Machismo ~ It's time to finally dispel a lazy ethnic trope

The social media backlash against Latino men has exposed some ugly truths about how systemic racism works in America and it's not only the province of the American Right.

Chicana artist Yolanda Lopez’s artwork: ‘Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe.’ Yolanda Lopez, CC BY-NC-ND

Almost immediately after the results became clear on election night, and exit polls showed a significant rightward shift among Latinos, the abuse and blame from the progressive class began. Never mind that I had been writing about and explaining this demographic shift for over a decade. Never mind that I pored over overwhelming evidence for years, proving that sexism is far more a function of American culture rather than Latino culture. And never mind that I dedicated an entire chapter of my book “The Latino Century” to providing quantifiable and subjective evidence that the term “machismo’ has been a way to ‘otherize’ Latino men for centuries and turn them into uncivilized savages. America has always needed us to justify the taking of our land, the subjugation of our labor, and the segregation of our children in our schools.

One of the more surprising, yet equally offensive, developments was the attacks on Latinos by Black progressives, as if Latinos had betrayed the coalition of the vacuous term “people of color.” Perhaps they did. As I’ve written in detail, the Latinization of America doesn’t just threaten whiteness in America, it also threatens Blackness too. The Latinization of America will challenge the entire racial construct that existed in this country for 450 years. The Black construct is predicated on a nonwhite paradigm, and as whiteness loses dominance and we blend into a multiracial society, the social construct of Blackness also shifts.

One of the tools used to disparage Latino men is the stereotype that they are somehow less ‘civilized’ than other races or ethnicities. It’s always been very convenient to pit nonwhite men against white women for an array of sordid reasons throughout history, and the machismo stereotype fits conveniently here as well.

We should take a moment to reflect on the fact however that while we also saw a movement to the right among Black men we are not hearing an uproar about the cultural degeneracy of Black men that makes them more misogynistic. Why is that?