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Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday
Ralph Cintron
Boston: Beacon, 1997. 264 pp. $18.00 (paper).
Angels' Town is an ethnography of a Latino/a community just outside Chicago where Cintron's family lived while he was in graduate school. In both its style and political commitment, this ethnography follows from Michel de Certeau's understanding of everyday practices. Like de Certeau, Cintron sees everyday practices as rhetorical performances through which people struggle over identity and power. From this perspective, written and oral language are one more everyday social practice like the Thumper and Too Low Flow cars, gang hand signals, a young boy's bedroom wall decorations, and the layout of city streets Cintron discusses-the bread and butter of cultural analysis. Cintron calls his work an ethnography of the "rhetorics of public culture... the structured contentiousness that organizes, albeit fleetingly, a community or a culture" (x). His interest in structured contentiousness leads him to organize his story around the question "How does one create respect under conditions of little or no respect?"
Three of the central chapters tell the stories of individual people struggling to construct identities and garner respect through everyday semiotic practices. But the stories of these people are not primarily opportunities for explicit theorizing. Rather, in these chapters as throughout the book, the theoretical issues that drive the analysis are implied through metaphors that emerge from the fieldsite. For example, in a chapter about the elderly immigrant nicknamed Don Angel with whom he lived during his fieldwork, Cintron dwells on Don Angel's mastery...