Homegirls E-Book

Norma Mendoza-Denton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: New Directions in Ethnography
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 598

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In this ground-breaking new book on the Norteña and Sureña (North/South) youth gang dynamic, cultural anthropologist and linguist Norma Mendoza-Denton looks at the daily lives of young Latinas and their innovative use of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges that signal their gang affiliations and ideologies. Her engrossing ethnographic and sociolinguistic study reveals the connection of language behavior and other symbolic practices among Latina gang girls in California, and their connections to larger social processes of nationalism, racial/ethnic consciousness, and gender identity.

• An engrossing account of the Norte and Sur girl gangs - the largest Latino gangs in California
• Traces how elements of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges are used to signal social affiliation and come together to form youth gang styles
• Explores the relationship between language and the body: one of the most striking aspects of the tattoos, make-up, and clothing of the gang members
• Unlike other studies – which focus on violence, fighting and drugs – Mendoza-Denton delves into the commonly-overlooked cultural and linguistic aspects of youth gangs

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

FIGURES

TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF SOURCES

INTRODUCTION

To the Undergraduate University Student

To the Professional Linguist

To the Professional Anthropologist

To the Middle and High School Teacher

To the General Reader

To the Homegirls Depicted in this Book

Structure of the Book

CHAPTER 1: LA MIGRA

The Meaning of Dancing: Banda and Rock En Espanol as Class Codes

What Would You Do If Your Boyfriend Was Into Gangs?

Lock-Down Piporras and Cosmopolitan Fresas

Sor Juana High School

Same School, Separate Lives

Jocks, Latinas, and Popularity

Ethnic Diversity, Linguistic Diversity, and Educational Possibility

Interpreting Fluency: Researcher Effects and Ethnographic Uncertainty

CHAPTER 2: BEGINNING FIELDWORK

Stereotype Threat

A Reader’s Manual

Heading into the Copacabana

Replicability and Subjectivity

Confronted by My Own Stereotypes

Are You a Cop?

A Semiotic Crisis

You Could Be Our Mascot!

What Do You Claim? A First Sketch of Norte and Sur

Meeting an Icon: T-Rex (AKA: Trinidad, Trini) of the Norteñas

An Introduction to Clowning

CHAPTER 3: NORTE AND SUR: GOVERNMENT, SCHOOL, AND RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES

Introduction

Preamble: A Focus on Gangs but Away from Crime

Localism and Territoriality in Gang Research

Youth Gangs and Their Adults, Yesterday and Today

Chicano Gangs

Hemispheric Localism

Norte and Sur: The Government, Police, Research, Community Perspectives

The California Police Perspective on Youth

The Gang Research Perspective

A Description from Within the Community

CHAPTER 4: HEMISPHERIC LOCALISM: LANGUAGE, RACIALIZED NATIONALISM, AND THE POLITICIZATION OF YOUTH

Dismantling Ideology (with Junior, Güera, and T-Rex as Guides)

Exploding Localism: The Interview with Junior

Language and Belonging: Code Choice

Conflict Resolution

My Faux-Pas: Wrong Phonology, Wrong Discourse!

Recursive Categories

Indios and Mestizos: Continua of Racism and Phenotype in Latin America

Racial Contradictions

Class and Class Consciousness

How Junior Found Out That He Was (underlyingly) Sureño

The Imaginary of El Norte

Projecting North and South Onto the Hemispheric Stage

Telescoping Out: Norte Becomes Hemispheric North

Sita from Gujarat: Sur Becomes the Hemispheric South

The Salvadoran Case: Why MS 13 Were Sureños

The Wedding Fight: MS 13 Becomes MS 14

Norteños and Sureños Against Larger Forces

The Gorditos Incident

CHAPTER 5: “MUY MACHA”: GENDERED PERFORMANCES AND THE AVOIDANCE OF SOCIAL INJURY

“Such a Pretty Girl!”

Bad Girls and Drag Queens

The Lexicon of Makeup

“Bedroom Cultures”

Theorizing Cosmetics

The Discourse of Being Macha: Prophylaxis from Social Injury?

Shifting Styles in Performance

CHAPTER 6: SMILE NOW CRY LATER: MEMORIALIZING PRACTICES LINKING LANGUAGE, MATERIALITY, AND EMBODIMENT

Memory and the Gang as an Institution

Discourse Practices: Tattling, “Talking Shit,” and the Inherent Untrustworthiness of Non-Participant Narratives

Language Games, Clowning and Albur

Secret Literacies: Poetry Notebooks

Smile Now Cry Later

Circulation Networks Extend Through Material Artifacts

Conclusion

CHAPTER 7: ICONS AND EXEMPLARS: ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES IN VARIATIONIST SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Fighting Words

Linguistic Variation in Communities of Practice

What is a Community of Practice?

An Exemplar-Based Approach to Language and Social Identity

What is Exemplar Theory?

A Short History of Sociolinguistics: From Stratification to Ethnography

The Labovian Tradition

Sociolinguistic Constructs: Apparent-Time and Real-Time

The Sociolinguistic Interview

Questioning the Sociolinguistic Interview

The Danger of Death and the Vernacular

Coming Full Circle: From Stratification Back to Ethnography

CHAPTER 8: VARIATION IN A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE

Projecting an Accent, Casting an Identity

Raising and Lowering: Some Visual Evidence

Analyzing Vowel Differences Statistically

The Story of Chicano English /I/ in California

The Study

Methodology and Speakers

The study of Th-pro

Conclusion

CHAPTER 9: “THAT’S THE WHOLE THING [iη]!”: DISCOURSE MARKERS AND TEENAGE SPEECH

The History and Uses of -thing

Prior Studies and Stuff Like That

Discourse Marking -thing Among California Latina Girls

The Data Set

Referentially Given vs. Referentially New

Discourse Markers

Discourse Analysis of Th-pro

Ambiguities in Referentially Given vs. New

Ambiguities in Referentially New vs. Discourse Marker

Varieties of Discourse-Marking Th-Pro

Discourse-Marking Th-Pro is an Ethnic Marker

Conclusion: The Stigma of Discourse Markers

CHAPTER 10: CONCLUSION

A Small Note about Phonetic Awareness

Concluding Remarks

REFERENCES

Discography

Filmography

APPENDIX

INDEX

Additional praise for Homegirls

“Mendoza-Denton provides an extraordinary fusion of ethnographic insight and sociolinguistic analysis. I know of no better demonstration of how linguistic and cultural variables are entwined in social interaction.”

William Labov, University of Pennsylvania

“A landmark work in sociocultural linguistics! The breadth and depth are spectacular and the humanistic presentation makes the description captivatingly accessible to both a professional and a public audience.”

Walt Wolfram, North Carolina State University

“Homegirls provides a stunning and innovative linguistic, anthropolitical ethnography of how gang-affiliated Latina girls talk, dress, and interact. It is certain to become a classic in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.”

Marjorie Goodwin, UCLA

New Directions in Ethnography is a series of contemporary, original works. Each title has been selected and developed to meet the needs of readers seeking finely grained ethnographies that treat key areas of anthropological study. What sets these books apart from other ethnographies is their form and style. They have been written with care to allow both specialists and nonspecialists to delve into theoretically sophisticated work. This objective is achieved by structuring each book so that one portion of the text is ethnographic narrative while another portion unpacks the theoretical arguments and offers some basic intellectual genealogy for the theories underpinning the work.

Each volume in New Directions in Ethnography aims to immerse readers in fundamental anthropological ideas, as well as to illuminate and engage more advanced concepts. Inasmuch, these volumes are designed to serve not only as scholarly texts, but also as teaching tools and as vibrant, innovative ethnographies that showcase some of the best that contemporary anthropology has to offer.

Published volumes

1. Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place Gabriella Gahlia Modan

2. Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs Norma Mendoza-Denton

Forthcoming

Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City Rudolf Gaudio

© 2008 by Norma Mendoza-Denton

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING

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9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

The right of Norma Mendoza-Denton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

First published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2008

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mendoza-Denton, Norma.

Homegirls : language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs / Norma Mendoza-Denton.

p. cm. – (New directions in ethnography)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-631-23489-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-631-23490-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Youth–Language. 2. Latin Americans–Languages. 3. Teenage girls–Language. 4. Sociolinguistics. 5. Language and culture. I. Title.

P120.Y68M46 2008

401′.41–dc22

2007016800

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards.

For further information on

Blackwell Publishing, visit our website at

www.blackwellpublishing.com

To Ona, who willed it.

To Grizzly, who lived it.

FIGURES

1.1

Carmen Miranda: The South American Way.

1.2

Valentine’s Day envelope from Alejandro to Güera.

2.1

Segregated tables at Sor Juana High School during lunch.

2.2

Emergency makeup application on Norma.

3.1

“Gang Signs”: Fog City Police Department handout to teachers.

4.1

A simplified, linear representation of the complex relationships between race, gang, and nation.

6.1

Drawing: “Smile Now Cry Later.”

6.2

Bedroom culture: Autographing pictures.

6.3

T-Rex hangs a bandanna from her vest, while Angie and Mosquita spell out “14” with red roses.

6.4

A candid snapshot. The pose is being planned: “Should we do an XIV?”

6.5

Norte Park pose.

8.1

The vowel “iota”: [I] MRI images courtesy of Diana Archangeli.

8.2

The vowel sounds of American English.

8.3

MRI images: Front, high, lax [I] vs. front, high, tense [i].

8.4

Northern California shift: Highlighting raising of /I/.

8.5

Distribution of variants of underlying /I/.

8.6

Following phonetic segment is most significant factor in raising of /I/.

8.7

Sonority hierarchy ranking; cf. Selkirk (1984b), Santa Ana (1996).

8.8

Social grouping is second most significant factor in raising of /I/.

8.9

Individuation is most significant factor, second run.

8.10

Th-Pro status is second most significant factor, second run.

8.11

Codeswitching is third most significant factor, second run.

8.12

Social group is most significant factor in Th-Pro.

8.13

Phonetic factors are second most significant in Th-Pro.

9.1

Distribution of 195 tokens of discourse-marking Th-Pro organized by speaker and social group.

TABLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am first of all grateful to the former students at Sor Juana High School who allowed me to take part in their lives for several years, to tape record them, to copy their drawings, and to take notes and video even when we went to beauty salons and amusement parks. I am also grateful to the SJHS teachers and the principal who were all so supportive of this research. Many thanks to Guadalupe Valdés for generously facilitating an introduction to the school.

The original fieldwork for this project was my PhD dissertation, the idea for which was conceived in a flash and so funded in its entirety by my parents, Norma Denton Navarrete de Mendoza and Rodolfo Mendoza-Ortiz. They provided steadfast love and support, driving instruction for the right side of the road, and a car without which running after school-kids would have been difficult indeed. Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Ozlem Ayduk, my brother and sister-in-law, have been my academic role models, my support system, as well as sounding boards for many ideas on race, stigma, stereotyping, and rejection sensitivity. Teo Mendoza-Ayduk and his trilingual jokes preserved my sanity in the home stretch of writing.

Once fieldwork was completed, the write-up of the dissertation was funded by The Spencer Foundation, by an internship with Institute for Research on Learning, a dissertation grant from the Stanford Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and by the Linguistics Department at Stanford University. Further work has been done with support in the form of generous faculty leaves, grants, and other research support from the Spanish Department at The Ohio State University and the Anthropology Department at the University of Arizona. In 2002 I held a residency at the Rockefeller Study and Research Center in Bellagio, Italy, which allowed me to write and present my work to a wide community of scholars, poets, writers, and artists. This book bears the indelible imprint of their encouragement to reach out to a wider audience through different kinds of writing.

Jane Huber was my indefatigable editor at the start of this series with Blackwell, and reviewed many of the chapter drafts with the keen eye and loving pen of an old-fashioned literary editor. I’ve also had the superb pleasure of working with the Anthropology editor Rosalie Robertson and with Deirdre Ilkson who have both been incredibly encouraging and helpful. Three anonymous reviewers pored over the entire manuscript and provided many excellent suggestions. I must gratefully acknowledge J. Baker, Ashley Stinnett, and Terry Woronov, all of whom played crucial roles at various stages with helpful comments, editing, and friendship that helped me see this project to completion. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to Bambi Schieffelin, Perry Gilmore, Candy Goodwin, Jane Hill, Susan Philips, John Rickford, and most especially to my dissertation supervisor Penny Eckert for their mentorship, support, and guidance through the years. I am fortunate to have them as mentors and friends.

I have benefited profoundly from the advice and companionship of colleagues, friends, mentors, and students. From them I’ve had encouragement, enlightening conversations, incredible amounts of coffee, and comments over multiple written drafts over the course of many years. My heartfelt gratitude goes to: Don Anderson, Diana Archangeli, Jennifer Arnold, Mariella Bacigalupo, Rusty Barrett, Robert Bayley, Mary Beckman, Laada Bilaniuk, Michael Bonine, Don Brenneis, Shirley Brice Heath, Charles Briggs, Mary Bucholtz, Ron Butters, Jesse Callahan, Phillip Carter, Gianna Celli, Ralph Cintron, Colleen Cotter, Eric Cummins, Manuel Díaz-Campos, Wolfgang Diecke, Teun vanDijk, Alessandro Duranti, Joshua Fishman, Paul Foulkes, Susan Gal, Salvador García, Shelley Goldman, Mary Good, Chuck Goodwin, Lars Hinrichs, Rebecca Haidt, Kira Hall, Mike Hammond, Pete Haney, Diego Herrera, Paul Hodkinson, Kacy Hollenback, Judith Irvine, Miyako Inoue, Melissa Iwai, Rob Jones, Keith Johnson, Brian Joseph, Elizabeth Keating, Ghada Khattab, Emily Kidder, Don Kulick, William Labov, Robin Lakoff, Robert Lawson, Alaina Lemon, Bob Levine, José Limón, Charlotte Linde, Adrienne Lo, Jonathan Loftin, Natasha Mack, Bruce Mannheim, Elizabeth May, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ray McDermott, Cecile McKee, James McMichael, Jacqui Messing, Miriam Meyerhoff, Mourad Mjahed, Robert Moore, Terrell Morgan, Salikoko Mufwene, Ben Munson, Vivek Narayanan, Nancy Niedzielski, Dorothy Noyes, Brendan O’Connor, Claire Park, Tad Park, Thea Park, Janet Pierrehumbert, Robin Queen, Tanya Rhodes (and Jenai and Xóchitl), William Rietze, Jen Roth-Gordon, Dana Rosenstein, Ivan Sag, Otto Santa Ana, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Hinrich Schütze, Scott Schwenter, Joel Sherzer, Amy Shuman, Michael Silverstein, Julie Solomon, Griselda Suárez, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Chuck Tatum, Nicole Taylor, Maisa Taha, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Elizabeth Traugott, Adam Ussishkin, Tom Veatch, Sudhir Venkatesh, Jess Weinberg, Etienne Wenger, Don Winford, Andrew Wedel, Ruth Wodak, Walt Wolfram, Kit Woolard, Landon Yamaoka, and Ana Celia Zentella. All mistakes and inaccuracies remain my own.

Student and faculty audiences at University of Michigan, University of Chicago, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-Berkeley, University of Texas-Austin, University of Texas-San Antonio, Harvard University, New York University, New Mexico State University, The Ohio State University, Duke University, Brown University, Grinnell College, University of Arizona, University College Dublin, Università di Firenze/Verona, and Universität Freiburg have also helped to shape this work with their questions and keen insights. Over the years the interns in my laboratory and the students in my sociolinguistics, face-to-face interaction, and history of anthropological theory classes have inspired me to craft accessible explanations that address issues both within and outside of the academy. I hope this work lives up to the inspiration they have provided.

Some associations leave a lasting personal and professional impact. My longtime partners in anthropological mischief and writing have been Galey Modan and Rudi Gaudio. It is through them that many of these ideas found their first expression. While I was at Ohio State, I was fortunate to be part of an intellectual environment where friendship and collaboration overlapped, and brain sparks flew in all directions. Jen Hay, Stef Jannedy, Bettina Migge, Elizabeth Strand, and Anthony Allen have been influential for me since that time. I conclude with many, many thanks to Aomar Boum for helping me to herd the wandering sheep of my thoughts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF SOURCES

Thanks to Diana Archangeli for permission to reproduce the MRI pictures in chapter 8.

Penny Eckert kindly allowed me to reproduce the Northern California shift vowel chart in chapter 8.

Lyrics to the song “Smile Now Cry Later” are by generous courtesy of Glad Music Publishers and Pappy Daily Music.

Photo of Carmen Miranda provided by CMG Worldwide.

http://www.carmenmiranda.net/

Portions of the chapter 1 are an expanded and modified version of my article “Fighting Words” which I have been permitted to quote by U of AZ Press.

Portions of chapter 6 are significantly expanded from a chapter in

Youth Cultures

, a 2007 collection edited by Paul Hodkinson and Wolfgang Diecke. Thanks to Routledge and Francis.

Thanks to Routledge and Francis for allowing me to rework my article “Muy Macha” in Ethnos.

Thanks also to the homegirls for letting me take their pictures.

All efforts have been made to trace copyright holders. Should any copyrighted works inadvertently appear without permission, please contact the author.

INTRODUCTION

The social bond is linguistic, but it is not woven with a single thread ... nobody speaks all those languages, they have no universal metalanguage... we are all stuck in the positivism of this or that discipline of learning, the learned scholars have turned into scientists, the diminished tasks of research have become compartmentalized and no-one can master them all.

Jean-Francois Lyotard1

One of the things that occurs to me as I introduce the book that you are about to read is that I cannot be certain of the publics that this text will encounter. I have written Homegirls, a linguistic ethnography of a subcultural group of Latina girls involved in gangs in the mid-1990s, in the hope that it will be accessible to a wide variety of readers. Crafting an introduction that attempts to pull the book together and assumes a unified audience or forces a unique reading seems both self-defeating and formulaic ... but do introductions ever “force” a reading? Or do they simply discourage alternative readings?

Is it glue or solvent when I try to address many different publics in one place?

Thus I write a series of short letters to different readers that I imagine may encounter this book, and follow these letters with a description of the chapters so that you may find your way. You may be one of those readers I have addressed; you may intersect or fall outside of the categories I have imagined. In any event it is my hope that you will read this book all the way through. Especially toward the end of the book, some sections are fairly technical, making use of specialized terms and arguments drawn from diverse and sometimes disparate fields: youth subculture studies, linguistics, criminology, and cultural and linguistic anthropology. I have attempted to clarify terms and craft these arguments in a way that I hope will make the whole work accessible to people outside of those fields.

I believe that the process of writing and the process of reading are dialogic. We stand in dialog with each other, you as you read this introduction and I as I await your reaction. I am out there waiting, expecting your reply, and expecting to engage you in dialog. I would like to hear from you, and you can always find me either through the ether of the internet or through this publisher. Here is my letter; please write back.

To the Undergraduate University Student

One of the main aims of this book is to convey to you the intricacy and interconnectedness of linguistic and cultural practices, and to introduce you to one way of viewing cultural description. We might define ethnography as a process where a researcher “closely observes, records, and participates in the life of” a group of people, and then “writes an account emphasizing descriptive detail.”2 An ethnography is always to some extent a case study, and as such, it can trace out causal links and explain situated behavior: I spent about two years eating breakfast and lunch with Latina and Latino youth at Sor Juana High School, going to many hours of classes, tutorial sessions, and sports practices. I hung around on weekends, for parties, conducted interviews and did volunteer work. I listened as young people explained why they did what they did. This type of long-term involvement is what makes an ethnography unique: because of the depth it can provide, we can understand the many different factors at play in a particular situation; at the same time it is limited because it is a study of a single situation. What I describe for the high school I observed could be similar to what you have seen in your own high school, but your school may have had different groups, different demographic characteristics, different gender processes. The generalization still holds: people in institutions (such as a high school) will use perceived axes of difference to manufacture sign systems that naturalize those differences: your social group might be reflected in music; your class in dress or language, or in the expectations of others; ethnicity in makeup: these signs may interchange places or be projected at the same time. The processes I describe at Sor Juana High School were a local arrangement, specific to the time and place I describe. They have probably changed beyond recognition. It’s your turn to become more aware of sign systems in your own environment, knowing all the while that they are both arbitrary and historically grounded; complex, subtly patterned and interrelated. Good luck.

To the Professional Linguist

In linguistics we have traditionally delimited the scope of our field as involving only language, and this definition can be quite restrictive, occasionally referring only to the abstract structures we have isolated, and often turning away when it’s time to look past the structural level and to introduce cultural interpretation. Here you will find accounts of structural phenomena in sociophonetics and discourse in the later chapters, as well as a summary of this book’s situatedness within sociolinguistics. In order to get to that material and to derive the greatest benefit from these accounts, I will try to persuade you that we must look at language by looking beyond language, we must look holistically at the life-world of the people with whom we work and investigate the richness of practices that are inextricably tied to language, weaving with it one continuous tapestry. You will find that makeup, clothing, musical taste, and consumption are all related to linguistic and literacy practices described in the coming pages. Additionally, macro-social processes of nationalism, race-thinking, and what I’ve termed hemispheric localism also go hand in hand with language use and language ideologies in the emergence of the Norte and Sur gangs. These communities of practice are voluntary affiliation groups that I’ve shown to have reflexes that reverberate in linguistic structure. Starting at the phonetic level, the variation employed to signal these identities is embedded in discourse markers that connect low-level variation to broader interactional frameworks. Understanding the dynamics of sociolinguistic identities, and communities of practice, as well as what these can teach us about broader variation in language remains one of my goals.

To the Professional Anthropologist

About twenty years ago, Mary Louise Pratt famously griped of anthropologists and our ethnographies, “How, one asks constantly, could such interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books?”3 Although Pratt’s exasperation roughly coincided with and acted as harbinger of the experimental moment as described by George Marcus and Michael Fischer,4 with reflexive ethnographic writing and humanistic anthropological writing gaining ascendancy, this moment has not yet ... quite ... reached linguistic anthropology. The reasons for this are varied, but partly arise from a privileging of empiricism (the fetishization of the transcript) and from the historical relationship of linguistic anthropology to linguistics. Linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics are oriented toward external data more than to the subjective or interpretive experience of the ethnographer, though there is both a long-standing tradition of taking into account the role of the researcher5 and of critiquing the ethnographer’s role in data gathering.6

Occasionally discussions of ethnography offer simultaneous positive and negative definitions, stating for example that ethnography is the hermeneutic method par excellence and that it is variously taken to be incompatible with science7 or anathema to quantification,8 or that ethnography is “warm” while science writing is “cool.”9 Here I attempt to do more than simply combine or sequentially present “qualitative” and “quantitative” methodologies. I show that ethnographic understandings are enriched, supported, (and sometimes problematized) when we examine subtle linguistic patterns that can be mined quantitatively. In a similar vein, quantitative conclusions lose some of their stability when written through an ethnographic tradition that questions not only the place of the researcher,10 but also the properties of one’s subjectivity as a filter for knowledge production. All the while, I show that combining phenomenologically oriented members’ categories with categories devised by the researcher might yet yield some fruitful insights.

To the Middle and High School Teacher

High school teachers were extremely kind to me in the execution of this project: they allowed me access to the school and their classrooms, and I was able to see up close the many nurturing and caring relationships between the students and their teachers. You will notice that I caution teachers in chapter 3 about the representations of their minority and language-learner students in materials handed out by law enforcement, materials that are required reading in many school districts around the country. I implore you to read these materials with a critical eye, considering that “moral panics” around immigration,11 youth, and gangs12 in the media and at the community level are cyclical, and not always related to what may be going on in the school or the community. The research for this book was conducted in the mid-1990s, at a time when the panic around gangs was quite high. The level of panic subsided during the early 2000s and appears to be on the upswing again.

Here in Tucson, Arizona, we have recently had an increase in the allocation of funding to law enforcement for the as yet nonexistent increase in gangs (more on this in chapter 3), and also a local scandal about a middle school that held separate meetings for Euro-American and Latino parents, and considered adopting uniforms – presumably as gang deterrents – for the Latino students only.13 The issues outlined in this book affect schools not only in California, but across the country as school districts develop closer ties with law enforcement that often rely on systematic stereotyping of students based on language, ethnicity, and immigration background.

In chapter 1 I draw an extended case study of a girl who disidentifies with English instruction for social reasons. At first glance it may seem like this kind of behavior should be automatically condemned, but my aim is to elucidate the intricate factors that go into her development of such a stance. I want to show you the basis for her decision-making, and to consider that you might do the same thing if faced with her choices. I hope that this section will serve to make teachers aware of the complex factors that enter into children’s public performances, and that these factors might lead them to mask competencies. Sometimes youth are involved in social dynamics that will lead them to decisions that go against the grain of school expectations, like not reading aloud in class or refusing to change for PE. It is up to teachers to work closely and mediate between students, administration, and parents who may have yet another set of expectations. My admiration and gratitude go to you who are in the position to influence young people and to act as role models and mentors outside the immediate family.

To the General Reader

I have worried about this book making the right impression on you. You may be picking up this book because you are concerned with gang activity in your neighborhood or in your city, or because you want to understand a slice of the increasingly complex world of youth in the United States. You may be concerned about the social impacts of immigration, the life-world of girls in schools, or you may be interested in language and culture more generally. I hope I’ve written a book that can answer some of your questions. I want to say a couple of words about the content and some of the transcripts you will find in this book. One of the challenges for me in writing this book has been not to fall unquestioningly into reproducing stereotypes of gangs and gang members, so I have steered away from the usual law-enforcement topics of illicit activity and violence and attempted to focus on young people’s own explanations, their accounts of the world around them, and their words as they were collected and recorded by me. All participants were recorded with full consent procedures, and yet for reasons of privacy I have changed all their names, as well as the name of the school and all the place-names. Sometimes in the collection of recorded speech participants or researchers may say things that a reader may not approve of, ranging from language-mixing between Spanish and English (some people disapprove of this, linguists want to describe it), to swearing or telling bawdy jokes, to using sentence fragments or lots of “pause-fillers” and repetition. In the linguistic tradition, we transcribe people’s words without any editing for “propriety” on the researcher’s part. We would consider that kind of editing equivalent to censorship of our informants, of ourselves. Because young people’s speech is already negatively stereo-typed, some of it may “sound” to you upon reading the transcripts as though I am representing them as inarticulate by including every last pause, um, ah, repetition and breath. These are linguistic conventions that allow us to probe further into people’s discourse. All of us pause, repeat, tease, tell jokes, switch between styles or languages if we have several. The crucial point in presenting these transcripts is to try to understand the sense that participants make of their own lives. I invite you to consider young people’s words. Listening to them has been the greatest privilege of my career.

To the Homegirls Depicted in this Book

Q-vo. Ten years have passed and you are all grown up now. It’s amazing. Some of you are moms, many of you have been to college, you work (often more than one job), and are raising young families. Some of you are self-made businesswomen, and meet not only your own financial responsibilities but those of extended family members. You still write poetry, dance on Saturdays, have picnics at the park, play basketball, and listen to Oldies and Banda.

I didn’t tell you this at the time, but you have defied the expectations of researchers, some of whom predicted that any kind of gang involvement for girls would likely lead to troubled lives.14 In every single one of your cases they were wrong. But then, who are they to tell you what you can and can’t do? You’ve always been very independent. I’m not surprised.

***

Just writing these open letters has given me a bit of stylistic whiplash (and provided fellow linguists with more data!). There is no way to hold all the audiences in one voice. They’ve dissolved and slipped out the sides of my fingers.

Structure of the Book

Chapter 1 provides a slice-of-life description of the social and linguistic setting of Sor Juana High School, and discusses many of the subtle nuances of social categories among Latina and Latino youth in that context. I describe some of the routines in the daily ebb and flow of school life, and end the chapter with a reflection on the choice of self-presentation of one of the girls as a non-speaker of English. In chapter 2, I discuss aspects of ethnographic reflexivity, and analyze some of the issues that I faced as a Latina immigrant doing this research – different in many ways from the young Latina/o participants, but very similar in others. I detail my fractured introduction to a practice called clowning, a type of over-the-top mock insult routine, and follow another example of misapprehended clowning, where possible offense was taken by a passerby.

Chapter 3 discusses the literature on gangs, and the rise of the Norte and Sur gangs as found in accounts from the government, the police (as filtered down to the teachers at Sor Juana High School), gang researchers, and members of the community. Chapter 4 turns to the discourses of young people who are involved in the Norte/Sur dynamic, and it is through their words and explanations that we begin to see a picture of the Norte/Sur conflict that goes beyond that provided in police accounts, which focus on the territorialization of California. In young people’s accounts, Norte/Sur becomes a locally interpretable conflict that allows stance-taking on some of the issues that others in the community are not addressing: issues of immigration, language, authenticity, race and racism, and class. In addition, an emergent aspect of these discourses of gang-talk is hemispheric localism, whereby young people interpret these local and regional conflicts and actively use them to reason about the wider world and power relations within it.

Gender and performativity are the focus of chapter 5, looking through the lens of girls’ practices around makeup and bodily presentation. What sort of gendered interpretations arise in talk about makeup, about normative femininity and relations with boys? Chapter 6 similarly goes beyond the strict scope of spoken language and describes material cultural practices such as the circulation of networks of poetry, photographs, and drawings, connecting these practices to the clowning routines established in chapter 2.

Chapters 7, 8, and 9 comprise the sociolinguistic variation section of the book, where the focus becomes the linguistic patterns found in the recordings of the girls when they were interviewed during the course of fieldwork. Chapter 7 situates this research within the broader field of sociolinguistics, taking stock of its traditions as well some of the current trends. Chapter 8 examines the variation of a particular English phoneme – the vowel /I/, found in the word “bit” – and how this variation patterns according to the details of the communities of practice of the girls. Chapter 9 examines this variation further by looking at the patterning of the words in which much of the /I/ variation is embedded. I claim that the girls’ innovative usage of these words extends processes present in the history of English while simultaneously creating an in-group code that is designed explicitly for the recipient. The concluding chapter draws together some of the threads in the study.

***

My brother read this introduction when I first wrote it and remarked: “your stated goal is to write a book for everyone, but the [opening] quote is totally antithetical to that.” Hmmm. That’s true. I’ve chosen to leave the quote in because it captures both my difficulties (what with the death of grand narratives) and the fractured nature of you as my audience, of audiences in general. Some readers will find Lyotard’s words deeply resonant, while others won’t identify with them. I hope some may be just a bit intrigued and try to pursue the source further. The whole book is like that: open to individual interpretation, open to creating ruptures, hoping to catch you off guard and entice you to read on in an area that you’ve thought outside the scope of what you do.

Notes

1 Lyotard (1984: 40–1)

2 This definition is pieced together from parts of the one found in Marcus and Fischer (1986: 18), except that I’ve made two important changes: no longer is an anthropologist the only type of researcher carrying out ethnography, and no longer are ethnographies unproblematically considered to be accounts of other cultures. See for instance Bakalaki (1997).

3 Pratt (1986: 33)

4 Marcus and Fischer (1986)

5 Labov (1972b), on the observer’s paradox.

6 Briggs (1986)

7 See Aunger (1995) and Roscoe (1995) for discussions of debates on “ethnography vs. science.”

8 Kamil, Langer, and Shanahan (1985)

9 Bishop (1992)

10 Marcus and Fischer (1986)

11 Jorge Bustamante (1994) has documented how during periods of economic recession, the American public holds a negative view of migrants and immigration, while during periods of economic expansion the public holds a more favorable view.

12 McCorkle and Miethe (2002)

13 Arizona Department of Education (2007)

14 Moore (1994), Moore and Hagedorn (2001)

CHAPTER 1

LA MIGRA

“M-I-I-G-R-A-A-A-A-a-a-a!” A fast-decaying echo followed the scream. It was the kind of echo where you can hear the sound waves buzzing in your ear.

Feet scurried all around; creeping under bushes, jumping over rocks, then frozen in mid-step behind cocked-open dumpsters. Hoping that the Border Patrol agent would pass them by, the immigrants held their breath, shoulders tense and armpits hollowed. The agent brushed aside weeds and grasses with her foot, counting backward quietly to herself. Leaves rustled, and a soft in-breath drew her eyes through a thicket and met them in a sustained gaze. Sergio knew it was over. He looked down and emerged defeated without a word. One by one the immigrants were found until only one remained. Time was running out. A bell’s vibrato finally clamored.