Homeboy Masculinity
Authors: Navarro José 
Published: August 2018

Like Frantz Fanon, Anne McClintock, R. W. Connell, María Lugones, Elizabeth Martínez, and other scholars of postcoloniality/decoloniality, I agree that the concrete historical conditions of colonization as constituting and constitutive of heteropatriarchy set the parameters of masculinity for men of color and subsequent specific expressions of cultural nationalism and masculinity for Chicano men. These contexts, in fact, are best described by María Lugones as part of the modern/colonial gender system. Still, any investigation of gender/masculinity must simultaneously attend to other interlocking and intersecting systems of oppression and identity formation like racism and class, which remain dynamically constituted by other facets of identity like sexuality. “Homeboy Masculinity,” in these contexts, then, indicates a situational and historically specific type of masculinity that remains influenced by the complexity of the modern/colonial gender system. This particular type of masculinity, as such, emerges in various practices and expressions of masculinity in Chicana/o barrios across the United States but especially in the American Southwest and is particularly exemplified by barrios in East Los Angeles, the west side of San Antonio, and El Paso, among others. Homeboy masculinity also emerges in primary and secondary cultural texts whose locus of expression and whose epistemological formation is the Chicana/o barrio.

In this respect, the barrio, as the site of the production of this type of masculinity and epistemological formation, must consequently be understood as a byproduct of the dialectical processes of “barrioization” and the barriological. Indeed, Raúl Homero Villa argues that barriology is a critical and witty challenge to knowledge produced in the predominantly white institutions of academe and in dominant ideological apparatuses like the mainstream media that is made by offering a subaltern knowledge produced from within the barrio and by barrio residents. Villa, in Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture, succinctly distinguishes between the “socially deforming” processes of barrioization and the “culturally affirming” processes of barriology in describing this dialectical model for understanding the social and material construction of the barrio; this model, as a result, is integral to understanding homeboy masculinity

In addition, homeboys, as culturally and historically specific subjects, also form part of a legacy of Mexican and Chicana/o figures that have worked to set the parameters for Mexicano/Chicano masculinity and femininity. Therefore, while La Malinche, La Virgen, and La Llorona function to structure Chicana femininity, they also operate as an implicit boundary zone for the construction of Mexicano/Chicano masculinity, as Gloria E. Anzaldúa notes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Octavio Paz and Tomas Almaguer, like Anzaldúa, note the sociohistorical and linguistic relationships between these figures and their gender/sexual correlations in various cultural expressions and practices in the community. Paz and Almaguer, in discussing one specific role of la chingada as La Malinche in the Mexican/Chicano imaginations, describe the power politics involved in being los hijos de la chingada and how this framework produces a homophobia that stems from the onset of conquest. They also note how the framework of “being the fucked one” produces a type of Mexican “masculine homosexuality” that is tolerated among Mexicans alongside of such homophobia. These scholars, as a result, point to the multifaceted ways in which these archetypal historical, religious, and cultural figures structure both Chicana femininity and Chicano masculinity.

Moreover, the figures of the Aztec warrior, Hernan Cortes as a model of the conquistador, the revolutionary figures of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, el pelado as a manifestation of working class “noble” masculinity, and el pachuco (later, the homeboy) collectively form an explicit historical and ideological apparatus that structures Mexican/Chicano masculinity. In many ways, these culturally and historically significant figures, as embodiments of Mexican and Chicano masculinity, can also be understood as part of complex negotiations in the maintenance of a hegemonic masculinity and as potential challenges to such a masculinity from an insurgent or subaltern form of Mexicano/Chicano masculinity. This phenomenon of competing and, at times, mutually reinforcing forms of masculinity as a result remains rooted in the onset of conquest but is also dynamically intersectional. In the contemporary context, race and ethnicity, nonetheless, remain the primary modalities upon which this phenomenon rests; it is best exemplified by adapting Gayatri Spivak’s calculus as: white men saving all women from the threat of black and brown men.

Hegemonic masculinity, as defined by Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee in “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity,” is part of a set of powerful circumstances in which the meanings and practices of masculinity also become a normative force through, for example, the mass media; it also emerges through a “naturalized” division of labor that works to reify classed and gendered identities and spaces in society. Furthermore, this type of hegemonic masculinity is more powerfully underscored, they argue, when supported and embodied by the state. Homeboy masculinity, by contrast, is not ideologically or politically pure in practice or performance precisely because it is informed by the complex histories of Spanish and American imperialisms and the modern/colonial gender system that emerges from these large-scale structures. In the present context, homeboy masculinity is also de/formed by the late-modern processes of urbanization—themselves inflected with the legacies of those imperialisms and more contemporary racial and spatial formations. It is, consequently, a central social element of the dialectical relationships between barrioization and the barriological. Homeboy masculinity, nonetheless, remains an insurgent form of masculinity whose spirit challenges these white hegemonic forms of masculinity and, by extension, a compulsory heteronormative sexuality.