What does fatherhood mean in the lives of Latino men? In Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains their Parenting (in production with NYU Press), I shift the scholarly attention from how father involvement affects Latina/o/e children to how Latino men experience fatherhood and what being a father means to them. I illuminate 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 (re)production of inequality in family life.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 Latino fathers in California, I highlight Latino fathers’ familial stories of joy, sorrow, humor, pain, uncertainty, and hope. Their narratives illuminate their paradoxical relationships with work, capture the emotional intensity of their relationships with their own fathers, elicit strong memories about their childhood, and allude to the role of motherhood and religion/spirituality in shaping their definitions of fatherhood. In Latino Fathers, I 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.