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This article seeks to shift the framework of decades-long debates on the nature and significance of machismo, debunking the commonly held notion that the word describes a primordial Iberian and Ibero-American phenomenon. I trace the emergence of machismo as an English-language term, arguing that a tradition of unself-consciously ethnocentric scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s enabled the word's entrance, by the 1960s, into popular sources. In fact, machismo was rather a neologism in Spanish, but midcentury US scholarship presumed the category's empirical validity and applied to it to perceived problems in the "Latin" world. Much of machismo's linguistic purchase-the reason it has become a global shorthand for hypermasculinity-stemmed from mid to late twentieth-century anxieties about hemispheric security, the Cold War, immigration, and overpopulation, particularly vis-a-vis the United States' near neighbors, Mexico and Puerto Rico. I have sought out the word's earliest appearances in various English-language media (books, scholarly articles, newspapers, magazines, and television) and explained how it has long escaped scrutiny as a construct in and of itself. As a result, machismo has resisted the most earnest and well-intentioned of challenges to its scholarly primacy and remains a pathologizing point of departure in approaches to Latin American gender systems.
"Machismo"-the Latin American cult of virility that so often overpowers sweet reasonableness in moments of high passion
-Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1969
On November 13, 1969, television stations across the United States aired a new episode of Ironside, starring Raymond Burr as the eponymous chief detective. Known for delivering hard-hitting, timely dramatizations of controversial themes, Ironside tracked into uncharted territory with this installment, entitled "The Machismo Bag." The episode's reliance on stereotype-the wise, paternalistic constancy of Burr's character, contrasted with the belligerent, juvenile volatility of the Chicano dissidents under investigation-would have constituted familiar terrain for viewers. Yet the titular term machismo lay at something of a crossroads in terms of usage and recognizability.1 Over the course of a decade, this word had trickled into English popular usage, but it remained unfamiliar enough that scriptwriters felt compelled to define it. Referring to the Chicano militants' dangerous "machismo bag," the junior, younger, debatably hip Detective Brown explains to his mystified boss: "Machismo. It's a word often heard among Spanish-speaking people. Especially those raised in the old-country...