Chicana and Chicano Mental Health: Alma, Mente y Corazón

4. Los Hombres: The Negotiation of Grief and Pain

4 Los Hombres The negotiation of Grief and pain A s early as childhood, Chicanos may experience microaggressions and “daily indignities” (Franklin and Boyd-Franklin 2000; Sue 2010) that can attack the body, mind, and heart. Chicano boys often are problematized in the community, school, and even in the home as disobedient , willful, conduct disordered, and aggressive (Aguirre-Molina and Betancourt 2010). As Hardy and Laszloffy (2005) have demonstrated, men of color encounter devaluation, loss of community, and dehumanization of loss, which for Chicanos have both historical and contemporary roots. In his classic book El espejo enterrado (The buried mirror), Carlos Fuentes (1998) describes the Mexican as he who was born at the precise moment of his death. Octavio Paz (1962) and Rogelio Diaz-Guerrero (1975) described the psychology of Mexican men as embodying both the colonizer and the colonized. Thus, depending on his identification and the degree of internalization of negative stereotypes, a Chicano can embody the victim and/ or the perpetrator of aggression. Chicano men carry that legacy on their shoulders. They may also carry the scars of historical trauma. Furthermore, the complicated history of Mexicanos/Chicanos in the United States can further impact the sense of self and the mental health of Chicanos. Experiences of discrimination and marginalization as a result of minority status can produce psychiatric distress (Aguirre-Molina, Borrell, and Vega 2010; Finch, Kolody, and Vega 2000; Williams and Jackson 2005), particularly for those men who remain in the margins of society or become part of the urban underclass (Portes, Fernandez-Kelly, and Haller 2005; Rumbaut 1994). This chapter explores the gender socialization of Mexicano/Chicano men of various social classes and the role of cultural values, “minority status,” and histories of oppression on their experience and expression of emotional and spiritual distress. In addition, contemporary self-empowerment and healing efforts that emerged in the 1970s are discussed as potential avenues to strengthen the mental health of Chicanos. Los Hombres 77 Chicanos and Mental Health As stated in earlier chapters, the growth of the Latino population has resulted in greater attention to health disparities and the prevalence of psychiatric disorders among Latino subgroups (Alegria et al. 2007, 2008; Vega et al. 2010). Available epidemiological data regarding the mental health of the three major Latino groups (Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Mexican American/Chicano) indicate different lifetime prevalence estimates. For example, the LA-ECA study (1983–84) found a 3 percent prevalence estimate for depression, 7.3 percent for phobia, 3 percent for alcohol, and 1 percent for panic disorder. In contrast, the MAPPS study (1994–96) found much higher rates for depression (9 percent) and lower ones for alcohol dependence (3.3 percent) among Mexican immigrants (Aguilar-Gaxiola et al. 2002). The rates were similar for phobia and panic. The National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) (Alegria et al. 2004; Kessler and Merikangas 2005) found significantly higher rates of mental disorder among Chicanos than Mexican immigrants (Guarnaccia et al. 2010; Alegria et al. 2008). These authors concluded that the longer an immigrant resides in the United States, the more compromised his mental health may be. This was the case for both men and women. Polo and Alegria (2010) compared the epidemiological data obtained through the NLAAS with that of non-Latino white men obtained with the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Study (NCS-R) (Kessler and Merikangas 2005). Latino and non-Latino white men were compared across various sociodemographic, structural, and “clinical characteristics, including lifetime and past-year rates of depressive, anxiety and substance use disorders” (183). Polo and Alegria found that Latino men in the NLAAS sample were younger than non-Hispanic white men in the NCRS sample; they also had lower educational attainment and lower household income, were twice as likely to be unemployed, and were three times as likely to lack health insurance as their non-Latino peers. Polo and Alegria (2010) also noted that the lifetime prevalence rates of any disorder were not significantly different from those of non-Latino white men across the eleven psychiatric disorders they investigated. Among the Latino men, Mexican-origin men reported more acculturative stress. In terms of psychiatric diagnosis, Alegria and her colleagues (2008) had established lifetime prevalence estimates for psychiatric distress to be 28.81 percent for Latinos and 30.2 percent for Latinas. For Mexican-origin males Chicana and Chicano Mental Health 78 the estimates were 28.42 percent for lifetime, and...