Caring Men Are Happier Than Traditional ‘Macho’ Men In Mexican-American Culture, Study Suggests

Professor Miguel Arciniega clearly remembers the dichotomy of being a Mexican-American youth trying to learn what it means to be a man. Now he and his colleagues have developed an academic scale to define what it means to be either a gentleman or a “macho” man in the Mexican-American culture.

“This has been a lifelong thing for me, in terms of growing up in El Paso, Texas, and finding out the messages about being a man from my father and grandfather,” says Arciniega, an associate professor of counseling and counseling psychology in the Division of Psychology in Education with ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton College of Education. “On the streets, from my friends, it was a very different message.”

Arciniega says he was raised to believe that men took care of their families and respected their wives. His family raised him to be un caballero – “a gentleman” – but his peers embodied machismo, which is the stereotypical, hypermasculine image of Mexican-American men as chauvinists who drink too much and fight too much.”*

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