Angels' town : chero ways, gang life, and rhetorics of the everyday / Ralph Cintron.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cintron, Ralph.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hispanic Americans--Illinois--Chicago Region--Social life and customs.

Hispanic Americans.

Hispanic Americans--Illinois--Chicago Region--Ethnic identity.

Ethnicity.

Manners and customs.

Chicago Region (Ill.)--Social life and customs.

Chicago Region (Ill.).

Illinois--Chicago Region.

Physical Description:

xiii, 264 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Boston : Beacon Press, [1997]

Summary:

In Angelstown, a mid-sized, Midwestern city, Cintron pursues his ethnographic work through the language of everyday life in the Mexican-American community. He explores how Don Angel, an older Mexican immigrant, expresses his traditionalism in his storytelling, elaborate gestural style, and folk beliefs about healing. A youth, Valerio, reveals the "inbetweenness" of his life through his difficulty writing English in school and through the images he puts on his bedroom wall. For other teenagers, the language of vengeance and violence, trust and respect provides a rationale for joining gangs. As issues of power and social order loom large in Angelstown - from family dynamics to the complexity of city management - Cintron shows how eruptions on the margins of the community are emblematic of a deeper disorder. And as the unwieldy disorder of his fieldsite is transformed into a book, Cintron explores his text as if it were a fieldsite itself, engaging his own impulse to order and make sense of things.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-254) and index.

ISBN:

0807046361

OCLC:

36954627