Cintron pursues his ethnographic

Angels’Town Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday by Ralph Cintron, Fdited by Deborah Chasman Beacon Press Due/Pubfished October 1998, 288 pages, paper tsBN 080704637X

In Angels town, a mid-sized, Midwestern city, Cintron pursues his ethnographic

work through the language of everyday life in the Mexican-American community.

He erplores how Don Angel, an order Mexican immigrant, expresses his

traditionafism in his storytelling, elaborate gesturatstyle, and folk beliefs about

healing. A youth, Vaferio, reveals the “inbetweenness” of his life through his

difficulty writing English in schoot 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 Angels town – from famify 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 fiefdsite is transformed into a book, Cintron explores his text as if it were a

field-site itsell engaging his own impulse to order and make sense of things.

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