Soy un macho arrepentido.

I usually don’t open my columns in Spanish, but since I am the token minority columnist this quarter, I’m figuring my editors will let me get away with it this last time. Besides, I’m Cuban — people expect me to burst into sudden fits of Spanglish, salsa dancing and communism.

But this past quarter I’ve struggled with another stigma of “Latinness”: machismo. I’ve also noticed that too many people at Northwestern — not just Hispanic men — exude machismo, and it needs to stop. Or, at least, we should tone it down a bit.

Political science professors commonly mention the concept of machismo as a footnote to explain past Latin American political troubles. The traditional macho used women for making kids and sandwiches, and he liked to pick fights. So, obviously all this pent up testosterone contributed to the countless military coups in Latin American history. Never mind fraudulent elections and financial mismanagement — that’s too simple.

But the new version of machismo is much more than that. Now that women have gained much deserved respect in many aspects of Latin society, machismo has taken a more subtle form, and it’s even seeped into our NU bubble.

Rick N