ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES
Essay by Camilo Montoya
Silver Spring, MD. June, 2025
Often the people who seem the hardest to deal with, the loudest in the room, the quickest to anger, the ones who curse first and ask questions later - are the same people who will defend you without hesitation when the moment calls for it. Their roughness is not a flaw of character but a kind of armor, a learned response to a world that rarely meets tenderness with care. In their stubbornness and rough edges lies a quiet resilience, a way of saying: “I’ve been hurt before, but from this ground forward, no one breaks through my shield.”
What fascinates me is how, once trust is earned, these so-called “difficult” people often reveal themselves as the most reliable, the most loyal, the most truehearted. Their sharpness is simply the cost of admission to some of the tenderest hearts in our society. The contradiction is striking, the same voice that can cut you down with a joke is also the one that will call at 2 a.m. to make sure you got home safe. Roughness, then, is not the absence of love, but the barrier built to protect it.
Fire burns, but it can also provide warmth.
Among Latino men, this tension between hardness and heart is everywhere. We inherit a history that asks us to be providers, protectors, and sometimes fighters, even as it denies us the language to speak openly about grief, doubt, or fear. So we craft a vocabulary out of jokes, bravado, and sarcasm; we build reputations out of volume and presence. But beneath that surface lives an instinct for loyalty and generosity so deep it can catch you off guard, the uncle who will drive three hours to fix your flat tire, the friend who shows up at your door when words fall short.
If fire can burn, it can also give warmth. Latino men, with all their contradictions, are proof of this double nature. They carry an ember inside, sometimes hidden behind smoke, sometimes blazing bright, that keeps families steady, friendships alive, and whole communities moving forward. Our challenge is not to extinguish that fire in pursuit of politeness, but to recognize the tenderness it protects and create spaces where it doesn’t need to hide.
I’m at peace with this tension.
I don’t believe that men need to be pushed into constant disclosure or polished into a version of themselves that feels unnatural. We have to meet one another where we are, with the languages we’ve inherited: humor, swagger, bluntness, or silence and honor the ways those languages have kept us safe.
What I do believe is that those of us who can see the armor for what it is, who can name it and work around it, have a responsibility. We can be the steady force that makes space for our brothers to open their hearts slowly, without shame, without pressure to become someone smoother or softer. Not to change them, but to make it safe for tenderness to surface, however it arrives. That is how we honor the fire: not by taming it, but by standing close enough for its warmth to reach us all.
