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Introduction
Constructs of gender and ethnicity represent two of the most contentious and contested axes of identity politics in popular culture and American society more generally. Two recent professional boxers of Mexican American heritage, Oscar De La Hoya and Fernando Vargas, cultivated an intense boxing rivalry during the late 1990s and early 2000s by embodying competing and contrasting representations of masculinity and "Mexican-ness." De La Hoya and Vargas, along with boxing fans, Mexican Americans, corporate boxing interests, and the mass media helped construct the divergent gender and ethnic identities associated with these two world-class pugilists. Additionally, the heavily contested nature of De La Hoya's and Vargas's constructs of masculinity and latinidad stem from the manner in which the boxing duo questioned each other's manifestations of gender and ethnicity, and also through the way in which Mexican American boxing fans perceived De La Hoya and Vargas as both prize fighters and fellow co-ethnics. Although the two men share the same sport, and also share the same ethnic heritage, their media-driven public personas and projected self-identities epitomize two strikingly different versions, as well as visions, of Mexican American manhood.
Oscar De La Hoya and Fernando Vargas rose to boxing prominence in the amateur ranks and at the professional level during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, during a postmodern era in which traditional, essentialized understandings of race, ethnicity, and gender came under intense criticism within the social sciences (Goode 434-35). Since the 1970s, sociologists and anthropologists have shifted away from viewing cultures as static, timeless, and fixed entities that are passed down intact across generations and instead now view human culture as a fluid, dynamic process that is negotiated and redefined within contexts of power, structural constraints, and individual, as well as collective, agency. Rather than regarding race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality as distinct social identities, scholars now emphasize that these variables interact and intersect with one another to produce a range of socially constructed identities and lived experiences. Chicana anthropologist Patricia Zavella (187-89) refers to this confluence of variables in shaping an individual's overall life experiences within his or her respective social and cultural matrix as one's "social location." In his analysis of the differing constructions of male gender identities displayed by various male...