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The contemporary meaning of Latino fatherhood
What does fatherhood mean in the lives of Latino men? In Latino Fathers, Fatima Suarez shifts the attention from how father involvement affects Latine children to how Latino men experience fatherhood and what being a father means to them. Suarez brings attention to the social forces shaping, sustaining, and undermining Latino men’s parenting, how their views and behaviors uphold, challenge, negotiate, and transform culturally dominant ideas of fatherhood, and the lessons they teach us about the reproduction of inequality in family life.
Suarez focuses on the many different facets of fatherhood, including work-life balance, parenting challenges, and empathy and resentment for their own fathers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 Latino fathers in California, Suarez highlights Latino fathers’ familial stories of joy, sorrow, humor, pain, uncertainty, and hope. Latino Fathers provides a compassionate, intimate account of a group of fathers challenging the myths about them, wrestling with the tensions they experience as they negotiate cultural ideas of good fathering, and the structural realities that make it both possible and difficult to meet those expectations.
"Based on conversations with dozens of men, Latino Fathers explores their trials and triumphs, including how political economy and racism impact them as parents. We witness a range of Latino fathers expressing strong and mutually contradictory generalizations about Latino fathers. From the challenges of measuring up to legendary Latina motherhood to living down the 'unrelenting stereotype' of machismo, Suarez breaks new ground in the sociology of gender and Latinx studies."
"As the first book to center Latino fathers and the meanings they attach to parenting, work, migration, culture, and religion, Latino Fathers is a must-read for anyone interested in families, fathering, and masculinities. Suarez beautifully weaves fathers’ stories with powerfully written and perceptive accounts of economic, social, and political forces that influence their individual lives. By focusing on what shapes and sustains contemporary Latino fathers’ lived experiences, Latino Fathers incisively makes this crucial, but for far too long understudied, group of men more visible in scholarship, education, and policy beyond the topics of crime, poverty, and immigration that have previously limited our understandings of how Latino fathers think, feel, and engage with their families."
"Using in-depth interviews, Suarez captures the lived experiences of Latino fathers, revealing complexities typically unacknowledged in popular depictions. She analyzes these men’s social contexts, intergenerational perspectives, motivations, and emotions using sophisticated sociological frameworks that help us understand the nuances of family life in Latino communities today."
"Groundbreaking… this work makes a substantial contribution to sociology and Latinx studies by critically examining and expanding on prevailing conceptions of Latinx fatherhood."