If not a ‘macho’,then who did it? Social actors and the violence of Mexico

Introduction

Violence against women is a public problem in Mexico – as the National Institute of Women reports – more than 66% of women have suffered some form of violence throughout their lives, whether in the family, school, work, labor, in the public space, or from their partners (Instituto Nacional de Mujeres, 2021). Although since 2012 femicide has been considered a crime according to the Mexican Federal Penal Code, the confinement derived from the coronavirus pandemic escalated impunity and sexist violence – during the first month of the lockdown, 11 women were killed daily (Instituto Nacional de Mujeres, 2021). In the first half of 2021, the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP) recorded 489 femicides in Mexico ‒ 9.2% more than in the corresponding period in 2019. At the same time, there is an increased mortality of men – for every 100 dead women there are 128 dead men. The average rate at the state level is 10.8 men killed as a result of an accident or as victims of violence per 10,000 inhabitants – in comparison, the average rate for women is 2.3 (Instituto Nacional de Estadstica Geografa e Informtica [INEGI], 2019b: 36, 40–41, 44).

According to the press but also as commonly believed by Mexicans, the main reason for an extreme violence, especially against women, is machismo – they talk about la violencia machista (Barragán, 2021). Mexican women protest in streets singing: ‘the oppressive state is a macho rapist’ (Trujillo et al., 2021). For many decades, since the term machismo was defined by Bermúdez (1955) as a mental phenomenon – ‘a typical case of unconscious tendency compensation femininity in a Mexican man’, the same stance has been presented by sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, and other researchers of the Latin American societies. In the literature, the core features of machismo include ‘exaggerated aggressiveness, tenacity in relations with other men, arrogance and sexual aggression in relations with women’ (Stevens, 1973: 90). The second wave of feminism in the 70s and the development of gender studies revised opinions on Latin American women and men previously described in the social science literature as heirs to a machista legacy, a legacy of obsessive masculinity and hierarchical gender relations (Mirandé, 1998: 21). The plural ‘masculinities’ appeared – ‘there is no one masculinity, although there are hegemonic forms and they are subordinate to it’ (Kaufman, 1989: 5). Machismo started to be defined not only as the hegemonic masculinity, but also as power, ideology, ‘social institution based on an insignificant relationship between masculinity and biological sex’ (Kaufman, 1989: 40), or the basic myth in the construction of masculine identity in Mexico (Melhuus, 1996: 241). There is an agreement that the features of this phenomenon include: the domination over other people (and especially over women), the rivalry between men, the continuous search for sexual conquests, the obsession to exhibit value in the public sphere, the indifference to pain and risk, the concealment of feelings, the opposition to attitudes and tasks traditionally assigned to the female condition, the verbal abuse as well as psychological and physical violence toward women (Loma, 2003: 22–23).

The need to constantly prove masculinity and the resultant violence is a frequent subject in gender studies carried in Latin America (Basham, 1976; Bustos Torres, 1999; Garda, 1998; Jiménez Guzmán, 2013; Kaufman, 1989; Mirandé, 1998; Stevens, 1965, and others). Kaufman (1989) discusses ‘the triad of violence’ – a macho is violent against other men, against women and against himself (pp. 46–57). Selby proves that the main reason for the growing violence has been male unemployment and men’s financial dependence on women, which have been interpreted as a threat to masculine dignity (quoted by Gutmann, 2000: 312). While Garda (1998) seeks the explanation in the fear of everything that supposedly threatens male privileges and the status quo (pp. 194–195), Ramírez Rodríguez (1997) notes that there are several beliefs that not only allow aggressive men to avoid responsibility for acts of violence against women, but also contribute to their pervasiveness. Among others, the belief that male violence is a family issue, and cases of such violence are isolated, do not pose a serious social problem and occur only amongst the lower classes of the society. However, there is also a tacit assumption that men are aggressive ‘by nature’, they simply lose control (Ramírez Rodríguez, 1997: 230, 233–240). In his field work Alfredo Mirandé tried to combat generalizations on Latino men, based on stereotypes and ethnographic work carried out in 1960s and 1970s (Lewis, 1960, 1961; Mirandé, 1998). Nevertheless, on the list of characteristics of macho figure, mentioned by his respondents, next to the positive qualities, there are: exaggerated masculinity resulted from man’s insecurity and his need to prove his virility in front of others, male dominance within the family, in which the male demands authoritarian power especially in relation to the female, violence, aggressiveness, irresponsibility, inside and outside the family, as well as selfishness and stubbornness (Mirandé, 1998: 70–71). An expression of such rivalry between men, common in Mexico, is also the custom of verbal combat albur (Tomczak-Boczko, 2020).

A strong conviction of compulsory violence is also a vital element of the process of introducing boys to the wider society – they must be strong (fuertes), tough (aguantadores, duros), ready to compete and fight for success in life. Garda (1998) notes ‘boys are educated in terms of hegemonic masculinity: violent games, blows when saying hello, no physical contact, etc’. (pp. 188–189). Insecure about their masculinity, they have to prove all the time that they are virile enough, better than others, always number one (Mirandé, 1998: 61).

Interestingly, the violence exerted by mothers on children is not treated very often in the literature on the subject. In general, fathers are considered to be more patient and consenting to their children. It is the mothers who enforce the rules more rigorously than the fathers, even when it is necessary to physically punish the children (Gutmann, 2000; Tomczak-Boczko, 2019).

It needs to be highlighted that even though the cult of macho is a common phenomenon across the whole Latin America, it is of a special importance in Mexico, where it forms the key element of the Mexican national identity. The Mexican macho is, above all, daring, proud, brave, not giving up, not trusting anyone, and when suffering, he acts like a national hero laughing and ‘not breaking down’. He is embodied in the character charro, a Mexican horseman with a specific hat, who in the 21st century became a national symbol, as evidenced by the recognition of the charro as Mexico’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (Mariscal, 2019). ‘Machismo stereotypes constitute key components of the symbolic capital used by ordinary Mexicans’ (Gutmann, 2000: 57).

Linguistic aspects of the reasons of violence in Mexico are yet to be studied, however, I want to mention some conclusions drawn from the analysis on the term macho of the reference corpora the Mexican sub-corpus of the CREA Contemporary Spanish Language Reference Corpus (Real Academia Española 2015) and the 21st Century Spanish Corpus CORPES XXI (Real Academia Española, 2018). Analyzing the concordances with terms macho/machos I distinguished three discourses which I named: ‘becoming a macho’, ‘macho’s women’, and ‘homosexual as an antagonist of a macho’. In the first discourse the category ‘becoming a macho’ is associated with the pursuit of a certain ideal, a man must prove that he deserves to be called a macho, he must meet a number of requirements: he must not cry, he must endure pain, regret and fear and must never give up. All these attributes are demonstrated by the macho primarily through violence – he has to be tough and dominant, must subdue, subordinate, fight, challenge – he must chingar (fuck) others. Macho and violence-related adjectives and nouns are numerous: aggressive, hostile, irascible, thug, abusive, chauvinist, contemptuous, womanizer, bad, beater. He must always respond to violence with violence, thus proving his courage and getting reasons to be proud. The violence is used against everybody – other men, women, especially those who are not ‘from home’ (de casa), and against homosexuals who embody all the features that macho despises (and sometimes desires, as the figure of macho callado proves) (Tomczak-Boczko, 2018: 114–118).

I present arguments in three steps. First, I briefly present the magnitude of violence in Mexico and machismo (the cult of macho) as the main explanation of such situation. Therefore, next, I analyze extracts of interviews recorded in Guadalajara, Mexico, in which the informants talk about violence, in particular, I determine the representation of perpetrators in the discourses of the informants by applying the van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Approach. Finally, through doing so, I shed light on the following research questions: Do the informants see machismo as a reason of violence? Does ‘being a macho’ justify violence? Does the representation of perpetrators justify their aggressive conduct?

Theoretical framework

Theo van Leeuwen presented The Social Actors Approach (SAA) in 1996 in an article published in Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, later he elaborated on it in a book Discourse and Social Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (2008). As Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer emphasize:

[SAA] applies to a wide range of sociological and linguistic theories, particularly those explaining the role of action in creating a social structure: representation is ultimately based on practice, on what people do -

the primacy of practice is theoretical core of the SAA (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 36).

The starting point in SAA theory is the distinction between social practices and their representation in texts or discourse. The essence is the difference between ‘doing it’ and ‘talking about it’, the same social practice can be described in different ways, leading to many discourses. Van Leeuwen draws on the theory of recontextualization by the sociologist of education Basil Bernstein (1986, 1990), and assumes that ‘all discourses recontextualize social practices, and that all knowledge is, therefore, ultimately grounded in practice, however slender that link may seem at times’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 5). As van Leeuwen understands ‘discourse’ in Foucault’s sense as a social cognition, as ‘a socially constructed knowledge of some social practice developed in specific social context, and in ways appropriate to these contexts’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 6), discourses can be used as resources for representing social practices in text. Consequently, it is possible to reconstruct discourses from the texts that draw on them.

During the Recontextualization Chain, as it is named by the author, the key elements of the social practices, such as: actors with their roles and identities, actions and their performance styles, settings, and timings, can be excluded, transformed, but also new elements can be added, that is purposes and legitimations for the actions (Van Leeuwen, 2008: VII–VIII). In this particular case, in the recontextualization chain the initial practices (violent acts) are inserted into another one, the practice of interviewing. Then, the text resulting from the interviews are inserted into yet another practice, it means, writing an academic paper. Van Leeuwen features several elements of social practices which can be transformed in the process of recontextualization: (1) Participants, (2) Actions, (3) Performance Modes, (4) Eligibility Conditions (Participants), (5) Presentation Styles, (6) Times, (7) Locations, (8) Eligibility Conditions (Locations), (9) Resources: Tools and Materials, (10) Eligibility Conditions (Resources) (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 7–12). What is relevant, recontextualization is rarely transparent to the participants of such practice, it is embedded in their common sense, in their habits, ‘tacit know-how of experienced participants of the recontextualizing social practice’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 13). The most fundamental transformation is the substitution of elements of the actual social practice with semiotic elements, it is when new meanings are added.

The main question of the paper is how social actors (perpetrators of violent acts) have been represented by the interviewees. To answer that I will use van Leeuwen categories, which I am describing below.

The first major categories highlighted by van Leeuwen is exclusion as opposed to inclusion. Whereby some exclusions leave no traces in the representation, so the author makes further distinction between suppression and backgrounding. In the first case, there is no reference to the social actor(s) in question anywhere in the text, while in backgrounding, the exclusion is less radical: the excluded social actors may not be mentioned in relation to a given action, but they are mentioned elsewhere in the text. Next transformation concerns the roles that social actors are given to play in representations (role allocation). As van Leeuwen emphasizes: ‘Representations can reallocate roles or rearrange the social relations between the participants. [. . .] activation occurs when social actors are represented as the active, dynamic forces in an activity, passivation when they are represented as “undergoing” the activity, or as being “at the receiving end of it”’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 33). He distinguishes two kinds of passivation: subjection and beneficialization. Another important transformation is genericization as opposed to specification, as van Leeuwen emphasizes: ‘The choice between generic and specific reference is another important factor in the representation of social actors; they can be represented as classes, or as specific, identifiable individuals’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 35). When social actors are referred to as individuals, it is individualization, when as groups, it is assimilation. Van Leeuwen distinguishes two major kinds of assimilation: aggregation (quantifies groups) and collectivization. There is another way in which social actors can be represented as groups: association, generally realized by parataxis. Next distinction is indetermination, when social actors are represented as unspecified individuals or groups, and differentiation, when their identity is specified. Nomination occurs when social actors are represented in terms of their unique identity, while categorization, when they are represented in terms of identities and functions they share with others. Van Leeuwen distinguishes two key types of categorization: functionalization and identification. ‘Functionalization occurs when social actors are referred to in terms of an activity, in terms of something they do, for instance, an occupation or role. Identification occurs when social actors are defined, not in terms of what they do, but in terms of who they, more or less permanently, or unavoidably, are’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 42). Furthermore, he determines three types of functionalization: classification, relational identification, and physical identification. In the first type, social actors are referred to in terms of the major categories that differentiate classes of people, which obviously are historically and culturally variable. The second one occurs if social actors are represented in terms of their personal, kinship, or work relations to each other. The last type means representation in terms of physical characteristics which uniquely identify them in a given context. When social actors are referred to in terms which evaluate them as good or bad, appraisement takes place. If they are represented as human beings, it is personalization, while they are represented in other ways – ‘by abstract nouns or by concrete nouns whose meanings do not include the semantic feature “human”’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 46) – impersonalization takes place. Van Leeuwen distinguishes two types of the former: abstraction (when social actors are represented through a quality assigned to them) and objectivation (when they are represented with reference to a place or things closely associated with their person or the action in which they are represented). Common types of objectivation include: spatialization, utterance autonomization, instrumentalization, and somatization. The last transformation described by the author is overdetermination, which takes place when social actors are represented as participating, at the same time, in more than one social practice. He distinguishes four categories of overdetermination: inversion, symbolization, connotation, and distillation.

Undoubtedly, the utility of van Leeuwen’s Social Actor Network can be proved not only by numbers (the Google Scholars search engine gives more than 2200 publications citing his book). The major research area in which van Leeuwen’s categories are widely used is press research: Bennett (2013), Don and Lee (2014), Strom (2015), and others. The universality of van Leeuwen’s theoretical scheme may also be demonstrated by its application, for example, to the analysis of ethical codes of 30 largest German companies (Winkler, 2011) or in the analysis of the representation of social actors in documents concerning the Bologna Process and the EHEA creation process (Saarinen, 2008). While Hansson (2015) includes the Social Actor Network in a heuristic model whose aim is to analyze macroconversational discursive practices (p. 302), there are as well many analyses of representation of women and men in the English language textbooks: Esmaeili and Arabmofrad (2015); Roohani (2014), Sahragard and Davatgarzadeh (2010). There are not many studies in Polish, nonetheless we should mention the analysis of representation of family in official church writings (Kamasa, 2013) or analysis of the discourse on fatherhood/motherhood in the media debate (Krzyżanowska, 2013). Obviously, this list is not exhaustive.

Corpus and procedures

The analyzed corpus has been created from scratch and consists of transcriptions of in-depth interviews (54 hours) with 28 inhabitants of Guadalajara (Mexico). The corpus has over 340,071 tokens, 17,033 types, and 15,110 lemas (Brezina et al., 2018). The fieldwork covered the city of Guadalajara with a population of over 4 million. Informants were selected using the snowball sampling method. As a result, the informants differed not only in terms of gender or age, but also in terms of social origin and sexual orientation.

Since during an interview ‘knowledge is constructed in the interaction between the person who carries it out and the informant’ (Kvale, 2007:18) informants were asked to tell their life stories. Afterward they were asked for opinions on the topics related to machismo, such as: mother/whore dichotomy, importance of virginity, domestic violence, male space, homosexuality, fatherhood and motherhood, man as breadwinner, private and public spheres, importance of the Catholic religion and Virgin Mary of Guadalupe, Mexican feminism. In conclusion they were asked for definitions of macho, machismo, ideal of a man and a good man (buen hombre). All these topics were determined theretofore on a basis of literature about machismo. In each case, I complied with the ethical standards, asking for permission to conduct and record the interview, as well as informing about the purpose of the research.

The informants’ stories about their lives, about their relatives and neighbors, their justification for choices, behaviors and beliefs are discourses understood as

ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing that are accepted as instantiations of particular roles (or ‘types of people’) by specific groups people (definition JJ Gee, after: Locke, 2004: 7).

Thus, in their stories, they recontextualized social practices. This non-transparent process of recontextualization, influenced by common-sense beliefs, customs and knowledge, represents the main axis of this work and justifies the use of the tools proposed by Theo van Leeuwen in Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (2008). I have limited my analysis to the representation of social actors, which obviously means omission of other salient and critically relevant features of the interviews.

Analysis and results

Violence is not a taboo subject in the stories of the informants. I have isolated 189 extracts of interviews focusing primarily on physical violence. To isolate them I used the keywords (based on previous reading several interviews) such as: violence (violencia), violent (violento/a), rape (violar), smack (pegar), fight (pelear), bully (peleonero/a), yell (gritar), assault (agresión), aggressive (agresivo/a), quarrel (discutir), hard blow, beating (madrazo, putazo, madriza). Surprisingly, in these extracts the terms such as macho or machista do not appear almost at all. Generally, in the whole corpus the frequency of these terms is relatively low: macho appears 142, machista – 50, and machos only 33 times. The terms are used by the informants mainly when they are asked to define macho. Due to the length of the article, it is not possible to present an overall analysis of macho and machista terms, nevertheless, the low frequency is surprising considering the collocations of the terms macho, that is, with the verb es (‘is’) the concordances reveal that macho is: nasty, terrible, bastard, asshole, drunk, aggressive, bully, quarrelsome, possessive, dominating, powerful. Macho brags and feels better than others, he also has many women. Finally, he is the most selfish human being. The interviewees see the macho/machista figure only negatively.

At the first stage of the analysis, extracts about violence are split into four groups depending on who is the victim of violence. There are four groups:

The first group turned out to be the most numerous – 65 extracts, while violent acts against men appeared in 51 quotations, against children – in 41 quotations, and violence with unidentified victims – in 26 fragments.

Below I present the results of the analysis of representation of the perpetrators of violence. They have been interpreted and identified according to van Leeuwen’s categories of the Social Actor Approach.

Concluding remarks

In this article the I have analyzed how the perpetrators of violence were represented in life stories told by the Mexicans. By comparing the extracts in which the informants talk about violence against women, men, and children I have noticed significant differences of representation, depending on the victims. Relational identification is most relevant in cases in which women and children are the victims, at the same time, it is the less frequent category in acts of violence against men. This is not surprising as the statistics point that almost 44% of the Mexican women have been victims of their husband or partner (INEGI, 2019a), however, it is remarkable that the female informants do not talk about their husbands as perpetrators, it is always ‘her husband’. I do not notice this kind of disproportion analyzing acts of violence against children – they talk about mi mamá or mi papa. It proves that beating children is still accepted in the Mexican society, while beating wives not so much any longer. Generally, the informants are reluctant to talking about the violence experience when they were perpetrators or victims: women do not talk about their own partner in such situations, and men declare they would not do it, and at the same time they justify their aggressive behavior activating their wives.

Surprisingly, the role allocation is not clear in many stories. First, the male informants activate their victims, especially their wives. It should be interpreted as a blame avoiding strategy. Second, men often justify their violent behavior by being provoked, or by claiming the necessity to defend themselves. Another example of vague role allocation is the use of the third person plural – the mutual aggression is common between men and happens between women, too. In the majority of those cases the aggression is mutual – ‘they beat each other’ – which probably helps to avoid being stigmatized as a victim.

Genericization takes place when the informants talk about ‘a/the’ man or men, and in four extracts about women. This happens primarily in statements of general facts that violence is very common across the Mexican society or in descriptions of typical male conduct. Whereas exclusion occurs only in cases of violence against women and queer men, it never occurs when a victim is a heterosexual male. The same happens with indetermination (‘they’) and spatialization. When a heterosexual male is a victim, the perpetrator is usually designated or blurred by the use of the third person plural.

This article started with a statement that a figure of macho represents a part of cultural heritage of the Mexicans, however, the informants emphasize that the macho features are only negative and the figure is historically remote, which falls within a definition of symbolization. Nevertheless, this fictional actor from the distant, mythical past, as van Leeuwen defines it, rarely replaces actors in real social practices, the informants do not talk about perpetrators as machos or machistas. It seems that being a macho does not justify any violence, though a macho is definitely aggressive and violent. Violence is a feature of being a man, a Mexican man, and even when a woman beats her husband, she is qualified ‘as if she was a man’. Obviously, what is acceptable in a given society originates from historical legacy and machismo forms a part of it.

The analysis of the perpetrator’s representation reveals the transformation of social practices (act of violence) into discourse about social practices. It unveils how the Mexicans represent their social world where violence plays a significant role and by recontextualizing they justify violent behaviors. The economic crisis that caused the impoverishment of the Mexican society and made women seek jobs, as well as the influence of the so-called folk feminism, forced social changes, including changes in the concept of masculinity. Some researchers note a reduction in machismo strength (Bustos Torres, 1999). Others predict the rise of the neomachismo (Escobar Latapí, 1996) while some contemplate the invisible machismo – present ‘in almost all aspects of everyday life of men and women’ (Castañeda, 2012: 27). Though in the analyzed discourse of the Mexicans machismo does not seem a justification of violence, the features of macho are still reflected in social life.