Lipsett-Rivera traces the genesis of the Mexican macho by looking at daily interactions between Mexican men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This engaging, exhaustively researched book examines the colonial origins of a much-studied and highly stereotyped phenomenon: Mexican machismo. However, the book is much more than a search for the roots of that axiomatically assertive, violent ideology. Instead, the author complicates easy stereotypes of Mexican masculinity, finding not only multiple colonial masculinities but a general difference between colonial norms and the machismo that emerged in the nineteenth and (especially) twentieth centuries.--Jacqueline Holler, Histoire sociale Sonya Lipsett-Rivera has written a brilliant book on a novel topic. . . . The committee found her command of primary sources masterful and her writing beautiful and accessible.--Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies Lipsett-Rivera . . . enriches the study of gender in Spanish America. -- Choice Sonya Lipsett-Rivera is a professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa. She is the author of Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750-1856 and To Defend Our Water with the Blood of Our Veins: The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla (UNM Press), and she is the coeditor of Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico (UNM Press) and The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (UNM Press).