There is no greater allure than being by the water in the long hot days of summer. A getaway from the mundanity of being cooped up indoors, a way to refresh and beat the heat. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, two teenage best friends Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) are one with themselves, spending their days by the water, free to be as fluid as the element they inhabit. They convince an older woman named Luisa (Maribel Verdú) to join them on what they hope will be a salacious road trip to a beach named Boca del Cielo (Heaven’s Mouth), a beach they have fabricated to lure her along; instead, the journey challenges their perceptions of the machismo that has been ingrained within them.
Machismo is often associated with a strong sense of masculine pride and an exaggerated masculinity — a foundation of Latinx family structures and relationships. Men must be the breadwinners and women must be subservient to them, tending to cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Men, even those in relationships, are free to sleep around without consequence, while women must remain faithful and submissive to their desires. Ultimately, men must not show any sign of weakness, like sadness and pain, which becomes a challenge for Tenoch and Julio as Luisa brings these inert traits bubbling to the surface.
In “Mexican Machos and Hombres,” Matthew C. Gutmann describes “a macho’s machismo” as, “…very closed. He doesn’t think about what might happen later, but mainly focuses on the present, on satisfaction, on pleasure, on desire.” At the beginning of the film, Tenoch and Julio embody this ideology. They consume alcohol and drugs recklessly (Tenoch ends up driving home drunk after a party and smashing his headlight). They’ve created a list of rules dubbed “Charolastra Manifesto,” which includes, “Do whatever you feel like,” “Screw morality,” and “Get high at least once a day” — all ways they choose to live in the day-to-day without regarding the future. And they don’t seem bothered about their girlfriends leaving them to travel abroad in Italy; instead, they fantasize about the potential conquests they will encounter at parties.
Octavio Paz wrote, of both men and women in Mexico, “In a world made in man’s image, woman is only a reflection of masculine will and desire.” Tenoch and Julio frequently boast about their sex lives, reducing women to their body parts and what they wish to do to them. At a wedding, Tenoch and Julio stumble into Luisa for the first time and begin peacocking. They immediately swarm her, flirting and prying with reckless abandon even when it’s clear that she is not interested because she is married to Tenoch’s cousin, Jano. When Luisa later suggests that their girlfriends might be cheating on them in Italy, the young men immediately lay claim to their prized possessions. Julio insists Ceci would never cheat on him and Tenoch brags about how he devirginized Ana, and how he’s the only one she wants.
Tenoch’s parents had previously considered naming him Hernán after Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who colonized Mexico. Earlier in the film, Tenoch’s former nanny and house servant Leo, an Indigenous woman from Tepelmeme, crosses from the kitchen, through a sitting room with a fountain, and up a grand staircase only to deliver Tenoch a sandwich and answer a phone call for him. He gives her a quick thank you and barely regards her, despite the fact that she raised him and he would even call her “mama.” While Tenoch’s family had opted to name him after Tenochtitlan, the former capital of the Aztec empire, rather than after Mexico’s colonizers, the spirit of the conqueror remains in his blood.
When Julio and Tenoch find themselves alone, the machista, womanizing shield fades and a homoerotic tension surfaces. Tenoch and Julio slap each other with towels whilst naked in the shower, tease each other about blow jobs, even masturbate together at the community pool. Luisa catches on to this and exclaims, “what [they] really want to do is fuck each other!” after Tenoch and Julio begin to argue because they’ve fucked each other’s girlfriends. Toward the end of the film, Luisa, Tenoch, and Julio get drunk and all begin to fool around, leading to a kiss between Tenoch and Julio that feels like it was years in the making. In truth, Boca del Cielo is a fictitious sanctuary where they can finally succumb to their forbidden desires.
Yet, the morning after Tenoch and Julio finally kiss, they become aware of the consequences of such a tryst. Even today, LGBTQ+ people in Mexico are victims of extreme violence, and same-sex marriage only recently began to be allowed in some jurisdictions. In 1999 when the film was set, it was likely a daunting and frightful proposition to abandon such an aggressively heteronormative culture — so Tenoch and Julio drive back home mostly in silence and stop hanging out after the trip. When they reunite for the final time at the end of the film, they remark on how Daniel, a friend of theirs, was kicked out after coming out as gay, yet it seems like he’s the happiest he’s ever been, a wistful tone in their voices. Although they appear unhappy, perhaps in part at having lost each other, they are ultimately unwilling to sacrifice the stability and safety that machismo provides in exchange for repressing their sexuality.
During the final scene, Tenoch and Julio are in cardigans, button-downs, and have their hair slicked back, appearing more like boys playing dress up than actual men. They’ve graduated secondary school and have entered university, so they must leave any childish impulses behind, even if they may not be ready. Having previously said “fuck economists,” and claiming he was going to be a writer, Tenoch defeatedly admits he will be majoring in economics, most likely at the behest of his father. Liberal arts are thought of as frivolous and unable to bring in money, not something the man of the household should pursue. Machismo is cyclical, a gene passed down from fathers to sons that can only be willfully unlearned and rejected as their friend Daniel has.
Luisa’s final words to Tenoch and Julio are, “Life is like foam, so give yourself away like the sea.” Luisa chose to live her final days in Boca del Cielo, free to live her truth after accepting Jano’s infidelities and her own mortality. Tenoch and Julio were drawn to Luisa just as they are drawn to water, to the origin of life, to the ease of existing before they were weighed down by the firm grip of machismo. In the end, they return home and abandon their true selves, forever bound by rule #10 of their manifesto: “Truth is cool, but unattainable.”
