Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora

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-Hernâandez 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-Magâon, a well-recognized anarchist political leader and journalist, and his multiple families. Guidotti-Hernâandez analyzes Flores-Magâon'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-Hernâandez 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--