The semiotics of the deictic field: Reckoning language and experience in East Los Angeles

This analysis examines the ways in which a single speaker, Ana, born in mid-century East Los Angeles, organizes and reflects upon her experiences of the city through language. Ana’s story is one that sheds light on the experiences of many Mexican Americans who came of age at a critical time in a transitioning L.A., and the slow move of people who had been up until mid-century relegated largely in and around racially and socioeconomically segregated parts of L.A. These formative experiences are demonstrated to have informed the ways that speakers parse the social and geographical landscape along several dimensions, and this analysis interrogates the symbolic value of a special category of everyday language, deixis, to reveal the intersection between language and social experience in the cityscape of L.A. In this way, it is analytically possible to not only approach the habituation and reproduction of specific deictic fields as indexical of the ways that speakers parse the city, but also to demonstrate the ways in which key moments in the history of the city have shaped the emergence and meaning of those fields.

East Side Story: Disaggregating Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles

This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted history of intergenerational Latinx gangs with local neighborhood residents viewing them as a fundamental social problem. Hollenbeck has over 30 active street gangs, each claiming a geographically defined territory, many of which have remained stable during the study period. Over twenty years (1990–2012) of homicide data collected from Hollenbeck’s Homicide Division are utilized to create an empirically rigorous typology of homicide incidents and to test whether or not gang homicides are sufficiently distinct in nature to be a unique category in the latent class analysis.

What Can We Learn from Cool Cats? Chillante Pedagogy, Gary Soto, and the Chato Series

In the face of ongoing stereotypes about barrio subjects, Gary Soto offers a decolonial and counter-narrative about cool cats from East Los Angeles that amplifies notions of intersectional identities and notions of gender roles. This chapter offers an analysis of Chato’s Kitchen (1995), Chato and the Party Animals (2000), and Chato goes Crusin’ (2005) through a decolonial and intersectional lens, bringing to the forefront stories, images, and representations of non-choloos as outliers of barrio communities. The representation of Chicano subjects as non-cholos while being cool cats manifests intersectional identities that teach children about the diversity of barrio life, especially for young brown boys.

Translating the Eastside: Embodied Translation in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

“Translating the Eastside: Embodied Translation in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came With Them” argues that translation—specifically embodied translation—is the central mode through which Chicanx bodies confront the painful condition of inhabiting the fragmented spaces and temporalities that simultaneously construct and exclude them. In Dogs, translation is above all a process of carrying across, transferring, expressing and contesting meaning from one place to another through the physicality of the body. Embodied translation does not solely carry across meaning across texts or languages, but is itself a source of new knowledge, including insofar as it refuses to transfer meaning through the body. However, embodied translation is only transformative as much as it disrupts the direct translation imposed by the state which contains and regulates Chicanx bodies. Rather than straightforwardly carrying meaning across, embodied translation foregrounds excess and lack, seemingly producing too much or not enough translation to produce and transfer meaning. Excessive modes of embodied translation, such as repetition or recycling, and those that indicate a lack, such as silence or muteness, are practices of dissent that continually reference space and temporality while calling other kinds of translation into question. As such, embodied translation stands as an excessive, persistent site of resistance that places systemic pressure on dominant institutions, marked through the intersection between bodies, space and temporality. In the process, embodied translation calls both the present and presence of Chicanx peoples into being in the face of their erasure in spaces like East Los Angeles.