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Latinx hypersexualized lovers or kingpin predators pulsate from our TVs, smartphones, and Hollywood movie screens. Tweets from the executive office brand Latinxs as bad-hombre hordes and marauding rapists and traffickers. A-list Anglo historical figures like Billy the Kid haunt us with their toxic masculinities. These are the themes creatively explored by the eighteen contributors in Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities.

Together they explore how legacies of colonization and capitalist exploitation and oppression have created toxic forms of masculinity that continue to suffocate our existence as Latinxs. And while the authors seek to identify all cultural phenomena that collectively create reductive, destructive, and toxic constructions of masculinity that traffic in misogyny and homophobia, they also uncover the many spaces—such as Xicanx-Indígena languages, resistant food cultures, music performances, and queer Latinx rodeo practices—where Latinx communities can and do exhale healing masculinities.

With unity of heart and mind, the creative and the scholarly, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities opens wide its arms to all non-binary, decolonial masculinities today to grow a stronger, resilient, and more compassionate new generation of Latinxs tomorrow.

Contributors
Arturo J. Aldama
Frederick Luis Aldama
T. Jackie Cuevas
Gabriel S. Estrada
Wayne Freeman
Jonathan D. Gomez
Ellie D. Hernández
Alberto Ledesma
Jennie Luna
Sergio A. Macías
Laura Malaver
Paloma Martinez-Cruz
L. Pancho McFarland
William Orchard
Alejandra Benita Portillos
John-Michael Rivera
Francisco E. Robles
Lisa Sánchez González
Kristie Soares
Nicholas Villanueva Jr.

 

You know the scene: amateur soccer players battling over the ball, spectators cheering from the sidelines, vendors selling their wares from carts. Over the past half century, immigration from Latin America has transformed the public landscape in the United States, and numerous communities are witnessing one of the hallmarks of this transformation: the emergence of park soccer. In Fútbol in the Park, David Trouille takes us into the world of Latino soccer players who regularly play in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood where they are not always welcome. Together on the soccer field, sharing beers after the games, and occasionally exchanging taunts or blows, the men build relationships and a sense of who they are. Through these engrossing, revealing, and at times immortalizing activities, they forge new identities, friendships, and job opportunities, giving themselves a renewed sense of self-worth and community. As the United States becomes increasingly polarized over issues of immigration and culture, Fútbol in the Park offers a close look at the individual lives and experiences of migrants.
 

What is the end of the story after a lifetime in gangs?
 
Violence, addiction, imprisonment . . . we don’t have to look hard to see the negative consequences of gang involvement. But what does it look like to spend a life—from adolescence to adulthood—in gangs? Sociologist Avelardo Valdez and his research team have been following the lives of Mexican American men in San Antonio, Texas, over a remarkable twenty years, watching and listening as they navigate adolescent delinquency and gang involvement, advance into a life of crime, and—sometimes—attempt to break from gang life and build lives in conventional society.

When gang affiliation exploded in the 1990s, adolescent street gang membership surged in the Mexican American community of Westside San Antonio. Valdez was quick to begin investigating how young men embedded in a system with little support for lasting change turned to gang violence, drug use, and other risky behaviors. The honesty of these men’s accounts draws our attention to the economic, political, and sociocultural context of impoverished communities in San Antonio. Being constantly written off as troublemakers and criminals eroded the self-respect that these young men once had. They were once lithe, active, and full of self-confidence, but after a lifetime of constant harassment and entanglements with the legal system, they now have a perpetual look of exhaustion and defeat.

Encouraging readers to question who is at fault when young men become involved in gangs and other delinquent behaviors, Homeboys Forever is a humanizing account of marginalized youth who struggle to overcome the systemic inequities that have led to a lifetime of heartbreaking consequences. 
 

Preventing teen pregnancy has become a national goal, but a one-size-fits-all strategy for achieving it may never be found. Because varying social and cultural factors lead to pregnancy among different ethnic/class groups, understanding these factors is essential in designing pregnancy prevention programs that work. This book explores the factors that lead to childbearing among Latina adolescents.

Pamela Erickson draws on both quantitative data and case histories to trace the pathways to motherhood for Latina teens. After situating her study within current research on teen pregnancy, she looks specifically at teen mothers enrolled in programs at Women's Hospital in East L.A. She describes the teens' relationships to their babies' fathers and their own families and discusses how these relationships affect whether teen mothers want to become pregnant, their use of prenatal, postpartum, and family planning services, and their ability to prevent a repeat pregnancy. Erickson describes culturally appropriate intervention efforts and assesses the limitations of prevention programs in institutional settings such as schools and clinics.

Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men. Often forgotten or silenced, these men are honored and remembered in Sown in Earth through the lens of Arroyo’s memories of his father. Arroyo recollects his father’s anger and alcohol abuse as a reflection of his place in society, in which his dreams and disappointments are patterned by work and poverty, loss and displacement, memory and belonging.

In Sown in Earth, Arroyo often roots his thoughts and feelings in place, expressing a deep connection to the small homes he inhabited in his childhood, his warm and hazy memories of his grandmother’s kitchen in Puerto Rico, the rivers and creeks he fished, and the small cafés in Madrid that inspired writing and reflection in his adult years. Swirling in romantic moments and a refined love for literature, Arroyo creates a sense of belonging and appreciation for his life despite setbacks and complex anxieties along the way.

By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer. Sown in Earth is a shocking yet warm collage of memories that serves as more than a memoir or an autobiography. Rather, Arroyo recounts his youth through lyrical prose to humanize and immortalize the hushed lives of men like his father, honoring their struggle and claiming their impact on the writers and artists they raised.