Popular Mexican Masculinity and American Culture in the 1920s: Migrants and Fifís

Abstract

This essay examines the discourse around Mexican masculinity in the 1920s by looking at the figures of the repatriated migrant and the urban dandy of the period, the fifí. Using evidence from print culture, popular literature, and other sources, it explains how these masculine figures provoked anxieties about sexuality, work, and public space, as well as concerns about how to integrate American mass culture into revolutionary Mexican society. Though many observers saw repatriated migrants and fifís as potentially destructive to Mexico's body politic, others crafted cultural narratives that described how to integrate men's encounters with American culture into modern Mexican masculinity.