Week 7: Executive Summary

Cintron, Ralph. Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life and Rhetorics of Everyday. Boston (Mass.):
            Beacon, 1997. Print.

Chapter 7: Blacktop

            Cintron begins this final chapter with signs(?) or informational texts for members of the community of which he is doing an ethnography on.  The text are items such as “Be Considerate” with statements such as “Keep weeds and grass cut” and “Keep loud music and parties inside—not outside” and “Be Neighborly” with statements such as “Welcome new neighbors and get to know old ones” and “Join with neighbors to clean up local streets, parkways and vacant lots and help plan other neighborhood projects”.  Cintron then explains that the rest of the chapter will:
                    Attempt to understand certain fieldwork experiences through an
                    analytic lens that relies heavily on such concepts as dirt versus
                    the neat and clean, disorder versus order and, most importantly,
                    the ‘discourse of measurement,’ a term that I will slowly unwrap”
                    (199).

            The rest of the chapter speaks of two males: Ramón and Pablo and then speaks to the “discourse of measurement”.  Ramón laid blacktop as a way to support himself financially as a way to not rely on others.  However, he owes a lot of people money because “his Latino clients often did not pay on time” (201).  Ramón also did not own the correct equipment because of his lack of money, causing some of his work to be sub-standard.  Ramón did, however, “handle contracts and bids well despite his limited English” (202).  Pablo, on the other hand, was “a businessman extraordinaire” (203).  He owned several businesses in and around town.  Pablo could even afford to hire an architect to draw plans for a building he had bought.  Pablo needed to fix the sidewalk in front of one of his store for insurance purposes and was willing to do the work without money from the city, but the city refused to allow this, stating that the sidewalk needed to be re-engineered (205).  The final section of the chapter is labeled “The Discourses of Measurement”.  Cintron defines measurement in this case as “a broad metaphor to imply precision, the sort of precision that is often associated with numbers.  Most simply, the discourses of measurement are ways by which a precise order gets made” (210).  Cintron goes on to compare discourse of measurement to “instrumental rationality” (210).  Cintron then gives four characteristics of the manufacturing process, as it applies to the discourses of measurement:

                        1. The discourses of measurement seem to begin with an
                            identification of a kind of emptiness, formlessness, or
                            ambiguity, and it is to the emptiness, now targeted, that
                            the discourse address themselves.

2. The discourses of measurement tend to belittle other
                knowing systems--implicitly, if not explicitly—or at least
                to make prior discourse of measurement obsolete.
           
            3. Quite often the discourses of measurements are aimed
                at the control of perceived death, decay, and instability.  
           
           4. Discourse measurements are thoroughly integrated into
               the economic sphere.
               (212-214)