Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice Among Latina Youth Gangs »

Norma Mendoza-Denton is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, and the founder and director of the Linguistic Anthropology Research and Teaching Laboratory.

In this ground-breaking new book on the Norteña/Sureña (North/South) youth gang dynamic, cultural anthropologist and linguist Norma Mendoza-Denton looks at the daily lives of young Latinas and their innovative use of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges to signal their gang affiliations and ideologies. She analyzes their use of language as well as social and cultural practices such as the circulation of poetry, photographs, and drawings, and also their practices around makeup and bodily presentation. Through this detailed exploration, Homegirls examines the localized North-South rivalry between the bilingual, English-speaking and Americanized Norte girls and the Mexican or Latin-American-oriented, Spanish-speaking Sur girls.

Mendoza-Denton uncovers a new dimension to studies of youth styles, where gang members are innovative not only in terms of dress, make-up, and music, but also by participating in crucial processes of language variation and change. This engrossing ethnographic and sociolinguistic book reveals the connection of language behavior and other symbolic practices among youth, and their connections to larger social processes of nationalism, racial/ethnic consciousness, and gender identity.

List of Figures     viii
List of Tables     x
Acknowledgments     xi
Acknowledgment of Sources     xiv
Introduction     1
La Migra     10
Beginning Fieldwork     42
Norte and Sur: Government, School, and Research Perspectives     76
Hemispheric Localism: Language, Racialized Nationalism, and the Politicization of Youth     101
"Muy Macha": Gendered Performances and the Avoidance of Social Injury     148
Smile Now Cry Later: Memorializing Practices Linking Language, Materiality, and Embodiment     176
Icons and Exemplars: Ethnographic Approaches in Variationist Sociolinguistics     207
Variation in a Community of Practice     230
"That's the Whole Thing [characters not reproducible]!": Discourse Markers and Teenage Speech     265
Conclusion     292
References     297
Appendix     324
Index     328