Machismo

There were four books where I kept encountering machismo.

The basic definition is just "strong or aggressive masculine pride". It makes sense to use it here because I have always associated that particular word with the Spanish language. I do not necessarily want to call this toxic masculinity, though it does seem to exist on a spectrum. We will get into that more later, but for right now I just want to focus on the Latin American side of that.

From two novels, one novel that was historical fiction based on true characters, and one history, it came up a lot. The men with this trait - fictional and real - came from Cuba, Panama, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. There were some traces of how it could developing with younger characters in some of the other works, but it is enough to focus on the men.

I read the history - Queens of Havana - first, and that spanned a longer time period. As the Castro (not that Castro) sisters formed their band, part of that was due to the disruption of education and a lack of job opportunities for women, going from before Batista until well after the Revolution. The way it was most noticeable was in relationships.

It was common over time that married men would date without revealing that key information. A woman might not find out that her boyfriend was married until after he proposed and needed to get a divorce, though there would often then be no divorce nor new marriage.

Under those circumstances, it was very hard to form lasting and satisfying relationships. How could you trust?

As the history, that was probably the most accurate representation: independent women often end up missing out on marriage and children. I felt that loss for them.

In the historical fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies, deeply passionate relationships happened with a lot of sacrifice and trust, but somehow there were still other women. Is it so hard to conceive of a man who never has to cheat, for both men and the authors who write about them? I don't know; it was starting to feel that way.

Although that was something where I felt the loss for women more than for men, I have to believe that there is a loss for men too, both in terms of the depths of intimacy and communication available and in the loss of integrity.

In the last two novels, Memory of Silence and The Book of Unknown Americans, adultery is not a primary issue. Sexuality is still important, but there at least seems to be some fidelity. Gender roles harm the men and women in other ways.

It could be something so simple as refusing to let the wife work, because the man is supposed to be the breadwinner, even though it leaves them poorer and the wife bored and unsatisfied. It could mean going into a dangerous situation without knowledge and ending up dead. Always there is the need to be in control and fix things, despite some fixes being unnecessary and some impossible.

In Memory of Silence that pressure killed both husbands, but it broke them first. It did not matter how much love they'd had for wives, children, and friends, what connections they had to life, or what good they could have been capable of doing. The demands that they felt were on them as men became intractable. Something had to give, and their lives were the only real possibility.

(Also, during the process of their breaking, they were often not great husbands.)

Learning to accept, adapt, and heal is something women have to do, but it ultimately works for our good. It's not like refusing to accept when you are wrong makes you right.

It would have been easy to take the combined influence of those works as an indictment of Latin American masculinity, except that Gloria Anzaldúa had already covered that in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. She acknowledged the stereotypes, and then pointed out that they weren't that different from North American demands on masculinity. I had to admit that she was right.

Because of that, as I read each of these books and found the topic recurring, it became a universal theme, and a tragic one.