Table Of ContentMasculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico
SERIES ADVISORY EDITOR:
Lyman L. Johnson,
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-2906-6
© 2012 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved. Published 2012
Printed in the United States of America
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Masculinity and sexuality in modern Mexico / edited by Víctor M. Macías-González
and Anne Rubenstein.
p. cm. — (Diálogos series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8263-2905-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-8263-2906-6 (electronic)
1. Masculinity—Mexico—History. 2. Men—Mexico—Identity.
3. Machismo—Mexico. 4. Sex—Mexico—History. 5. Sex role—Mexico—History.
6. Men—Mexico—Social life and customs. 7. Mexico—Civilization.
I. Macías-González, Víctor M., 1970– II. Rubenstein, Anne.
HQ1090.7.M6M37 2012
155.3'320972—dc23
2012013072
To the men in our lives,
Scott Sweeden and Patrick McGraw
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Masculinity and History in Modern Mexico
VÍCTOR M. MACÍAS-GONZÁLEZ AND ANNE RUBENSTEIN
PART 1
EXPERIENCES
CHAPTER 1
The Bathhouse and Male Homosexuality in Porfirian Mexico
VÍCTOR M. MACÍAS-GONZÁLEZ
CHAPTER 2
Runaway Daughters: Women’s Masculine Roles
in Elopement Cases in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
KATHRYN A. SLOAN
CHAPTER 3
Dominance and Submission in Don Porfirio’s Belle Époque:
The Case of Luis and Piedad
JAMES A. GARZA
CHAPTER 4
Meretricious Mexicali: Exalted Masculinities and the Crafting
of Male Desire in a Border Red-Light District, 1908–1925
ERIC SCHANTZ
CHAPTER 5
Theaters of Masculinity: Moviegoing and Male Roles in Mexico Before 1960
ANNE RUBENSTEIN
PART 2
REPRESENTATIONS
CHAPTER 6
Toward a Modern Sacrificial Economy: Violence Against Women
and Male Subjectivity in Turn-of-the-Century Mexico City
ROBERT BUFFINGTON
CHAPTER 7
Nationalizing the Bohemian: The Mythogenesis of Agustín Lara
ANDREW G. WOOD
CHAPTER 8
The Gay Caballero: Machismo, Homosexuality,
and the Nation in Golden Age Film
JEFFREY M. PILCHER
CHAPTER 9
Mariachis Machos and Charros Gays:
Masculinities in Guadalajara
MARY-LEE MULHOLLAND
CONCLUSION
Mexican Masculinities
RAMÓN A. GUTIÉRREZ
Contributors
Index
Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Blueprint for San Felipe de Jesús Bathhouse, 1911
Figure 4.1 Map of “The Owl,” Tijuana
Figure 5.1 Male audience in “El Molino Verde,” Mexico City
Figure 5.2 Male audience members covering faces at “El Molino Verde,” Mexico City
Figure 6.1 “Cattle for the New Slaughterhouse”
Figure 6.2 “The Big Press,” “The Little Press,” and “Open-Air Library”
Figure 6.3 Popular representations of Virgin of Guadalupe by José Guadalupe Posada
Figure 6.4 Antonio Vanegas Arroyo broadside of La Valentina
Antonio Vanegas Arroyo broadside, “Mother-in-Law’s Fight with Her Son-
Figure 6.5
in-Law”
Popular collections of love letters published by Antonio Vanegas Arroyo
Figure 6.6
with illustrations by José Guadalupe Posada
Antonio Vanegas Arroyo broadside depicting a man in despair over a
Figure 6.7
heartless woman
Figure 6.8 José Guadalupe Posada illustrations of murdered women
Contrasting styles of working- and middle-class men’s violence against
Figure 6.9
women
Figure 9.1 Press coverage of Vicente Fernández and Alejandro Fernández kissing
Acknowledgments
AS IS TRADITIONAL, THE EDITORS OF THIS BOOK ACCEPT ALL RESPONsibility for errors of fact
and interpretation herein. Having said that, we want to name and thank some of the many
people who helped make the book what it is.
This book exists because Lyman Johnson and David Holtby talked us into doing it over the
course of a coffee break at the 2001 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American
Studies. We thank them for the coffee and for so much more: excellent advice, rigorous editing,
support, and patience. Clark Whitehorn, who has not had such a long history with this project,
has nonetheless been invaluable to it, and we thank him as well.
We thank the friends, students, teachers, and colleagues who have helped shape our
thinking about gender history. For Anne, that includes especially her colleagues and students in
York University’s graduate history program, particularly those involved with the reading group
in Gender and Women’s History, everyone involved with the Toronto Area Latin American
Research Group, and all the Latin Americanist students she has had the good fortune to work
with, especially Melanie Huska, Dilaila Longo, Sophia Koutsoyannis, Pamela Fuentes, Frank
Peddie, Brigitte Khadija Cairus, José Tufy Cairus, Brad Skopyk, Mary-Lee Mullholland, Liz
Polak, Maurice Demers, and James Cullingham. Víctor thanks the University of Minnesota’s
Comparative Women’s History Workshop and the UW-La Crosse History Writers’ Group,
especially Jodi Vandenberg-Daves and Marti Lybeck.
We have been in dialogue with the authors in this book for some years now, and we thank
them for their patience and even more for how their ideas have challenged and changed our
own. Other scholars outside our own institutions also have pushed us to think more clearly
about these murky topics, and we are especially grateful to Glenn Avent, Bill Beezley,
Gabriela Cano, Eileen Ford, Asunción Lavrin, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Bill French,
Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Matthew Gutmann, Donna Guy, Rodrigo Laguarda, Robert McKee-Irwin,
Pablo Piccato, Carmen Ramos, Sonya Lipsett Rivera, Susie Porter, Ageeth Sluis, Camilla
Townsend, Mary-Kay Vaughan, and Pamela Voekel for timely interventions and helpful
disagreements. Much of this collective thinking has happened in the context of the Coloquio
Internacional de Estudios de la Mujer y Género en México (Red MuGen), and like everyone
who thinks about gender in Mexico, we owe all the scholars connected to that organization an
enormous debt.
Víctor M. Macías-González thanks the International Development Fund and the College of
Liberal Studies of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (UW-L) for the research and travel
funds that made this book possible. Larry Sleznikow of the UW-L Office of Academic
Technology Services lent his technical expertise to assist with the formatting of illustrations.
Robert Buffington thanks Valerie Bhat for her assistance editing and formatting the images
in his chapter.
