This book is exactly the sort of resource that I wish had been available when I first began doing ethnographic fieldwork. Mendoza-Denton describes with candor, sharp observation, and humor her experiences as an ethnographer working with young, gang-affiliated Latinas in northern California. The resulting book provides psychological insight into the lives of these complex and compelling young girls and the social context in which they interact. Mendoza-Denton skillfully integrates the fields of linguistics, anthropology, and sociology. In addition, she offers an unusually intimate look into the thought processes of a young graduate student, who finds, as so many of us do, that her training in a university classroom is inadequate for taking on the challenge of ethnography, and that she must assemble a new toolkit in response to the complexities of her fieldwork setting. Homegirls seeks to address what Mendoza-Denton correctly identifies as “the dearth of self-reflexive work” (p. 39) in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and it achieves this goal masterfully.
The Introduction sets the tone, making it clear that this is no ordinary academic text but rather an invitation to dialogue, from the author to a diverse set of potential readers. These include undergraduate students, linguists, anthropologists, secondary school teachers, and “the general reader,” and the author speaks directly, in her own voice, to each group. Mendoza-Denton also speaks to the “Homegirls” who are the focus of her book, modeling what will be her stance toward them throughout the following chapters: that they are her co-researchers, her teachers, and her guides to the complex world in which they live. As she puts it, “[w]ithin the interviewees’ words were lessons meant for me” (p. 40).
Chapter 1, “La Migra,” plunges the reader directly into the center of a narrative. There is no academic introduction of terms or outline of what will be discussed. Mendoza-Denton simply drops us off at “Sor Juana High School” (SJHS, the pseudonym for the school where she conducted her fieldwork) and walks away, re-creating, in a sense, the initial immersion of the researcher in a fieldwork setting. Throughout the chapter, she provides us with key anecdotes and details that will form the backdrop for our understanding of the multiple levels of context in which the girls construct a social and linguistic identity. This context includes the structuring of space across the school campus, as well as the symbolic structuring of geographic space represented by the Norte/Sur ‘North/South’ divide. She analyzes the role of language proficiency in how the school positions particular students, and in how the girls position themselves within the key social groupings at the school.
In chapter 2, Mendoza-Denton fulfills her earlier promise to be self-reflexive about her fieldwork, and discusses in detail how her own identity and history formed an integral part of the research she conducted. She takes us step by step through her process of learning to read the “signs” of the social groupings all around her, as well as her growing awareness of how her own, unintended signs (in clothing, makeup, and even choice of partner) were constantly being interpreted by the girls. She also maps out here the main indexical markers associated with the two gangs that are at the center of her study: Norte and Sur. This dichotomy encompasses themes of race, class, ethnic pride, and assimilation. It also encompasses language affiliation, with the Norteña girls orienting toward use of English, and the Sureña girls orienting toward Spanish.
In chapter 3, Mendoza-Denton shifts her focus to how the Norte/Sur distinction is seen by institutions such as the school and local police, including the ways in which official instructional materials misrepresent the signals of gang membership. The chapter summarizes the literature on gangs and gang violence, while challenging researchers to focus on aspects of gang affiliation beyond definitions rooted in criminality. This section also introduces and defines the term “hemispheric localism” to encompass a meaning system in which local and global identities are projected onto each other.
This term is expanded further in chapter 4, where Mendoza-Denton uses detailed transcriptions of interviews with students at the school to elaborate on the meanings of Norte and Sur. In particular, she traces the path of racial categories such as Indio and Mestizo from their Latin-American roots to their role in categorizations in the United States. She also looks at issues of class, noting the occurrence of factors such as occupational categories and car ownership in descriptions of the Norte/Sur distinction. Mendoza-Denton illustrates some fairly abstract theoretical categories with vivid anecdotes, including one in which she accidentally aligns herself with a Sur identity through a single use of Spanish phonology.
Chapter 5 focuses on the construction of gender identity by the gang girls, exploring how they resolve the conflict between the dominant U.S. ideology of femininity and the “unfeminine” nature of gang membership. In particular, Mendoza-Denton looks at the use of eyeliner as a public signal of willingness to fight, and “[the] discourse of ‘being macha’” (150). She argues convincingly that the construction of a powerful and confident gendered identity may play a role in protecting some gang girls from “socially injurious” outcomes later in life.
In chapter 6, Mendoza-Denton describes the role of material artifacts in the “distributed memory” of the gang subculture she is studying. She identifies and explores how unattributed drawings, collective poetry notebooks, and school photographs all play a role in defining the boundaries of Norte and Sur, as well as preserving and circulating cultural and linguistic norms. Readers interested in youth subcultures will find this chapter particularly fascinating.
Chapter 7 provides a brief history of the key elements of sociolinguistic theory, viewed through the lens of Mendoza-Denton’s research on Latina gang girls. In particular, this section shows how the macro-level elements (class, ethnicity, gender) on which the early sociolinguistic studies were based must be broken down into micro-level categories in order to understand the symbolic organization at SJHS (and presumably in many other communities of practice). Mendoza-Denton looks critically at the sociolinguistic tradition, questioning, for example, the social appropriateness of the famous “danger of death” question in particular fieldwork settings. Her critique is confirmed in my own fieldwork with gang members in Los Angeles (Fought Reference Fought2003). I found that while asking this question was not considered inappropriate, the narratives it elicited were generally told with exaggerated nonchalance, rather than with the unguarded excitement that is the goal. Chapter 7 also poses questions about the sociolinguistic interview in general, and the ways in which the study of a community by outsiders may “indirectly reproduce … the colonialist and capitalist relations of domination between researchers and subjects” (223). In the end, Mendoza-Denton argues convincingly that ethnographic studies focusing on situated practices and participants’ own categories are crucial to sociolinguistic research.
Chapters 8 and 9 present two types of studies of sociolinguistic variation at SJHS, combining the detailed information about social categories from the first part of the book with traditional methods for looking at linguistic variables. The speakers in the analysis consist of girls from each of six crucial social groupings at the school (Norteñas, Norteña Wannabes, Latina Jocks, and so forth); two participants are selected to represent each group. Chapter 8 focuses on the raising and lowering of the /i/ phoneme, as determined by a multivariate analysis using Goldvarb (Rand & Sankoff Reference Rand and Sankoff1990). The analysis reveals that the most raising is done by the core gang girls of both groups, followed by the Wannabes and the Disco Girls. Latina Jocks, not surprisingly, have the lowest levels of raising. Mendoza-Denton also looks at the linguistic behavior of individuals, showing how their particular histories and roles within their social groups contribute to the amount of raising they do. (As an aside, there seems to be an error on p. 255, where the girls who have the highest scores for raising are identified as “T-Rex and Raisa,” while the chart on p. 253 shows the highest scores for T-Rex and Reina.)
Chapter 9 applies a similar type of sociolinguistic analysis to discourse markers, specifically the lexical set “TH-Pro” (something, nothing, everything, anything). The chapter provides a pragmatic analysis of these markers, focusing on those forms that are used specifically with a discourse-marking function. Unfortunately, the number of tokens is quite small, averaging out to only 6 or 7 per speaker (see Table 9.1a on p. 327). In addition, I was not convinced that the pronominal (non-discourse-marking) TH-forms and the discourse marking forms under study could be grouped together as they are here, where the figure given for each speaker represents the percentage of discourse markers out of the total number of TH-forms. Nonetheless, even the raw numbers show some trends consistent with the patterning of the /i/ phoneme in the previous chapter. Chapter 10 provides some very brief concluding remarks.
Overall, Homegirls is a delightfully readable, thoughtful, and unusually candid exemplar of ethnographic fieldwork at its best. It accomplishes the goal of presenting Latina gang culture in a more nuanced light than what we generally find in the media or in most academic texts. It also shows the importance of situating linguistic interpretation within the context of other signs and symbols that reflect the practices and ideologies of a particular community of practice. It is accessible to a wide audience, and will be a “must-read” for graduate students in linguistics and anthropology, especially those about to begin their fieldwork.
