Muy Macho : A Latina and a Gringa Consider the Animal in Its Mexican Lair

WE ARE NO STRANGERS TO MACHISMO. We are two women journalists, an American and a Colombian, living in Mexico. There are many macho countries, but this is one that brags of its macho ways through pistol-toting movie idols and popular ranchera songs like “Turning Away.” Mariachis in black pants with silver studs sing: “You go because I want you to go. At the time I want I’ll get you back . . . Whether you like it or not, I’m your owner.”

Television here routinely features buxom women in too-small bikinis, and classified ads offer secretarial jobs to “good-looking females.” The Mexico City subway reserves separate cars for women at rush hour as a precaution against mauling by el macho mas macho, the most macho macho.

We share the experiences of all women here: Men who make sexual advances; men who ignore us in front of our male colleagues; waiters who won’t seat us or give us the check. These are the daily reminders that we live in a society of men; we are outsiders looking in.

Yet our reactions are markedly distinct. We were raised in different cultures: the United States, where machismo increasingly is a dirty word, and Colombia, where a man is still proud of being macho. We realize that when we meet Alyx, a 28-year-old American photographer based in Mexico City, who tells us a story typical of a gringa in Macholandia:

After three days holed up in her apartment against the ordeal that awaits her, Alyx ventures into the street. She is dressed modestly in jeans and a loose blouse that camouflage her slender body. She makes it through the first block. No tormentors in sight. But by the next corner, her blond hair and blue eyes begin to draw fire. She hears the trademark “ Pssst !”--a bullet hissing past her ear. She keeps walking, head down, through a gantlet of vendors at the stoplight, teen-agers at the Metro station, middle-aged men in the subway car.

Their gazes penetrate her clothes. “ Bonita ,” the men whisper. “Pretty.” “ Mamacita .” The assault escalates. Someone brushes against her in the crowded subway car. An accident? “Guerita, “ someone calls, “Little white girl.” She hears the sucking of air between teeth, a loud exhaling and, finally, the verbal ejaculation-- “Puta “--”whore.”

“What are they expecting, that I will jump over and kiss them?” Alyx asks us. “You want to kill the guy. It’s degrading and humiliating. What can I do about it? Hit him? Say something and give him the attention he wants, or bow my head and ignore it?”

The question has American and Latin answers.

Daughters of the U. S. women’s movement respond as Alyx does, with a desire to lash out at the affront to female dignity. The American does not differentiate between mamacita and puta because both are an invasion of her privacy--glass ground into her soul. Where she grew up, limits are being set on men’s behavior and laws are being passed to protect her rights. Women in the United States have more economic independence and, therefore, more power than Latin women.

When an American plans her first trip south of the border, she is warned by friends about machos. They are wily womanizers, she is told, tearfully romantic when it suits them, ugly if they don’t get what they want. They believe that la gringa is sexually liberated and in search of a Latin lover. Why else would she come south alone, without a man? In Latin America, a woman alone is seen as something sad. She must be desperate and in need of sex, the macho thinks, and he can help her out. To defend herself, one gringa we know carries an umbrella to ward off Romeos who get too close. Another wears heavy shoes in case she should need to land a kick.

When Marjorie first traveled to Mexico in the 1970s, she was so upset by the unflinching stares and repulsed by the verbal assaults that she responded in kind--spitting wet , sticky chewing gum at aggressive machos. The men were appalled and called her “ cochina ,”--”pig”--which outraged her even more. In her mind, they were the pigs.

Cecilia laughs hard at this account. Latinas are amazed at the angry gringas fighting what always has been. They grew up on a continent of men who have not been tamed, where small boys are encouraged by their parents to “be a man, be a macho.” The same parents teach their daughters to be feminine and pleasing to men. Girls learn to dress and talk to charm suitors who might someday support them, an important skill in countries where only a minority of women have opportunities for good salaries. This is starting to change among some professionals, but progress is not widespread.

The Latin woman cannot remember the first time a man whispered a piropo, or flirtatious remark, to her in the street because it happened so early and so often. But she would never dream of walking with an umbrella for protection, for she knows that the men who approach Alyx do not expect to be kissed. Rather, they simply want her attention. They are keepers of the macho flame. She does not need to spit. She has learned to answer them with a look that is at once aloof and provocative, a look that says, “I like you.” “You are attractive.” Or if not, “You poor fool.”

A poll published recently in a Mexican women’s magazine finds that women of all ages in Latin America consider piropos compliments, not insults. They lift her spirits and make her feel desired. For the Latina, there is a big difference between a sexually explicit remark--an insult in any culture--and a flirtatious one. The Latina prefers the poetic piropos that compare her to a rose or the humorous remarks. “I wish that I were cross-eyed so I could see you twice” is a classic, or “All those curves and me without brakes.”

Now Marjorie laughs. We are good friends and colleagues, chatting over the steam that rises from mugs of hot tea. We are fascinated by our different reactions, but when we get to the core of machismo we find that we agree. The essence of machismo is the domination of men over women, a way of keeping women down, unequal and at home. In the magazine Sin Titulo, psychologist Paola Compean wrote that machos are “vain, egotistical, excitable, glib, notably seeking attention and admiration from everyone.” That sounds right, but there is more: contemptuous. Machos do not love women, they disdain them.

We interviewed many Latin and American women about machismo and each had her own list of complaints. A macho wants to be served and to avoid family work. He keeps his marriage secret and is unfaithful. He rarely wears a wedding ring or reveals that he has children. As Mexican anthropologist Ana Luisa Ligoury says with a smile: “They are all single and they all have serious intentions.”

ALBERTO, A HANDSOME, 43-YEAR-OLD BUSINESSMAN FROM ARGENTIna, would seem to be an exception when he says right from the start that he is happily married. But it turns out he fits perfectly into the rest of the profile of a Latin macho. He never admits to us that he has a lover, yet it quickly becomes obvious that he is gaga over another woman. “Conquer a woman with a ring on your finger. That’s a real macho,” he says, waving a hand bearing a gold wedding band. “The woman who would come with me knows the rules of the game.”

Sexual tension prevents Alberto from having women friends. He feels protective of women and, if they should confide in him, he feels possessive. He admits that he is terribly jealous and cannot imagine that his wife would ever have an affair. If she did, he says jokingly, he would kill her. And he says his wife would leave him if she ever discovered his infidelities. Even so, he takes the macho risk. “You have to know how,” he says with a sly look. Yet, he admits that “sometimes a man does not measure what he has at his side until he has lost it.”

We are talking to Alberto over a long Mexican lunch of margaritas, prawns and garlic, seasoned with guitar music. For him, there’s nothing wrong with being macho, although like many, he doesn’t consider himself one. Yet, he makes eyes at us and issues such macho statements as, “Women can conquer you with just a look.” We want his story; he wants to please us. He is intelligent and tries to give us the answers he thinks we are looking for, even if it means twisting the truth. The lunch is a seduction.

This is no surprise. We know the stereotype--machos seduce, machos lie and cheat. Of course, not all Latin men are machos, but all machos are basically like this. Cecilia, who grew up with them, is at ease with Alberto. Marjorie is less adept at fending off his flirtations. She presses him. Why do you cheat on your wife? He tangos with the question--coming at it, pulling back, but never committing. All the while he looks to Cecilia for understanding. A look that says, “What does this gringa expect from me, to tell her that I have been unfaithful?” He won’t tell.

Cecilia’s brother once broke the canon. His wife confronted him over his affair and, in a moment of weakness, he confessed that he had strayed. Family protocol obliged him to seek forgiveness from his father-in-law. The patriarch accused his own daughter’s husband of erring--not in cheating on his wife, but in admitting it. “That was your mistake,” the old man said.

Subterfuge is an implicit part of most relationships a la Latina. Typically, the woman lets the man believe he is in control. He will tell her that all he wants is to respect her. But she has been taught by her mother and aunts that “men only want one thing.” And she is supposed to be innocent. They share a game of conquest and surrender.

“The man circles around her, courts her, sings to her, sets his horse (or his imagination) to perform tricks for her,” Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote in “Labyrinth of Solitude,” his classic study of the Mexican character. “Meanwhile, she remains behind the veil of her modesty,” with a tranquillity made up of hope and contempt.

If she surrenders to a macho, the Latin woman pays a price. She is diminished in his eyes. Mexican feminist author Marta Lamas tells us that women contribute to this game--even liberated women--by perpetuating a modern version of the virginity myth. “Of course no one expects her to be a virgin technically,” Lamas says, “but she will say she has had only one or two relationships in her life--never 20. It’s the same virginity, but less extreme.”

Liberated gringas play by other rules with a macho. Gringas are direct, frontal. They assert themselves and feel uncomfortable when they are out of control. The gringa is frustrated at not being treated as an equal. The macho wants to kiss and hug in public, to show off his woman to his friends. But the gringa feels suffocated. He tells her he wants to care for her and she is just as likely to say, “I can take care of myself, thank you very much.”

Unlike the Latina, she is free to admit not only that she has sex but also that she enjoys it and has the right to sex with no strings attached. Latin men and women, says Pilar, a Mexican friend of ours, often interpret those freedoms as promiscuity and resent the gringas. When she was in high school, Pilar says, well-bred boys viewed Mexican girls as “good girls for holding hands and going to the movies, while gringas were for going to Acapulco and going to bed.” The boys courted the gringas, bedded them, boasted of the conquest--one for la raza-- and then made fun of the foreigners. “One of my friends told a gringa that his name was Fernando Pemex (after the state-owned oil company). Everywhere she went she saw Pemex stations and thought his dad must be really rich.”

This is the macho burla, the trick or ridicule that so confuses gringas. Perhaps their Spanish is not good enough to decipher the riddles and double-entendres that Mexican men love. After an evening of banter, the gringa is often left wondering whether she had been flattered or mocked, whether a joke was intended for her amusement or was at her expense. Which is just how the macho wants it. If he cannot dominate a woman, he will laugh at her--another kind of control. “The humor of the macho is an act of revenge,” Paz wrote in “Labyrinth.” “The essential attribute of the macho--power--almost always reveals itself as a capacity for wounding, humiliating, annihilating.”

WHY DOES THE MEXICAN man need revenge? Why must he conquer and diminish women? One explanation lies in Mexican history, a tale of submission and defeat. The Spanish conquest was cruel and bloody. The Spaniards took everything the Indians had, including their women, who then gave birth to the new, mixed-blood Mexican, or mestizo. Spanish fathers rejected their mestizo children. As a result, Paz and others have written, the mestizo views his Indian mother as symbolizing submission and humiliation, his Spanish father as representing power and domination. In Mexico, vale madre --literally, worth mother--means something without value, while que padre --what father--is high praise.

But Mexico is not the only macho country and machismo is not just revenge. We ask a few of the machos we know for other explanations. They remind us that where “good” women are unavailable, Latin American men often turn to prostitutes for their first sexual experiences. That, too, defines a macho’s relationship with women. For him, women are objects of pleasure. A reflection of his will.

All of the Latin women with whom we spoke faulted mothers for reproducing machismo. Mothers let their gallos-- their roosters--run loose while keeping their hens at home. They raise their daughters to be mothers and treat their sons as kings. “ Papi ,” they call him, elevating him to the status of father. Later, a mother might even become an accomplice in her son’s sexual adventures; Cecilia’s mother, for example, once let her married son use her phone, knowing he was going to call his girlfriend.

But blaming the mothers for perpetuating machismo was offensive to the Americans we interviewed. Absent and unfeeling fathers provide the poor role models, they said. Latin mothers raise their sons as best they can.

The double standard may begin at home, but it is reinforced at school. Vietnika, a 26-year-old Mexican woman, recalls an incident from the fifth grade, when a boy pulled up her skirt to expose her underpants to the class. Embarrassed and infuriated, she retaliated by jabbing him with her pen. The boy cried and she was expelled. “The teacher never gave me an opportunity to say what happened. She never listened to me. The boy was the victim,” Vietnika says. The lesson: She should have submitted to the abuse.

The lessons don’t stop there. As adults, machos continue to insist on a man’s right to sexual adventures. A Mexican-American woman recounts a lunch with a Mexican politician. At the end of the meal, he asked her outright if she was going to sleep with him. “What about your wife?” she asked in surprise. “What does that have to do with it?” he said with genuine puzzlement.

Although that cavalier attitude angers many American women, others decide to enjoy the sex that is available to them. Jennifer, a 32-year-old businesswoman who dates a married Mexican, says, “I would never do this at home, but my morals are different here. All men in Mexico have lovers. One of the first lines I learned in Spanish was casa chica (literally, small house, or a lover’s house). Besides, everyone my age is married. The guy’s 35, he’s interesting. I told a Mexican woman friend about him and she said don’t do it because he’ll never marry you. That was not an issue for me.”

Here we have stumbled into gringa complicity in machismo; many change their standards when they cross the border, doing what they would not do back home. Some middle-class American women who would never look twice at a truck driver in Texas fall for an illiterate boatman in Acapulco.

Those are not the only contradictions. While American women resent the fact they cannot sit in a cafe alone and read a book or go for a stroll without being accosted by men, many of them also like the attention they receive and the way machos make them feel. Machos focus on their beauty, not their flaws. At home, a gringa may be made to feel fat, but in Mexico the same woman hears she has pretty eyes. American men are careful about what they say to women not only in public, but in private as well; not so the Latin male. Many gringas like the raw emotion in Latinos--the same emotion, perhaps, that lets machos bellow out ranchera lyrics and the piropos that gringas so hate.

Our weeks-long discussion is coming to a close at a restaurant called--what else?--Macho. Although we began with such different perspectives, more and more we find points on which we agree. Marjorie was surprised to discover so much female complicity in machismo--from Latin women and gringas alike. Now she understands. She will teach her 1 1/2-year-old daughter to pick her battles better than her mother did; to be firm in combatting machismo, but perhaps not so angry.

Cecilia, who was so surprised by the intensity of American anger, now realizes how thin is the line between inoffensive and oppressive. She will never again say to her two young sons “Don’t be a little girl” when they start to cry. We both want our children to understand that the world must be fair to women and that they should help make it that way.

As we wait for the check, we look around and notice that we are the only women in the restaurant unaccompanied by a man. Out on elegant Paseo de la Reforma, we see that the vast majority of people going to and from work also are men. And we remember why we began talking in the first place. Because we are guests in Macholandia, a world owned and operated by men.