At a very young age machismo is instilled in young Chicano boys. They learn how to become the king, how to act as number one. In “I’m the King”, Rudolfo Anaya describes that the more traditional the rules of behavior are for the macho, the stricter the behavior the child learns. In a community that is poor and often oppressed there is suffrage so the child is taught to grin and bear it. “Aguantate” as Chicano men say. A macho is taught to never show weakness. But in today’s contemporary society Anaya points out the fact of how fathers at home are starting to become few and far between. There is no one influencing them on how a man is supposed to act. Without that father figure young men learn machismo through outside influences and this commonly leads to a misguided belief of what macho behavior actually is.
Television an…show more content… In a book called Media and Values: Gender in the Media by Sam Femiano and Mark Nickerson, Femiano and Nickerson talk about how men on TV are stereotyped. Media stereotyping has a huge impact on machismo since they create images based on assumptions (Femiano and Nickerson para.4). For example, Anaya talks about the characters portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Power Rangers are exaggerated view of macho images (Anaya 64). There is always violence involved within those characters and it got to the point to where those characters are symbols of violence within society. From this young men pick up the idea that violence is the way to solve problems and quickly. It has gotten out of hand to where young men use this false idea of macho behavior to achieve their goals. For example, la Ganga uses drive-by shooting as an initiation into manliness. By killing someone young men have this idea that they have achieved the