Angels Town

As issues of power and social order loom large in Angelstown, Ralph Cintron shows how eruptions on the margins of the community are emblematic of a deeper disorder. In their language and images, the members of a Latino community in a midsized American city create self-respect under conditions of disrepect. Cintron's innovative ethnography offers a beautiful portrait of a struggling Mexican-American community and shows how people (including ethnographers) make sense of their lives through cultural forms.A special book that is just as much about inequality in the contemporary U.S. as it is about the way to research it. Cintron succeeds in doing what many well-intentioned policies do not. And he does it by looking and listening with great care, rather than assuming, condemning, or condoning. --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 remarkable piece of ethnographic work. . . . With the publication of this book, Cintron will take a well-deserved place in the company of the leading ethnographers both in Mexican-American studies and in the study of cultural poetics in general." --José Limón, author of Dancing with the Devil

"After years of debates about whether ethnographers can write about the lives of their subjects without colonizing them, Cintron, a master rhetorician, shows us that cultural anthropology is still possible-but we must come to it with a commitment to learning how to read the deep stories of resentment, longing, and loss that are embedded in the world of the everyday. . . . 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 ObserverRalph Cintron is associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.