Latinx Barbershop Masculinities: Dominican Men and The Adaptive Macho Tacoma, Washington Transnational, Migration, Caribbean

Abstract

Men of color are usually stereotyped as inhabiting specific toxic, hypermasculine traits and other harmful characteristics. This is especially the case for Latino men, whose masculine stereotypes are dominated by the concept of Machismo. Despite such stereotypes, the topic of Latino masculinities has only started to receive considerable scholarly attention. Therefore this study seeks to understand how Latino men embody masculinities in specific social-cultural contexts such as a barbershop. In this study, I argue that Latino men recontextualize their masculinities, which assumes new shapes in the U.S., and I theorize as “adaptive masculinities.” In order to study and analyze how gender is embodied by Latino men within unique social and cultural spaces, I employed ethnographic methods which include participant observation and in-depth interviews with six participants from Bacano Barbershop. This study concludes that masculinities are often adaptive and frequently employed strategically by immigrant Latino men in order to reap the benefits that are associated with maleness in a patriarchal socio-cultural system. The six Latino men in this study adapted their masculinities in ways that allow them to maintain some form of power, even in a context that devalues their privileged position.