Latino Fathers:
What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting
OFFICIAL RELEASE COUNTDOWN
How do Latino men define and experience fatherhood?
"I almost have to prove that I’m a functioning dad, that I’m not the ‘dumb dad,’ you know, that I’m not ‘giving mom a break.’” -Dante, a 37-year-old single father of a nine-year-old boy
In her conversations with sixty Latino fathers in California, Fatima Suarez uncovers rich and complex familial stories of joy, sorrow, humor, pain, uncertainty, and hope. Their narratives illuminate their paradoxical relationships with work, capture the emotional intensity of their relationships with their own fathers, evoke vivid memories of their childhoods, and highlight the influence of motherhood and religion on their understandings of fatherhood.
Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting explores the social and cultural forces that shape, sustain, and undermine Latino men’s parenting. Latino Fathers examines how their perspectives and behaviors uphold, challenge, and negotiate culturally dominant ideas of fatherhood, emphasizing the lessons they provide about the reproduction of inequality in family life.
Cover art: Desahogo by Francisco Ramirez
Praise for Latino Fathers
“Based on conversations with dozens of men, Latino Fathers explores their trials and triumphs, including how political economy and racism impact them as parents. We witness a range of Latino fathers expressing strong and mutually contradictory generalizations about Latino fathers. From the challenges of measuring up to legendary Latina motherhood to living down the 'unrelenting stereotype' of machismo, Suarez breaks new ground in the sociology of gender and Latinx studies.”
— Matthew Gutmann, author of Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short
“Fatima Suarez’s Latino Fathers is a groundbreaking exploration of Latino fatherhood that dismantles stereotypes and uncovers nuanced and intersectional realities of parenting in contemporary U.S. society. Drawing on 60 in-depth interviews, Suarez captures the joys, struggles, and complexities of fathers navigating cultural expectations, work demands, and shifting notions of masculinity. This deeply empathetic and rigorously researched project amplifies the voices of Latino fathers while carefully articulating what it means to father with resilience and care. The book should be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand family, fatherhood, and the intersections of race, class, and gender in the U.S. today.”
— Tristan Bridges, co-author of Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity and Change
"Using in-depth interviews, Suarez captures the lived experiences of Latino fathers, revealing complexities typically unacknowledged in popular depictions. She analyzes these men’s social contexts, intergenerational perspectives, motivations and emotions using sophisticated sociological frameworks that help us understand the nuances of family life in Latino communities today. Highly recommended for classrooms and general readers and must-reading for those who work with or study Latino families."
— Scott Coltrane, co-author of Gender and Families
“As the first book to center Latino fathers and the meanings they attach to parenting, work, migration, culture, and religion, Latino Fathers is a must-read for anyone interested in families, fathering, and masculinities. Suarez beautifully weaves fathers’ stories with powerfully written and perceptive accounts of economic, social, and political forces that influence their individual lives. By focusing on what shapes and sustains contemporary Latino fathers’ lived experiences, Latino Fathers incisively makes this crucial, but for far too long understudied, group of men more visible in scholarship, education, and policy beyond the topics of crime, poverty, and immigration that have previously limited our understandings of how Latino fathers think, feel, and engage with their families.”
— Jennifer M. Randles, author of Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering
About the Author
Fatima Suarez is an author, researcher, and professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2021). She is the first person in her family to earn a college degree.
Fatima specializes in the study of social inequality in family life, with a particular focus on the experiences of Latino fathers in the United States. Her first book, Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting, examines the factors impacting Latino men’s parenting and how they understand these forces.
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