ABSTRACT
The chapter presents a study of Latino men that did not begin with the premise that Latino culture and Latino masculinity were inherently negative or pathological. A related goal was to look at Latino men in a way that reflected the richness and complexity of Latino mas-culinities—a study. The ethnographic or clinical, such studies were carried out by culturally insensitive and linguistically limited outsiders who saw machismo and Latino masculinity as pathological manifestations of societal and familial dysfunction and essentially as indices of sickness or disease. Because much of the early research used dominant societal values as the yardstick for evaluating Chicano/Latino culture and gender, Mexican culture and Mexican people were rendered "defective" and were free to vary only in the of pathology they showed. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
