrought in the independence era.These topics and source materials persuasively document her two principal observations about the nature of colonial masculinity. Her arguments are original. Colonial Latin American masculinity has not received a thorough scholarly reckoning since the early 1990s, when scholars like Ramón Gutiérrez applied Julian Pitt-Rivers's framing of the Mediterranean to colonial Mexican discussions of male honor (status) and female honra (virtue). Since then, researchers of Mexican masculinity have focused mainly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout the book, Lipsett-Rivera largely attends to the evidence presented in her source materials, which leads her to another novel revelation: the construction of masculinity in this context had much more to do with men's interactions with other men than with masculinity's constructions in contradistinction to femininity, an idea central to feminist analysis of gender since the 1980s.This terrific book is packed with detailed evidence and engaging analysis. Scholars and students of Latin American colonial history and gender theory will enjoy and benefit from it. Despite its many strengths, it left me with two questions. First, I noticed that Lipsett-Rivera, despite considering the role of Catholicism in the indoctrination of Mexican boys and men in her chapters on education and sexuality, does not consider the other ways that Catholicism also would have had an impact on the construction of masculinity. We know that the figure of the Virgin Mary was central to personal and social expectations of women and to idealized femininity in this setting, but was this the case for men? Did Jesus matter to masculinity? Did mundane examples of important religious men (the friar Motolinía, the archbishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, or the curate José María Morelos) influence how men thought of masculinity? Second, Lipsett-Rivera's final argument is that the roots of the modern Mexican macho were forged in the independence era, when, “under the seeming equilibrium of colonial society, the masculinity that would later incarnate the Mexican macho was being incubated. . . . and macho behavior was applauded” (p. 179). This is a provocative, and potentially rich, argument, but for one that carries such explanatory weight in the book's structural logic, it is insufficiently fleshed out in the evidence presented in the closing chapter.