Abstract
Essays in this useful collection revolve around the premise that Mexico’s patriarchal monolith—the dominant male, prone to violence, sexually driven to subject women, emotionally distant but prepared to respect a marriage based on a division of labor under his authority—began to crumble in the 1970s and decisively after 1980 with the onslaught of neoliberalism and intensified globalization. Women massively joined the labor force. State paternalism that had particularly favored male-dominated trade unions ebbed but support continued for family planning and education. Governments at the federal and state level responded to vigorous social movements by legalizing sexual freedom (2005), homosexual civil unions and gay marriage (Federal District in 2006 and 2010 and Coahuila, Colima, and Quintana Roo in 2013), adoption rights for gay couples, and abortion rights (Federal District in 2007). Even more widespread have been campaigns against domestic violence. Shaping the trend have been declining birth, mortality and marriage rates, and accelerated mobility. The buzz of the global media has also loosened long-standing structures altering couple relationships, marriage, and family as women and men “prioritize emotional attachment and personal satisfaction” (Introduction, 2).
The essays share Ken Plummer’s conceptualization of intimate citizenship (Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues, University of Washington, 2003) He argues that since the 1970s, the grand gender narratives (of the Euro-North American west) have been fading. In their place, fragmentations, pluralization, and multiplicities emerge amid uncertainty, doubt, and much contention. In intimate citizenship, private life becomes public—a legitimate space for sociopolitical struggle and the declaration of new rights that produce new enabling or repressive legislation, regulation, and social programs.
The editors’ introduction and Kate Willis’s essay provide a synthetic discussion of contemporary change. Rosario Esteinou presents an overview of twentieth-century developments. In her analysis of Teresa Suárez' 2006 film, Así del principio, Rosana Blanco-Cano argues that while the film’s focus on Lesbianism was intended to mark Mexico as part of globalized modernity, it avoided portraying genuine intimacy. It cast principals within a traditional heterosexual frame (women as ornaments of consumer-enhanced conventional beauty) and exoticism (the protagonist is rich, blond, and Jewish). The women come to no good end. Nonetheless, the film moved Lesbianism out of the closet. Bladimir Ruiz examines Camino a Casa, a 1994 novel by Naief Yehya that explores young men’s feelings as they struggle to live up to a traditional masculine model (aggressive, insolent, emotionally closed, violent, competitive, and driven by raw sexuality objectifying women). The protagonist is confused—about his failures at sexual conquest, his ambiguous reactions to homosexuality and inane macho banter. As he enters an open relationship with an offbeat girl, he can at last breathe a sigh of relief and express his emotions. Daniel Nehring looks at young professional women in Mexico City in the late 2000s. Their self-development, which includes a career and may or may not include marriage, requires negotiation with their families whose patriarchal norms they cannot accept. Through what the author calls “negotiated familism,” they do not reject their families, a necessary source of support and intimacy in an environment that is uncertain, insecure, fickle, and dangerous. Rather, they shape new attitudes and practices within the family. In her essay, Olga Rojas argues that these changes, inclusive of marriage based on mutual emotional satisfaction, are mostly confined to the highly educated, urban middle class and that as of 2004, they had not spread significantly. Introducing complexity to that argument, Dubrava Kindek uses data gathered shortly afterward to show transitions in courtship in the rural town of Tehuitzingo, Puebla. From an adult-monitored and emotionally distant experience, courtship has become an extended youthful exploration and enjoyment of sentiment, facilitated by a prolonged schooling, new leisure time, freedom of movement, and the mass media. Still, marriage remains the future for women. Within it are subtle changes related to shared participation in childrearing, mutual decision making, and women’s freedom of movement based on new levels of conjugal trust. Male extramarital sex and domestic violence persist.
Crossing the border to south Texas, we read of Emmanuel Alvarado’s 2010 interviews with professional Mexican American women. These reveal tension between professional achievement and reproduction, both encouraged by families. While professional performance limits reproduction (delayed marriage and fewer children), the parental family remains important as a source of emotional and material (e.g., child care) support, and women prefer not to travel or relocate in order to remain near their families. In the final essay, Hector Carrillo draws from his study (US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) of Mexican immigrant gays in San Diego. In the most intimate moments in this book, Leopoldo and Alvaro speak of pleasure in sex as not merely physical but affectionate and requiring rational, open communication. They describe their North American partners as cold, instrumental, and distant—terms gender studies have applied to Mexican machismo. Of course, the juxtaposing trope of the Latin lover versus the puritanical, closed Anglo Saxon has long bounced around in North–South dialogue, but it has not much entered gender studies. These intimacies may challenge certain premises of the book. First, they relate to transnational movements flowing south to north and not the usual north to south. They suggest that within the paradigm of modern democratic intimate relations, these Mexican gays seem far ahead of their supposedly more advanced Anglo Saxon counterparts. Finally, one must ask: are Leopoldo and Alvaro expressing a new or an old form of pleasure?
While this collection is interdisciplinary, it is short on history. If the essays cannot play forward to grasp the rapidity and diffusion of change, they can manage a better reading of history. If the 1980s accelerated gender/subjectivity changes, the process had a much longer history. Rosario Esteinou makes an interesting argument about the Catholic family she believes to have dominated in the middle and upper classes between 1940 and 1970. Romantic, companionate marriage meant fulfilling hierarchically ordered roles (domesticity for women and public activity and breadwinning for men) with respect for female modesty and male sexual liberty. Her argument about women’s domesticity relies on sources from the late nineteenth century and overlooks the notion of motherhood advanced by the postrevolutionary development project. The Mexican mother—often a single mother—was no longer a retiring angel of the hearth but an energetic emotional and rational actor partnered with the state and often the church in the raising of healthy, disciplined children who would form part of the modern labor force. Golden Age cinema might portray the patriarchal family, as Blanco-Cano argues, but depictions of women were ambiguous. The proper middle- or upper-class wife was seldom an admirable character—cold, obsessed with consumption and propriety, materialistic, and sometimes brutally domineering. Sara Garcia, cinema’s paradigmatic good mother and grandmother, often directed a female-headed household. Marga Lopez, Dolores del Rio, and Mimi Derba played office workers, scientists, and school directors while Maria Felix made a career out of challenging machismo. Further, Esteinou’s Catholic model was itself a defensive construct promoted by the church against the headwinds of secularization. We must probe more widely and deeply to explain why children of the 1940s and 1950s rebelled massively in the 1960s. In Mexico City, they participated in vigorous secularizing processes: the mass media (e.g., Hollywood film for children and youth, popular music and dance, Mexican and transnational), government, church, and private sector mobilizations for children’s rights to health, education, welfare, play, consumerism, and relatively more liberal parenting among a diverse population in a relatively safe city.
Nonetheless, Esteinou’s essay and the others contain valuable insights—particularly in relation to the family. The Mexican family has been a critical social unit throughout history in the absence of a strong state, reliable economy, and public trust. This family has long protected the vulnerable—the elderly, the incapacitated, the illegitimate, children whose parents are absent daily or for longer periods of time—not to mention the justly or unjustly accused. As these scholars note, it offers protection against the dangers, risks, and insecurities that riddle the new global economy.
As the essays are written around Plummer’s notion of intimate citizenship, it is a pity that little consideration is given to its link to broader politics beyond the politicization of the personal. Anthony Giddens and others have argued for a positive relationship between democratic personal relations and political democracy. However, in Mexico as elsewhere, there is no linear relationship. It is quite likely that the most advanced democrats in Mexico are not the (still authoritarian) politicians, political parties, private and public bureaucracies, and the church—but rather a broad swathe of ordinary citizens in their personal lives. At the same time, we must note that in Mexico as elsewhere, if neoliberalism and globalization have encouraged personal democracy and tolerance they have also fostered the opposite. They have bred cultures of violence and death engaging men and women in organized crime and systematic abuse of other human beings, cultures that appear to be uncurtailed in the absence of state and civil society capacity to channel individuals in a more positive, humane, and productive direction.