Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora

Abstract

What does studying visual and print representations of Mexican masculinity in flux/transit do for scholars of Bracero-era and twentieth-century Mexican and US pasts? Historians such as Deborah Cohen, Lori Flores, and Mireya Loza have reshaped our understanding of the lives of Braceros, bringing gendered explorations to some of the millions of Mexican men who arrived to the United States after the Second World War for labor. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández's Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora continues those conversations, injecting a critical examination of intimacy, belonging, and masculinity through photographs and private archives. Moreover, the author inserts the necessary theme of diaspora into her study and states that scholars must consider “how the interstitial experience of being between nations as diasporic subjects created opportunities for new manifestations of gender” (p. 21).This “feminist cultural transnational history” utilizes archives in Washington, DC, the US Southwest, and Mexico to consider how Mexican men—some migrants and others political exiles—grappled with race and gender over the course of the twentieth century (p. 4). What makes this analysis singular is how the author seeks to illuminate gender transformations, contending that scholars must reflect upon the gender of Mexican men through “transnational masculine intimacies,” which highlight the role of emotional bonds between these men and their transnational kin networks (p. 5). Within two sections and fourteen chapters, Guidotti-Hernández's book reshapes our understandings of Mexican gender and race, which scholars in women, gender, and sexuality studies and American studies will want to read.If cultural historian Gail Bederman asks scholars to consider manhood as a gender script that changes in relation to new experiences, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora shows us how gender and masculinities need to be studied not just in context, but over space and time. Furthermore, Guidotti-Hernández maintains that scholars must attend to how Mexican men's relation to gender was precarious, and that “fragility was a function of the intimacies that” migrant men forged to help make sense of their racial, social, and political statuses in the United States. (p. 2). If the author contends that scholars must study gender and intimacy in both space and time, then the organization of the book must include different objects of study over time in different locales, which it does. The first half of the monograph traces cultural objects regarding the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and Enrique Flores Magón, while the second section explores configurations of emotion through examining photographs at Leonard Nadel's Bracero archive at the Smithsonian (p. 5).My favorite part of Guidotti-Hernández's second monograph is her study of queerness and alienation in the photographs of Braceros within the Leonard Nadel Collection. Through a series of pictures taken of faceless Braceros picking lettuce in Salinas, Guidotti-Hernández contemplates the relation between Mexican migrants and the food crops they cultivate in a space where Braceros are removed transnationally from family. The author asks the reader to consider the nuance of the relationships between Mexican migrant men. While she determines that Braceros may not have had social and political overlap with the Anglo gay domesticity of the US- or Mexico-based middle-class and upper-class homophile movement, one thing was certain: “they were parallel experiences that idealized friendship and intimacy among and between men” (p. 223). I think this is important, as further studies of Braceros should consider how race, gender, and sexuality shaped these homosocial spaces.Guidotti-Hernández's visual analysis of the Nadel Collection is masterful. Yet, although I appreciated her insertion of queer possibilities to help the reader rethink masculinities in diaspora, I also wanted to learn more about the histories of the men in the photographs. Flores's Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement utilizes not just photography, but also Monterey County newspaper and print media stories that piece together how Braceros encountered racial discrimination, worker exploitation, and everyday life in central California. I think that paring both monographs would demonstrate how a critical investigation of how Bracero men forged intimacy and friendship alongside how photographers and the state viewed Braceros.