Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday

The decorations in a fourteen-year-old boy's room, historical ties to spiritual healers and migrant workers, the sexual puns of an older man, low-riders and youth gangs.…In their language and images, the members of a Latino community in a midsized American city create self-respect in an atmosphere of disrespect. In this creative ethnography Ralph Cintron offers a beautiful portrait of a struggling Mexican-American community and "a project in the rhetoric of public culture," to show how people make sense of their lives through cultural forms and how the work of anthropologists is in itself culture-making.
"[Cintron] uses his considerable skills as an ethnographer to provide a revealing look at the culture of a Mexican American community."


—Booklist
"A remarkable piece of ethnographic work."


—José Limón, author of Dancing with the Devil
"A special book that is just as much about inequality in the contemporary U.S. as it is about the way to research it. The writing is almost lyrical; the cumulative effect, devastating."


—Virginia Dominguez, author of White by Definition
"I am stunned, amazed, almost breathless at how good Angels' Town is.…Landmark critical ethnography and rhetorical analysis."


—David Jolliffe, DePaul University
"A stunning and important work that sets high standards for the new anthropology of Latino communities in the United States."


—Ruth Behar, author of The Vulnerable Observer