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 sixty 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/spirituality in shaping their definitions of fatherhood. Latino Fathers provide 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.

Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting is part of the Latina/o Sociology series at New York University Press. Latino Fathers is expected to release in Fall 2025.