Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting (Latina/o Sociology)

Winner, 2026 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association, Latina/o Sociology SectionThe contemporary meaning of Latino fatherhood What does fatherhood mean in the lives of Latino men? In Latino 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 men’s 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 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 both possible and difficult to meet those expectations. Read more