Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting [Hardcover]

Winner, 2026 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology Section
Honorable Mention, 2026 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association, Race, Gender, Class Section

The contemporary meaning of Latino fatherhood

What does fatherhood mean in the lives of Latino men? InLatino Fathers, Fatima Suarez shifts the attention from how father involvement affects Latine children to how Latino men experience fatherhood and what being a father means to them. Suarez brings attention to the social forces shaping, sustaining, and undermining Latino mens parenting, how their views and behaviors uphold, challenge, negotiate, and transform culturally dominant ideas of fatherhood, and the lessons they teach us about the reproduction of inequality in family life.

Suarez focuses on the many different facets of fatherhood, including work-life balance, parenting challenges, and empathy and resentment for their own fathers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 Latino fathers in California, Suarez highlights Latino fathers familial stories of joy, sorrow, humor, pain, uncertainty, and hope.Latino Fathersprovides a compassionate, intimate account of a group of fathers challenging the myths about them, wrestling with the tensions they experience as they negotiate cultural ideas of good fathering, and the structural realities that make it both possible and difficult to meet those expectations.

Fatima SuarezsLatino Fathersis 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. Thi