This week in my advanced methods course we read the first 4 chapters from Angels Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday (1998) by Ralph Cintron. Though I hadn’t heard of Cintron before this semester, I’ve been anticipating this book since the syllabus was distributed in January because (1) we’re breaking it up over two weeks of the semester and (2) other members of the program have lauded it in passing. Obviously the book carries some weight. So what is that weight?
What’s striking right from the preface is Cintron’s reflexivity. Cintron combines critical ethnography with rhetorical theory to provide a thick portrait of a Latino/a neighborhood in Chicago and extends that portrait to a larger commentary on the relationship between representation, power and language in everyday life (note to self: read de Certeau). As he notes early in the preface, “one of the book’s controlling questions is How does one create respect under conditions of little or no respect?” (x). He admits the problem in answering this question, reducing the method of fieldwork to “the difficulty of finding the truth inside the lie, the lie inside the truth” (xiii).
Cintron spends the first chapter examining this problems of ethnography and representation by recalling his own background as the son of a Texas farmer, defining the true field site as the text that is constructed by the ethnographer, analyzing the power of the researcher through the interplay of ethos and logos, etc. But what struck me most about the intro is its inductive approach. When Cintron narrates his data-collecting process — 300 pages of notes, 91 tapes, 100+ documents in one round and then a slew more in yet another round years later — and then we see how he arranges that data by navigating specific moments with Don Angel, Valerio, and others alongside his own interpretations, I get the sense of how messy and chaotic this project must have been. Although Cintron isn’t always explicit in connecting his dots, the reader certainly benefits from what must have been a rigorous revision process.
A couple of questions for me as I read through these chapters:
- Last week as we read and discussed an anthropology of writing (AOW), we heard perspectives about how an AOW studies so-called mundane sites like the workplace; this is different from ethnographers of the early and mid 20th century who studied othered, exotic sites and cultures. In chapter 2 of Angel Town, Cintron take up the question of romanticizing the subject: “For those who read and write ethnographies, the fieldsite is an ethnographic trope that generates both the spell of the exotic (romance) and resistance (science) to that spell” (16). Cintron tries to address this contradiction by studying a mundane map of Angeltown that “deflates the exotic and, in so doing, amplifies it” (16). As a researcher interested in studying a site that has shaped my own identity (self-publishing) I worry that I might fall prey to the romance Cintron evokes in this chapter. When we study material and subjects near and dear to us, then, how do we balance the romantic with the scientific? Does Cintron succeed in chapter 2 and throughout Angels Town?
- A CCC review of Angels Town called my attention to Cintron’s move to construct metaphors from his data. This made sense to me given the inductiveness of his project. But is his reading of data too figurative? That is, does he ever make too much of certain details (his reading of Valerio’s obsession of cars, for instance)? Is his rhetorical reading of certain instances of everyday life in Angeltown paradoxically too sweeping?
- Finally, given that Cintron’s fieldwork is now 20-25 years old, how might our privilege of distance help us assess the significance of this work in terms of cultural anthropology and writing studies? What do we need to take from this for our own work, and what needs to be left alone?
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Loved your post, as always.
Two quick points about your questions here. First, it is thoughtful on the part of the researcher to understand/foresee the possibility of romanticizing the fieldsite. But isn’t Cintron pointing out the abundance of this practice in more traditional ethnography, almost always about places and people far away? Given that there are plenty of issues to be wary about “insider” ethnography, the proclivity to romanticization may not be the only one! [While we are at it, could Cintron be implicitly commenting on questions about such works (insider ethnographies) especially given their rise in the fourth quarter of the 20th century that was also accompanied by cuts in funding for research?]
Next, I was intrigued by your attention to Cintron’s “figurative” reading of his data. I wonder if qualitative research is or can be ever completely immune to it, but I am interested in hearing about how we/readers feel about this issue, especially when the writer deliberately draws our attention to those “figures.” That makes your last question all the more important!
Jason and Iswari:
I’m finding some of the same issues/questions as I read, especially in the “figurative” reading of the materials and particularly in relation to the expanse of material he claims in his opening chapter.
He has all this stuff, but he explicates for pages on very little documentation in the first three chapters of the text. For instance, he talks a lot about the role of signatures and the bureaucratic language of citizenship documents–both cases expand into somewhat figurative readings without having to use any documents obtained on site.
I think it raises questions we’ve explored in other scholarship on quantitative data about what we find significant and why. I found some of the reflexivity in the first chapters interesting, but I also found to book a bit slow-going through these early chapters, slogging through historical data on Aurora (Angelstown) that I didn’t find particularly relevant to the close reading of language practices that come in the later chapters.
This post is poppin’! I’m really enjoying this book so far, but I’m also wondering about the selection of data we see. It sounds like Cintron had a ton of data to work from, which Tim noted signals how chaotic and messy these research and revision processes must have been. With all that data, though, it seems peculiar that we see so much of that figurative, metaphoric work.
There’s a lot going on in Chapter 4. Cintron focuses on Valerio’s LD status, constructs the wall metaphor, explores cars and baseball figures, and makes some pretty hefty claims. At times, it seems like he’s stretching the metaphors (and data) to meet his needs. For example, when he’s making conclusions about LD, he writes, “Of course, my naiveté about LD undermines this text…” (104), which actually *did* undermine my reading of his analysis. I quickly realized that though it plays an integral role in the chapter, he hadn’t picked up any actual literature on LD, nor did he reference the national overrepresentation of people of color in special education (or LD) classes.
I experienced similar moments in the elaboration of the car as “a mobile display of an artfully constructed self” (113). It’s not that I don’t buy that argument…I do. I’m just not sure I understand the process leading up to that argument. Cintron takes us on a detailed narrative journey, but when you look at where we started (a poster of a car and Valerio saying it makes him feel strong) to much larger claims about the young males in the neighborhood, I find myself wanting to see more of the data selection process. I enjoy the intimate snippets we see of Cintron interacting with the “thumpers” and with Valerio, but I wonder: Are those brief descriptions enough to sustain these larger claims? Does Cintron actually back these claims with more data that we just aren’t privy to? With all that data (hundreds of pages of notes, tapes, and documents), how does he make those selection decisions?
I’m looking forward to taking up these questions more in class today. Although I enjoyed the book, I felt similar to Ben that it was difficult to sort his strategies. It read more like a theory book than a study. I felt validated by Allison’s example of the missing LD literature, for example. Perhaps, though, I’m also asking for the very ethnography that Cintron is trying to explode. I have a lot of respect for the number of years this book took to make and I wonder if I need to spend more time with theories of ethnography than with the genre itself.