Sonya Lipsett-Rivera has done it again by writing another well-researched and highly readable history. The author reminds readers that colonial Mexicans themselves did not use the word macho. Yet, her book analyzes precisely the colonial period (mid to late seventeenth to early nineteenth century), with an eye toward the subject of men's experiences and notions of male behavior. Lipsett-Rivera's motivation here is how the Mexican macho trope relates to being a man in colonial Mexico. By offering a fine-grained analysis of topics like boyhood, sexuality (heteronormative as well as homosexual), labor, violence, and male sociability, she ultimately argues that the emerging of the “macho” stereotype could occur only after Independence.
Lipsett-Rivera's expertise as an established scholar is evident in her skillful analysis of 570 court cases. To those she adds diaries, travel literature, and contemporary morality discourses to diversify her source base. Admittedly, her sources offer uneven access to elites and plebeians, particularly indigenous and Afro-Mexican men. Still, she incorporates the experiences of men of color throughout the text, as in her contention that indigenous families were more likely to intervene to protect their adolescent sons from violence than were Hispanics. Lipsett-Rivera uses her stellar command of secondary literature to connect readers to important texts throughout. For example, she directly engages with Matthew C. Gutmann's The Meanings of Macho, acknowledging his pathbreaking historical analysis of violence in colonial Mexico while clarifying the goal of her own work: to catalogue masculine behaviors outside the contours of violence as well.
Thematic chapter titles reveal that the book is not organized chronologically. Importantly, though, the author pinpoints the late eighteenth century as a moment when expectations of and practices of masculine behavior altered significantly. For example, Bourbon reforms on wage labor and campaigns against vagrancy led to two new notions: how work factored positively into male identity, and how moments of tension were produced when more informal codes of labor collapsed in top-down fashion, leaving laborers with less autonomy to articulate their manliness.
The book culminates with attention to Mexico's era of Independence, because it is the changes in this era that serve to highlight the book's overall argument. Whereas in the colonial period, men (especially non-elites) might exert power through violence in their domestic realms, they were less likely to do so in other spaces due to the risk of punishment or violence by their superiors. Lipsett-Rivera contends that precursors of macho masculinity existed in the colonial era but was not acknowledged by society as a whole until men's broad political power across society was needed in the fight for independence.
As Lipsett-Rivera unearths men's experiences across the colonial era, some surprises emerge. First, we see plentiful evidence that non-elite men understood their subordinate place in society, but also that subordination had its limits when unspoken lines were crossed, such as in excessive punishments in the workplace. Her work is creative in its attention to space and reveals that while men are usually depicted as using non-domestic spaces to create social ties, there was a significant emotional pull of home, even though men had important social ties in other spaces. Clearly, as with any longue durée treatment of a broad subject, some questions will remain. Even though this book shows that sexuality generally was constrained but in some aspects quite free, one still wonders how masculinity was constructed through sex. With regard to labor, the excellent analysis of non-elite masculinities begs for attention to masculinity among enslaved Africans.
These questions aside, this book offers a winning combination of clear argumentation and vivid prose. This style is very adaptable to an undergraduate syllabus in courses on Mexican history and gender issues, or colonial Latin American history. Students will enjoy the well-crafted glimpses of individual men from a variety of class and racial backgrounds in their places of work, social situations, and families. This book's analysis of the range of masculine experiences in the colonial era, and its attention to the many actions and emotions apart from violence, make it a most welcome publication.
