Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora

In Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández challenges machismo--a shorthand for racialized and heteronormative Latinx men's misogyny--with nuanced portraits of Mexican men and masculinities along and across the US-Mexico border. Guidotti-Hernández foregrounds Mexican men's emotional vulnerabilities and intimacies in their diasporic communities. Highlighting how Enrique Flores Magón, an anarchist political leader and journalist, upended gender norms through sentimentality and emotional vulnerability that he performed publicly and expressed privately, Guidotti-Hernández documents compelling continuities between his expressions and those of men enrolled in the Bracero program. Braceros--more than 4.5 million Mexican men who traveled to the United States to work in temporary agricultural jobs from 1942 to 1964--forged domesticity and intimacy, sharing affection but also physical violence. Through these case studies that reexamine the diasporic male private sphere, Guidotti-Hernández formulates a theory of transnational Mexican masculinities rooted in emotional and physical intimacy that emerged from the experiences of being racial, political, and social outsiders in the United States "Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora offers a transnational affective narrative of masculinities along the US-Mexico border, showing how men's emotional vulnerability and intimacies have challenged the overdetermined script of machismo. To challenge this narrative, Nicole Guidotti-Hernández offers a theory of transnational Mexican masculinity rooted in emotional and physical intimacy and family settings from the 1890s to the 1950s. The first half of the book focuses on Enrique Flores-Magón, a well-recognized anarchist political leader and journalist, and his multiple families. Guidotti-Hernández analyzes Flores-Magón's archive to argue that his politics were rather gender normative and insistent on the production of a master narrative of the revolution that subordinated women. The second half examines Leonard Nadel's photographs of braceros, the over 4.5 million Mexican men who travelled to the US to work in temporary agricultural jobs from 1942 through 1964. Guidotti-Hernández demonstrates how the complex emotive life of braceros is best examined in the historical context of the Salinas Valley. The main methodological mode mines the historical record for thinking about emotion as a history of gender and sexuality as they are forged in migration. Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora provides key interventions for studies of masculinity within the fields of American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Historical Studies, and Studies of Mexico and its diaspora"-- Provided by publisher In Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora , Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernndez challenges machismo a shorthand for racialized and heteronormative Latinx men's misogynywith nuanced portraits of Mexican men and masculinities along and across the US-Mexico border. Guidotti-Hernndez foregrounds Mexican men's emotional vulnerabilities and intimacies in their diasporic communities. Highlighting how Enrique Flores Magn, an anarchist political leader and journalist, upended gender norms through sentimentality and emotional vulnerability that he both performed publicly and also expressed privately, Guidotti-Hernndez documents compelling continuities between his expressions and those of men enrolled in the Bracero program. Braceros more than 4.5 million Mexican men who travelled to the United States to work in temporary agricultural jobs from 1942 to 1964forged domesticity and intimacy, sharing affection but also physical violence. Through these case studies that reexamine the diasporic male private sphere, Guidotti-Hernndez formulates a theory of transnational Mexican masculinities rooted in emotional and physical intimacy that emerged from the experiences of being racial, political, and social outsiders in the United States. Cover 1 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 10 Part I: Enrique Flores Magón’s Exile: Revolutionary Desire and Familial Entanglements 38 1. Greeting Cards, Love Notes, Love Letters 44 2. PLM Intimate Betrayals: Enrique Flores Magón, Paula Carmona, and the Gendered History of Denunciation 52 3. Out of Betrayal and into Anarchist Love and Family 92 4. Bodily Harm 116 5. De la Familia Liberal 136 6. The Split 148 7. The Emotional Labor of Being in Leavenworth 156 8. Deportation to a Home That Doesn’t Exist, or “He Has Interpreted the Alien’s Mind” 166 Part I: Conclusion 180 Part II: The Homoerotics of Abjection: The Gaze and Leonard Nadel’s Salinas Valley Bracero Photographs 184 9. Making Braceros Out of Place and Outside of Time 194 10. The Salinas Valley and Hidden Affective Histories 206 11. Hip Forward into Domestic Labor and Other Intimacies 224 12. Queer Precarious Lives 242 13. Wanting to Be Looked At 260 14. Passionate Violence and Thefts 284 Part II: Conclusion 292 Conclusion 294 Notes 300 Bibliography 330 Index 338 A 338 B 338 C 339 D 340 E 340 F 341 G 342 H 342 I 343 J 343 K 343 L 343 M 344 N 345 O 345 P 345 Q 346 R 346 S 346 T 347 U 348 V 348 W 348 Y 348 Z 348 "Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández challenges the stereotypes of machismo with nuanced portraits of Mexican men and masculinities along and across the US-Mexico border."-- Provided by publisher