Single Father’s Day is Sat, June 19.

In the context of Spanish and Anglo-American conquest of Mexico, a passage from Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican American Women (Jeanette Rodriguez, 1994):
“It is true that within Mexican-American culture the Mexican-American woman is burdened by machismo. Men who show machismo are alleged to boast a great deal about their male conquests and to refuse to do ‘womanly’ things such as dishwashing, cooking, diaper-changing, or minding the children. One way of understanding this concept is that machismo is an over-compensation for a feeling of inadequacy as a man within a racist system. And what is a Chicano man supposed to do?—provide for, protect, care for, and defend his family. When these needs are truncated and reinforce feelings of inadequacy, this overcompensation may take the form of excessive fighting, drinking, or bragging about conquests, and thus may render the family or relationships dysfunctional…
“However, Chicana scholarship suggests that Chicano culture is not as male-dominated as the original researches would have had us believe. Research by Lea Ybarra and M. Baca Zinn contends that relations between the sexes are more egalitarian—perhaps more egalitarian than in the dominant Anglo-American culture.”
ADDENDUM: guess this needs clarification, da? It’s about operating outside stereotypes, and translates to other cultures. Book points out that often Mexican American women are seen/portrayed as untrustworthy (as manifested in misinterpretation of La Malinche, even in the writings of Octavio Paz) or nurturing/ self-sacrificing. As a general example, I’m interested in how disempowerment and misrepresentation is harmful to everyone.