The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico by Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (review)

This engaging, exhaustively researched book examines the colonial origins of a much-studied and highly stereotyped phenomenon: Mexican machismo. However, the book is much more than a search for the roots of that axiomatically assertive, violent ideology. Instead, the author complicates easy stereotypes of Mexican masculinity, finding not only multiple colonial masculinities, but a general difference between colonial norms and the machismo that emerged in the nineteenth and (especially) twentieth centuries.

The work originates in the author's decades-long research on gender in colonial Mexico, and particularly in her archival encounters with apparently "mystifying" (p. xi) masculine behaviour, much of which contrasts with the stereotype of the violent Mexican macho. The primary sources for the work are 570 criminal records dating from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. The book's strong emphasis on the latter century is an artifact of the archive studied; very few criminal records survive from before the middle of the seventeenth century, and most date to the eighteenth. Sources were selected that reveal "primarily male interactions", such as homicides, beatings, insults, mistreatment, etc. (p. 8). The criminal sources are complemented, particularly for the earlier period, by other sources such as manuals for comportment.

The key finding of the work is that for much of the colonial period, the forms of masculinity characteristic of the republican era (aggression, violence) were arguably less common or at least disparaged. Instead, the author argues, men aspired to emotional control, and lapses into violence were considered a failure: "a loss of self-possession" (p. 5) characteristic of women and other subalterns. As this suggests, the second key argument of the book is that social status interacted with masculinity in significant ways, and that men, while theoretically dominant in relation to women, were constantly engaged in a "dance of power" (p. 3) with other men. Many of the criminal cases studied for the book emerged in the contexts of such "dances," making for fascinating reading. Finally, as articulated most fully in the book's seventh chapter, the author argues that social, political, and economic changes of the late colonial period and the Wars of Independence fundamentally altered Mexican masculinity, unleashing violence, challenging deference to hierarchy, and thus sowing the seeds of the Mexican macho (a term, the author notes, reserved for male animals until the twentieth century).

Lipsett-Rivera approaches her topic through the study of childhood and youth, sexuality, work, space, and men's construction of their masculinity in separate chapters before tackling the late-colonial changes that the author finds so decisive. While this approach produces substantial insights (the chapter on work was particularly compelling for this reader), it de-emphasizes other questions of importance. For example, friendship is a key theme in the historical literature on masculinity but appears here only in tantalizing glimpses. An entire chapter on friendship would have allowed the author to parse not only the language of friendship across all of the cases but the status distinctions within notions of friendship, joking, and friendly behaviour, which, again, are mentioned but not explored in depth or across multiple cases. Every framing approach taken by an author will produce greater or lesser emphases, of course, but the life-cycle approach taken here tends to make this more a study of daily life among men (in some ways akin to the approach of Richard Boyer's Lives of the Bigamists [1995]) than a systematic exegesis of multiple, status-inflected forms of masculinity and their interactions.

The book offers some engagement with theoretical discussions of masculinity, but this reader would have preferred more. The author states that from a gender studies perspective, masculinity is a set of expectations considered appropriate in a given time and place, but that in practice, there were many sets of expectations. In addition, contrasting her analysis with that found in studies of gender relations, the author describes how masculine authority "was not always...