Mexican American Masculinities on Reality TV

Abstract

This essay examines the treatment of Mexican American masculinities on Los Cowboys, an internet-based reality TV show that followed a team of charros (Mexican cowboys) from Los Angeles as they prepared to compete in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Though it aired for only two seasons (2015–16), Los Cowboys was a landmark achievement because it used the genre-specific techniques of reality TV to represent the diversity, complexity, and contradictions of Mexican American masculinities in ways that challenge longstanding patterns of racial and gender stereotyping on television. Integrating theories and methods from Chicanx studies, media studies, and masculinity studies, I analyze the characters’ interactions around issues such as dating, marriage, and childrearing; body weight and fitness; style and fashion; and labor and skill. While the show ultimately upholds the desirability of Mexican American men’s aspirations to be heteropatriarchal providers, it also shows hegemonic gender norms to be produced through interactions among men, rather than by essentialist traits, and to exist in critical dialogue with subaltern Mexican American gender formations, including feminism and queer Latinidad. I conclude that reality television offers rich potential for representations of diverse Mexican American masculinities, particularly when produced in the institutional contexts of the Latinx web series and internet television more broadly.