Book talk on “Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting” by Fatima Suarez

What does fatherhood mean in the lives of Latino men? Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting shifts the scholarly attention from how father involvement affects Latina/o/e children to how Latino men experience fatherhood and what it means to them. The book also illuminates the social forces that shape, sustain, and undermine Latino men’s parenting; how their views and behaviors uphold, challenge, negotiate, and transform culturally dominant ideas of fatherhood; and the lessons Latino fathers can teach us about the (re)production of inequality in family life.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 Latino fathers in California, the book highlights these men’s familial stories of joy, sorrow, humor, pain, uncertainty, and hope. These narratives illuminate the men’s paradoxical relationships with work, capture the emotional intensity of their relationships with their own fathers, elicit strong memories about their childhoods, and allude to the role of motherhood and religion in shaping their definitions of fatherhood. Latino Fathers provides 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 possible and difficult to meet those expectations.

RSVP to attend

Author Bio:

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 UC Santa Barbara, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford. She also earned a MSc. in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BS in Criminology from the University of La Verne. She is the first person in her family to earn a college degree.