Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities

Book excerpt: Latinx hypersexualized lovers or kingpin predators pulsate from our TVs, smartphones, and Hollywood movie screens. Tweets from the executive office brand Latinxs as bad-hombre hordes and marauding rapists and traffickers. A-list Anglo historical figures like Billy the Kid haunt us with their toxic masculinities. These are the themes creatively explored by the eighteen contributors in Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities. Together they explore how legacies of colonization and capitalist exploitation and oppression have created toxic forms of masculinity that continue to suffocate our existence as Latinxs. And while the authors seek to identify all cultural phenomena that collectively create reductive, destructive, and toxic constructions of masculinity that traffic in misogyny and homophobia, they also uncover the many spaces—such as Xicanx-Indígena languages, resistant food cultures, music performances, and queer Latinx rodeo practices—where Latinx communities can and do exhale healing masculinities. With unity of heart and mind, the creative and the scholarly, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities opens wide its arms to all non-binary, decolonial masculinities today to grow a stronger, resilient, and more compassionate new generation of Latinxs tomorrow. Contributors Arturo J. Aldama Frederick Luis Aldama T. Jackie Cuevas Gabriel S. Estrada Wayne Freeman Jonathan D. Gomez Ellie D. Hernández Alberto Ledesma Jennie Luna Sergio A. Macías Laura Malaver Paloma Martinez-Cruz L. Pancho McFarland William Orchard Alejandra Benita Portillos John-Michael Rivera Francisco E. Robles Lisa Sánchez González Kristie Soares Nicholas Villanueva Jr.