Publications

This chapter offers a historical overview of racial constructions and phenotype stratification in three Latina/o/x contexts: The United States, Mexico, and Peru. Both Mexico and Peru are considered mestizo countries, yet each has produced uniquely distinct racial mixture constructions, with equally distinct hierarchies for distributing privilege based on embodied ethno-racial markers. By contrast, the United States as a site of racialization has operated under a binary racial schema where fixed, rigid racial identities are ranked according to proximity to whiteness on a Black-White scale. I review three decades of colorism research on Mexican-origin people, including changes in how phenotype is measured and the disappearance of indicators beyond relative lightness/darkness of skin tone. Finally, I offer two examples of colorism among Mexican and Chicana women to illustrate the complexity of ethnic-to-ethnic and subethnic phenotype discrimination. The use of real world examples drawn from popular culture and from a qualitative case lends support for a more expansive view of mestizaje, one that centers embodied mestizaje over colorblind ideologies.

Values in the Latino community play a significant role in the identity development of Latino male college students and can have an impact on their college student success. Though often maligned in the literature, machismo, when focusing on the caballerismo attributes, can aid in the academic success of Latino men while in college, if channeled through educational and cultural groups on campus. A small-scale scoping review was conducted to identify what is known about how machismo, caballerismo, and other masculinity-related values and constructs shape the identity development of Latino male college students. Ten empirical articles all published within the last ten years (2012–2022) were selected as part of this scoping review. Our findings are categorized into three groups: 1) cultural capital & support, 2) expectations & cultural values, and 3) machismo and caballerismo. Guided by Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth Model and Umaña-Taylor’s ethnic identity theory, Latino men are influenced by familial values, cultural beliefs, and gender constructs of what a Latino man should be and when in college, these play a role in their development and growth.