This paper looks at shifting notions of masculinity in post-revolutionary Mexico City. While labor histories have focused attention on the period’s celebrated male industrial workers, little has been written about the middle-class employee. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the expansion of foreign companies and government bureaucracies in the capital increasingly tied the livelihood of middle-class men to office employment. The world of the suit and tie represented respectability. But critics worried that office workers, and public employees in particular, had become effeminate dandies “dependent” on the public purse. At the same time, an increasing number of female office workers threatened to feminize the workplace. Plays and short stories depicted office employees as emasculated figures dominated in the workplace by bosses and in the home by overbearing wives. In response, men bought new products that promised to revitalize male energy and joined gyms and sports teams to build muscular strength. Some became members of charro organizations that gave them the opportunity to dress as cowboys and even ride horses on the streets of Mexico City. They escaped into comic books in which shirt-and-tie wearing characters traveled through time and around the globe. This paper argues for the inclusion of middle-class men’s attempts to shape a sense of manhood in studies of Mexican masculinity in the post-revolutionary period.
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