Author Elías Domínguez Barajas concedes that The function of proverbs in discourse represents an undertaking of ambitious scope. Through an examination of proverbs deployed in a Mexican transnational family-based network, this book illustrates the role that proverbs play in the production of culture and identity, and the implications that this has for both literacy theory and for the educational opportunities of linguistic minorities in the United States. Drawing insights from Gumperz and Hymes's ethnography of communication and contextualization cues, Domínguez Barajas emphasizes the fundamental role of conjoined agency and “context” in determining linguistic behavior. Through his analysis and discussion of the use of proverbs by members of the “Lopez social network,” the author makes a case for looking at proverbs as language-in-action from a functional perspective. The functions of proverb use teased out of this ethnographic research include arguing, advising, uniting, and entertaining. While proverbs may perform multiple functions, it is “context” that determines the centrality of a function in a given interaction.

The book provides insight into the paradoxical nature of proverbs in that they reference the concrete in order to abstract to the general, carry the weight of group authority due to the obscurity and anonymity of their origins, and are static in form but can encode very different meanings depending on who deploys them across different settings. Because they draw upon the shared, and in some areas distinctive, knowledge of a group, proverbs and other types of figurative speech can instantiate group identity at the same time that they divide groups. On this last point, Domínguez Barajas offers the generalization that the more “metaphorically loaded” a proverb is, the more likely that proverb is to be “culturally bound” because the analogical relation that makes the proverb “work” may not be part of the knowledge repertoire of other groups.

Domínguez Barajas holds that “discursive practices define social groups in so far as they are the primary means by which the groups assert their distinctive basis of cohesion” (163). The author bases this assertion on his presentation and analysis of ethnographic and linguistic data, and on his discussion of that analysis in light of Bakhtin's notions of dialogicality and the tension between heteroglossia and unitary language. Because of proverbs' central role of oral communicative practices, their suppression and devaluation amounts to an assault on both the culture and the identity of transnational Mexicans and other linguistic minorities.

The author takes pains to emphasize how deployment and interpretation of proverbs, as one form of verbal art, demands higher order cognitive skills, including abstract reasoning, reconfiguration of symbols, metalinguistic awareness, and metacognition. By showing the adept, nuanced, and tactical utilization of proverbs to manage a broad array of social exigencies, Domínguez Barajas is concerned to demonstrate that the privileging of written language use over oral linguistic behavior amounts to an unfounded prejudice that has pernicious consequences for linguistic minorities whose cultural practices favor spoken forms of interaction.