Executive Summary of Ralph Cintron's Angel's Town Chapter 3 Finding Don Angel

Ralph Cintron finds Don Angel through layers of discourse. Don Angel seems splintered between identities through bureaucratic discourse as he swaps fake names, exposing the State’s dependence on paper trails for maintaining order and identification. Cintron writes most about three of Don Angel’s personal discourse communities, labeled by Cintron as viejito, mexicano, and English. Overall, Cintron analyzes Don Angel’s “layered discourses” in order to explain how he uses language to in varying ways and establish his dynamic identity.

Don Angel’s viejito discourse sets him apart from his immediate community. Attached to the “old ways,” the viejito discourse is one part performance, another part ideological. Cintron describes how Don Angel has a semiotic body that exhibits viejito discourse through dance, demonstration, and dress. The ideas of the “old ways” like witchcraft and hearth medicine come into conflict with modernizing agents like science and popular culture—the local youth find this aspect of Don Angel backwards.

However, Don Angel earns more respect in his mexicano discourse. Playing Albures, a verbal game of wit through word play and sexual innuendo where two men spar off to outperform the other putting the loser on his back so to speak, Don Angel shows of his expertise with language and syntactical change.

Cintron spends the least amount of time describing Don Angel’s relationship to English. In this discourse, he does not have the strongest command, and English would surface in his jokes. Perhaps, Don Angel used humor to make light of his social position in view of the power discourse.

Quotes

52 “I first consider the rhetoric of the "legal documents'' genre and explore some of its cultural meanings and intentions and, likewise, consider the forgings of legal documents as a profound manipulation of appearances whose goal is freedom from the forces of control. After that, I shift my analysis toward some specific oral discourse genres whose appearances, at least to the uninitiated, are also deceiving. My entire analysis is directed toward an understanding of Don Angel, a man whose life has been both banal and transgressive and, for me at least, deeply moving.”

55: “These cards and papers were parts of a genre, which itself may be part of a more complex system of rituals (including inquiries at a cocktail party, for instance) that attempt to bridge distance. Documents of identification, in particular, might be taken as contracts or signs of relationship between individuals and the institutions the individuals circulate through”

56: “These cards, then, are products of a lack of trust that plays itself out as a momentary curtailment of freedom at the moment of verification.”

57: “Perhaps we need to view the management of people and the devices used for management as cultural responses to the problems and successes of modernity: an explosive growth in population, the erosion of face-to-face interactions, an intensified concept of ownership, and so on.”

59: “In short, the unidimensionality of a law or regulation cannot help but straitjacket the multidimensionality of human need and, even more so, the almost chaotic abundance of human desire.”

63: “My point is that physical and oral representations of objects, actions, and events were very much a part of his vocabulary.”

64: “The repertoire of Don Angel, then, included at least three ways by which to animate words: gestures, sounds, and the creation of others through voice, pitch, and bodily changes.”

65: “Don Angel's viejito repertoire, it seems to me, implied a relationship to words that is distinguishable from the ideology of wording that is common in mainstream life to the extent that such life has been shaped by schooling.”

66: “Yes, I am saying that styles of power become molded to ways of holding the body and gesturing, to styles of discourse, and to ranges of thought—and all this might be called a style of being.”

68: “My sense was that his semiotic contained strands of ancient histories, cultures, and discourses, but his uprooted condition meant that following each strand would lead to a dead end, for there were no other viejitos, or matachin dancers in the neighborhood to think about, to compare, to ask questions of. In this sense, Don Angel was a powerful symbol of the fragmentation throughout these neighborhoods.”

71: “In this sense, Don Angel was part of a broadly shared identity related to contemporary Mexico. Because the term mexicano, then, was a communal marker, I have chosen it to label the discourse style through which Don Angel performed his everyday living.”

71: “To play albures, then, is to join a male game in which the participants search through phrases, words, and syllables for every possible way to suggest the penis, sperm, feces, anus, and sexual entry and exit into women, objects, animals, and particularly each other.”

76: “In other words, if the first level of meaning can be called normative, the second or albur level might be called transgressive.”

91: “But a man like Don Angel, who was inhabited by both viejito and mexicano discourses and performed them skillfully, was marginalized in both Mexico and the United States because in the eyes of others his own traces of viejito discourse acted as a kind of friction slowing the push toward modernization.”

96: “In such conditions, English potentially was a tool of exclusion and manipulation, and these were the festering sources from which the Spanish jokes and puns described earlier emerged. The motive behind the jokes and puns was the leveling of social stratification, but it was the sort of leveling that remained bound to words and bound to one's circle of intimates who understood Spanish.”