Reporter Volume 25, No.12 November 18, 1993

By Mark Wallace
Reporter Staff

Public surfaces such as walls and streets are places where street
gangs mark their struggle for control and dominance both with each
other and the culture at large, Ralph Cintron says, and graffiti is a
mark of that struggle. The symbol of a particular gang, if painted
upside down on a wall, is a sign of disrespect to that gang, says
Cintron, a 1993-94 fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships
Program at UB.
	The role that surfaces like walls and streets play in social
problems is central to the book Cintron is currently writing, Pues
Aqui: Language and Power in Angelstown, an ethnographic study of a
primarily Mexican community outside of Chicago. 
	Cintron grew up as a member of the only Puerto Rican family in
Mercedes, Texas, a small town about four miles from the Rio Grande and
the U.S. border with Mexico. His father worked in citrus production as
a trained horticulturist who could deal with professional issues as
well as speak to the primarily Mexican work force. 
	"Texas is a curious place to be Puerto Rican," he says. "Not
only were we the only Puerto Rican family in town when I was growing
up, we might have been the only one in the whole Rio Grande valley."
	Cintron's work is an outgrowth of his interest in the
cultural, linguistic, power, and community cross-relationships that
have always surrounded him, he says. "I have imagined my own life as
walking around in the midst of different groups who are speaking
different languages and have different cultures. I've always been
interested in how different groups come together, borrow or stay
separate from each other."
	Cintron's dissertation was an attempt to understand
differences in education that might cause difficulties with literacy
in a city outside Chicago that was one-quarter Latino, and which he
has given the pseudonym Angelstown. But after completing his
dissertation, which involved a great deal of work in the homes of
people in the community, his research changed, he says. "I lost
interest in making statements about educational things, and became
more interested in the darker problems of the way communities come
together."
	For Cintron, these "darker problems" include such things as
community power differences, and how public surfaces and structures
reinforce those power differences. An example, he says, is "how city
ordinances inadvertently become ways of controlling a community. If
you're poor and live in a barrio, and you have run-down cars and
landlord problems, ordinances will try to control public spaces and
have violations for such things as house repairs, yard
maintenanceQanything that has to do with the look of a neighborhood."
	At the time of Cintron's research, Angelstown was suffering
from what he describes as "a real collapse of economic strengthQthe
downtown had deteriorated, there was a collapse of local industry, and
competition from malls on the outskirts.
	"What happened simultaneously with this collapse was that a
lot of Mexicans, both documented and undocumented, began to move in,
on the periphery of downtown. Spanish stores began to appear both on
the periphery and downtown. There had been a Latino presence in the
city since the 1920s, but large waves of Latinos began to move there
in the late 1960s. In a city that hadn't before experienced these
sorts of conditions, this population seemed an implicit threat. The
Mexicans became a symbol of the basic fear of going downhill that many
in the city were feeling.
	"The city developed an Image Task Force to bolster their
image. How was this city going to attract yuppie homeowners if
neighborhoods were dilapidated and culturally threatening? In Chicago,
the Hi Tech Corridor was expanding and moving west, with new hi tech
industries, and the city was desperate to attract that kind of income
and growth.
	"The Image Task Force became part of that sense of fear, as
they tried to determine what they considered ways to clean up the
city, using such things as ordinances. What really upped the ante were
growing street gangs, with more homicides and graffiti on the main
thoroughfares into the city. There was a lot of discussion on what to
do about those thoroughfares, and whether to create new ones.
	"Of course, over its history the United States has always
faced these sorts of issues, with different emblems that symbolized
deep-seated problems. I do a lot of work with street gangs, who at
this time symbolize urban deterioration and fear.
	"How do you create respect under conditions of no respect?"
Cintron asks. "You do it by controlling public spaces for your own
use, but in so doing, you threaten those who really control public
space--the police. There's a lot of talk these days about 'winning
back' public space. But in doing that, you also contain somebody
else's space, which increases problems. The ways that police go about
controlling the streets sets up reactionary feelings against the
establishment."
	In fact, Cintron says, street gangs have many things in common
with the society that they seem to be at war againstQthey want to own
property, to have money and respect. "The problem is that the only
means by which they feel they can achieve that are illegal," he says.
But he points out that many gangsQwhich often refer to themselves as
"organizations"Qare sometimes willing to participate with the culture
at large. He gives as an example a Chicago street gang, The Disciples,
that is negotiating with Chicago officials to have its members stay in
school, at least partly because they want members who are trained to
handle their finances.
	Cintron, who will give a talk at UB this spring on the
"semiotics" of street gangs, is a professor in the University of Iowa
Department of Rhetoric, where he teaches what he calls the "rhetoric
of public culture."
	"Rhetoric is not just a language issue, but has to do with all
the physical surfaces that we display," he says. "I'm interested in
how various groups occupy space through forms of display. Cars,
sounds, the way people use their bodies, the way they dress, all are
ways of creating statements about who controls public space.
	"I use street gangs to further my cultural critique because
they embody a kind of dissent, and therefore reveal deep-seated social
problems. I find my own criticisms are amplified by using them as
examples."