Random Readings Redux: Macho Grande

This review ran in The Herald Mexico last September 26. I thought about it again recently because it deals with another example of something that "everybody knows" about Mexico — namely that it's overrun with machismo. But what does that mean? And is it true?

Random Readings
BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT

THE MEANINGS OF MACHO:
Being a Man in Mexico City
by Matthew C. Gutmann
University of California Press (2006)

The University of California Press, one of the best sources of good books in English about Mexico, has seen fit to bring out a "10th Anniversary Edition" of "The Meanings of Macho," Matthew Gutmann's groundbreaking 1996 study of male gender identity in a Mexico City colonia.

That tells us two things right away. One is that the book was special enough the first time around, and of sufficient academic impact, to merit a re-issue. How often does anybody keep track of an ethnography's anniversary?

The other is that the subject matter, neatly described in the subtitle, is at least as consequential and fluid today as it was back in the Zedillo administration.

But don't expect much analysis of the social and psychological development of machismo, "the supposed cultural trait of Mexican men that is at once so famous and yet so thoroughly unknown." Gutmann, an anthropologist at Brown University, has come to bury machismo, not to praise it. Two of the goals of his study, he writes, are "the deconstruction of hollow clichés about Mexican masculinity," and to provide "a potent antidote to the notion that especially virulent strains of sexism are to be found only in Mexico."

A pretty good indication of how shaky the ground is under the macho myth is how ill-defined the term is in the first place. Everybody "knows" that such a thing exists, but getting a definition out of them is something else. What usually comes out is a string of adjectives or behaviors.

If the definer is in a good mood, the macho is a strong and courageous man, self-reliant, confident, virile, a good provider, possessed of valor and attractive to women. Carlos Monsiváis has traced the flowering of this concept of the good macho to the film personas of Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete in the 1940s and 50s.

But then there's the bad macho, with his exaggerated aggressiveness, intransigence, daredevil antics, over-consumption of alcohol, compulsive gambling, obsession with procreation (of more males, of course), infidelity, child-abandonment, and intolerance of just about everything except the idea of wife-beating.

We can recognize in these behaviors good and bad traits of men anywhere in the world. Put a Mexican face on any combination of them, however, and it becomes "macho" and is assumed to be a national characteristic.

That, Gutmann argues, is nothing but egregious stereotyping: "Even if generalizations about Mexican men and women had in the past been somewhat appropriate -- and there is little to recommend such a conclusion -- they should be discarded now."

Gutmann is not above placing some of the blame on his fellow ethnographers, who sometimes start with the notion that there is such a thing as "the Mexican man," when in fact there are more than 50 million Mexican men, each with his own story.

"What scholars who spend most of their time talking to a small number of people usually write about are stories of the lives of just those few people," Gutmann writes in the preface to the new edition. "The appeal to generalize from this small group is intoxicating but usually best resisted."

It's good to hear those words coming from an anthropologist. And there's a good deal of this sort of professional introspection throughout the book, which may be one of the reasons it made such a splash.

But generalizations, alas, still rule the day when it comes to describing Mexican men and women. Foreign journalists seem to be incapable of writing about, say, women in politics without some reference to "macho Mexico." More seriously, Gutmann worries that generalization about Mexican men serve "theoretical and political agendas."

"The result of this situation, briefly put, is that by capriciously glossing over significant differences among men based on class, generation, region, and ethnicity, among other factors, such generalizations have come to invent and then perpetuate sterile ideal types and stereotypes."

It comes from inside the country as well. The author explains for us a phenomenon familiar to ethnographers that has to do with individuals defining themselves in the context of assumed culture-wide traits. Most of Gutmann's interviewees take for granted that machismo is a Mexican male trait, but also offer disclaimers such as "I'm not like that," or "My husband is different," or "It's not like it used to be," or "Where you'll really finds machos is out there in the campo."

The Mexican macho, then, is ghostly -- ever-present, but never there.

Octavio Paz famously described the Mexican macho in his 1950 classic "Labyrinth of Solitude." Gutmann, like most people, admires Paz, but warns that "he should not be taken literally but literarily." It's a beautiful book, Gutmann writes, "and part of the reason for its elegance may be that Paz was creating qualities of mexicanidad as much as he was reflecting on them."

I don't want to put words in the author's mouth, but that sounds a lot to me like a polite way of saying that Paz made most of that stuff up. He was the macho's Homer.

Gutmann, on the other hand, explores "being male in Mexico City" via constant interviewing during a year-long residence in a Mexico City working class neighborhood. The colonia he chose was an interesting one. Santo Domingo, just east of UNAM and south of Coyoacán, was until 1971 "a wasteland of volcanic rocks, caves, shrubs, snakes and scorpions," a place that the 19th century Sottish-born Mexico City chronicler Fanny Calderón de la Barca tells us was a place for robbers to "hide themselves among the barren rocks of the Pedregal, and render all crossroads insecure."

Then President Luis Echeverría gave tacit approval for a land invasion, and a colonia of 20,000 souls was born. By the 1990s, the population was more than 100,000. Gutmann uses the ethnographer's tools to describe for us what it's like to live there as a husband, father, and provider -- in short, as a man. But he writes like a journalist, not just without jargon but mercifully free of the condescension that social scientists often fall into despite themselves.

It would be folly to try here to summarize the stories and insights Gutmann brings us. Suffice it to say that if you're a man in Mexico City, as some of us are, you'll recognize a lot more of yourself in these pages than any set image of what a macho is supposed to be like.

In what may be the most fitting tribute to Gutmann's ability to study human beings rather than subjects, the preface to the new edition mostly consists of epilogues on what has happened to the main characters rather than updated ethnographic data. This is a book about people.

"You can exclusively blame machismo for a host of ills among Mexican men (and women)," Gutmann concludes. "But you can only do this if you wish to be the guardian of facile fairy tales and forfeit any claim to have witnessed actual people living and loving and yearning and wavering and celebrating and failing and laughing their way through their extraordinary lives."