Cintron, Ralph. Ch. 3 Looking for Don Angel. Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. 51-97.
In the third chapter of Angel’s Town, Ralph Cintron discusses the everyday rhetorics of Don Angel. He opens the chapter by describing the means by which Don Angel gets his “papers into order,” framing the process as a resistance against the institutional policies of social management (51). Demonstrating how Don Angel works to fly below the radar by use of a variety of forms of identification/documentation, Cintron introduces the idea of resistance through the tropes of discourse, consciousness, and self (60). From that triad, Cintron proceeds to tease out the ways in which Don Angel’s varied use of discourse functions to provide him with identification of another sort.
The three discourses Cintron identifies at work in Don Angel’s life are the viejito, mexicano, and English. The first, viejito, is characterized as the discourse of Don Angel’s cultural ancestry, los viejitos or the “old ones” and connects Don Angel to the natural and spiritual world. This discourse also isolates him within his community, labeling him as chero or outmoded (68). Mexicano, on the other hand, both modernizes his discourse and connects him to the community in two forms: albures (a game of wits employing veiled, bawdy repartee) and slang (employing double-entendres between spoken Spanish and English). The third discourse, that of Don Angel’s working English, integrates him into the literacy practices of institutions and also avails itself to Don Angel’s linguistic poaching. In particular, the last two discourses, as well as the processes of documentation and identification occur over both normative and transgressive contexts and, as such, help to illustrate the layeredness of rhetorics Cintron continues to unravel throughout the text.
Notes and Quotes
“I will begin at the beginning, at the moment of birth when one is recorded/inscribed in a bureaucratic culture. This action sets up future inscriptions in which paper and print—and now a computer’s memory—help to fix at least a part of us” (55).
Cintron, in identifying the means by which the state manages to keep track of individuals, sets up a correlation between the idea of documentation and the discourses that identify individuals and afford them opportunities to resist the state.
“Any portrait of institutional life needs at least two versions: one that acknowledges the curtailment of self-interest but also the furthering of self-interest” (57).
“Don Angel’s false documents and certificates, then, were a leveling of the ability to represent the truth” (58).
This ability insinuates itself into a number of Don Angel’s practices throughout the chapter and hinges on the normative /transgressive, linguistic/socioeconomic natures of his discourse.
“Through the games of albures, Don Angel momentarily found respect as a man of intelligence and words. His socioeconomic position (as janitor, dishwasher, and most recently nurseryman) made little sue of his intelligence and words, but in a game of albures, more often than not, he won” (90).
The albures remind me of Langston Hughes’ Simple stories. In particular, I am thinking of Simple’s Uncle Sam, which portrays the black working class through the perspective of one Jesse B. Simple. Simple participates in rounds of the dozens (signifying) with his friends, and though the ribbing is generally good-natured and does not—at least not in Hughes’ representations—match the raciness of the albures, the function is similar.
“Don Angel’s fragmented discourse, his approximations and appropriations, would go unmeasured because standardized tests cannot measure the overwhelming number of nonstandard routes that also lead to the making of meaning. But these routes, elusive and almost untheorizable, are also a set of actions by which power and the ciphers that preserve it are momentarily deciphered” (97).
In the conclusion of the chapter, Cintron’s argument seems to illuminate both institutional and cultural sources of literacy sponsorship in Don Angel’s life.
texturology 