Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora by Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández

Abstract

Reviewed by: Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora by Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández Lydia R. Cooper Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora. Durham: Duke UP, 2021. 352 pp. Paper, $28.95. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández’s Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora examines the visual archives of Enrico Flores Magón and Leonard Nadel. Flores Magón was a journalist and, with his more famous brother Ricardo, developed the anarcho-communist political philosophy of magonismo, fleeing to the United States in political exile prior to the Mexican Revolution; Nadel was a freelance photographer who documented the bracero program in the mid-twentieth [End Page 93] century. Both archives are records of diasporic life and form material records of the affective experience of men estranged from their homes and, in various ways, legally and physically constrained; both are what Guidotti-Hernández calls “archives of intimacy.” In these intimacies she reads “the records of masculine emotional bonds” in order to find queer complexities to heteronormative presumptions of machismo (9). Building on her previous book, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (also published by Duke University Press), this new study argues that “we need a transnational approach to affect and intimacy, one where the movement of ideas, bodies, services, emotions, and goods across and between the borders of nation-states produced new forms of gender” (5). This is a heady goal but one whose broader aims is achieved, albeit gesturally rather than definitively. This book takes as its specific focus the study of affective diaspora through visual artifacts, with most analysis dedicated to photographs. “Affective relations are forged through photographs,” she argues. “Photographs position the subjects in their most idealized or desired state and in a form of capture” (12). The first half of the book follows the gendered migrations, representations, and affective life of Flores Magón, beginning roughly around the time he fled to El Paso, Texas. Guidotti-Hernández notes the “baroque, masculinized style” of his prose in correspondence throughout his life, drawing attention to his performance of a sort of masculine virility (39). She anchors his section, though, by interrogating that “virility” through the erased records of his first marriage to Paula Carmona, a relationship whose erasure suggests the patriarchal and misogynistic strain of the masculinity he presented as essential to his identity as a free love–supporting anarchist. She examines a sketch he made of Paula, along with a cardboard cutout of two hearts, and says that they show an “intimacy counter [to] Enrique’s revisionist narratives in the biographies,” where he erases his relationship with Paula and inaccurately claims he was married to his second partner, Teresa Arteaga, during his time orchestrating the movement’s struggle from El Paso in 1908 (52). Overall, then, she concludes that Flores [End Page 94] Magón’s intimate and emotional life complexified performance of machismo, but in his own words, he asserted “normative gender order” (174). The second half of the book looks at the homoerotic tensions and possibilities in photojournalist Leonard Nadel’s visual record of the bracero program. Nadel, Guidotti-Hernández says, committed himself to his freelance photojournalistic project, traveling more than five thousand miles with his subjects from their homes in Central Mexican states through processing centers in the United States and into the labor camps (178). In his photographs she traces the tensions between two competing articulations of the braceros’ positionality—on the one hand, representing them as masculine ideals (Nadel’s photos “lionized [them] as heteronormative subjects who suffered”)—and on the other hand, revealing the intimacies of domestic life where men cohabiting with each other performed the “invisible work of domesticity” (180). One of the strengths of this section is her attention to weaving in the other histories of diasporic communities, such as Japanese American sharecroppers, German prisoners of war, and other precarious communities; pitted against each other in capitalist contexts, violence erupted—yet Nadel evades those tonal shadings in his photographic subjects. Guidotti-Hernández thus suggests the ways that feminine masculinity and homoeroticism enriched bracero life and culture underneath the dominant pressures of patriarchal, capitalist assertions of power and privilege. In the book...