In Angelstown, a mid-sized, Midwestern city, Cintron pursues his ethnographic work through the language of everyday life in the Mexican-American community. He explores how Don Angel, an older Mexican immigrant, expresses his traditionalism in his storytelling, elaborate gestural style, and folk beliefs about healing. A youth, Valerio, reveals the "inbetweenness" of his life through his difficulty writing English in school and through the images he puts on his bedroom wall.

For other teenagers, the language of vengeance and violence, trust and respect provides a rationale for joining gangs.

As issues of power and social order loom large in Angelstown - from family dynamics to the complexity of city management - Cintron shows how eruptions on the margins of the community are emblematic of a deeper disorder. And as the unwieldy disorder of his fieldsite is transformed into a book, Cintron explores his text as if it were a fieldsite itself, engaging his own impulse to order and make sense of things.