Cintron's "Discourse of Measurement"

Angels' Town by Ralph Cintron

Publication Date: November 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 080704637X | ISBN-13: 978-0807046371

"As issues of power and social order loom large in Angelstown, Ralph Cintron shows how eruptions on the margins of the community are emblematic of a deeper disorder. In their language and images, the members of a Latino community in a midsized American city create self-respect under conditions of disrepect. Cintron's innovative ethnography offers a beautiful portrait of a struggling Mexican-American community and shows how people (including ethnographers) make sense of their lives through cultural forms."

discourse of measurement -- mapping and texting changed expansive land to something reigned, placed under control -- This reminds me of James Scott's Seeing Like a State with the idea of regimenting or making legible both land and people. But what is lost in this formal, structural, fictitious measuring of this ordering of that which is natural, and by being natural disordered? Prior to formal systems, indigenous people had a a concept of land that was cultural and community-based, not articulated through a discourse of exacting measurement (37). The "texting" that came to expansive nature -- the claim forms, contracts, bills of sale and even street names -- reduced overwhelming space (or perhaps the mystery of space which is not named or measured). Cintron talks about the discourse of measurement here in a way that strikes me similar to James Scott, but as Cintron's book is an ethnography, he also sees telling a story as a discourse of measurement. Such histories reduce time to visible space; the enormity to which the contents of this history point become fenced by the edges of paper. The history is contained in "an illusion of management. Question: how can we read with an eye on this illusion? To not walk away from the text thinking we "know" these people, that their story can be measured by the text, the pages? The author, the enthonographer, is acting upon texts, so the text itself is an example of an ordering of that which is messy or complex. Question: Ethics of authoring?


I am thinking about the movement in Guatemala with Maya revitalization: the Pan-Mayan Movement (http://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/guatemala/pan-mayan-movement-mayans-doorway-new-millennium). What are the "fences" of this movement? What is the rhetoric? What will be the consequence of Maya lawyers, doctors, and poets in Guatemalan politics? What will happen to the milpas, chicleros, and weaving traditions? It seems that many Mayas in the highlands want subsistence living; they don't want to participate in the free market or politics, and educating their children for careers that place Mayas in the market economy, which is synonymous with government, will put the indigenous way of life in danger. Thus, have not the Maya been resisting the discourse of measurement all along? How has Rigoberta Menchu participating in the discourse of measurement (both the mapping and texting)? Cintron writes that the state cannot exist without a recorded relationship (maps and texts); they cannot manage individuals of the state without evoking the discourse of measurement. Thus, a major function of writing and other recording devices is this management of individuals and nature. However, it is merely a "representation of reality" in documents, documents that distance because of the lack of face-to-face contact (relationships). It is this distance(53) that makes genocidal atrocities possible, and it is this distance that also provides space for resistance and resilience. As Cintron talks to and about Valerio's wall, iconography, and literacy, I was thinking a lot about the indigenous Ka'quikel kids in Chimeltenago, Guatemala. Valerio's teachers wanted him to write "right"-- the structuralist approach that pervades all English classrooms -- they labeled him LD, and it took a lot of time and wounds to get him to believe he was, in fact, smart, and that he could, in fact, write his desires (rather than the formulaic paragraph). I am wondering what will happen when the children from the milpas get a pencil in their hands and begin to write their desires? If a page is blank but we (the measurers of the state) give them the page and the pen, are we writing on them ideas of modern desires? How long will these children stay in school? Perhaps long enough to read a little, write a little, and learn a little math - but perhaps not long enough. They will work with and for their family as soon as they are useful. And then, will they return to the milpa or the loom with ideas of "algo mas" (Fisher) and modernity? Will they turn away from the Maya ways because of school? Do Maya families desire education for their children or is that society's desire? I am now thinking about the poor public school system in Guatemala that provides an 8-12 day of schooling up to 6th grade (18% attend secondary school; 1% attend university). Is this measuring a mechanism for just enough participation in the free market economy but not enough to participate in the structures that control this economy? They are consumers in capitalism not participators in democracy --what Cintron calls a "warped citizenship" (126).

Cintron talks about Beth Roy's idea of "implicit ideology," and I think this is was I am pondering above.Bodies of ideas or ideologies can become so internalized that they disappear as ideas but reappear as emotions and truths -- a common sense understanding of the world so ingrained as to be beyond question and, at the same time, outside consciousness. Let's think about ideas about food and family, for example. The Maya who reside in the Highlands, have a family milpa that may be an hour or two walk from where they live. This milpa provides the corn they need to feed their family for the year and a little more for trading (for other food, medicine, soap). The family clears the milpa, plants the milpa, harvests the milpa. The milpa is an idea that became a truth of the Maya. As measuring changes -- zoning, taxes, sales, transportation -- the implicit ideology shifts. The Maya had to see land as "owned" by the state and were forced to accept the mapping and be marginalized by the "texts" that accompanied such mapping. I could go into this further as one way of thinking about the escalation of mapping and marginalization (and ultimate murder) of the Maya.

Cinton's work ultimately asks how one creates respect under conditions of little or no respect, and while he is exploring how the cheros, Cecilia's continuum of modernity in the neighborhood (222), and how they create respect in the discourse of measurement, I think his study has generalizable features. He writes, "We might imagine a variety of societies, then, urging their citizenry toward the modern in a variety of ways -- and, therefore, simultaneously defining the backward in a variety of ways. Of course, those defined as backward may also, in turn, resist the modern in a variety of ways. And so it goes, the plethora of ways that modernity can take" (227). I saw, for example, widows who are using their traditional dyes and weaving methods as a way of supporting their families: they started a co-operative with other widows to pull together their textiles, rent space in a market, and save money towards the purchase of a building. They have business cards and a website. While most speak the native Quiche, some of the women are bilingual and have enough education to read, write and do the necessary math for their cooperative. They are maintaining their tradition and participating in the market. Chicleros have also reclaimed their craft and have begun a cooperative that no only sells the raw chicle to companies in America (like Glee Gum who advertises this heavily), but one cooperative actually manufacture a fully biodegradable gum marketing it as that which will save towns the clean up costs of the biodegradable, synthetic chewing gums.

Here we see Cintron's second point about the discourse of measurement. He writes, "The discourses of measurement tend to belittle other knowing systems -- implicitly, if not explicitly -- or at least to make a prior discourse of measurement obsolete. ...These displaced ways of knowing and talking represent a precision that may now be taken as one more sign of backwardness when compared to the discourses of modernity" (213). Indeed the discourse of measurement that regimented the expansive Maya land, and the state or plantation land that Maya families cannot afford to buy back (to expand their milpas to provide for their growing families) has pushed Maya ways of knowing to extinction for some families, specifically ones that have to travel to work in factories or move to live in factory towns (abandoning all traditional methods of life and living). This leads into Cintron's third point: "The security that a discourse of measurement offers may increase dependence and a certain anxious expectation concerning the power of its control" (214). Indeed, the government might like for all Mayas to abandon their milpas and come to the cities where they can be made legible (be measured). The land and life they abandon in the highlands will leave a great deal of fertile land for the major corporations,and the people will be thorough absorbed into the economic sphere (Cintron's fourth point about the discourse of measurement) -- the sphere subsistence farmers have avoided for a century.

However, the Maya have worked hard not to make their prior discourse of measurement obsolete. Some Maya (specifically Tecpan) allocate a portion of their milpas for export crops (a risky shift that requires knowledge of cultivating new crops, understanding fertilzation, the distribution business, and new taxes) which allows them a semblance of their traditional subsistance farming; or, as mentioned above, using their skills previously used for subsistence living to participate in niche markets (textiles, gum).

As I am writing here, I an keenly aware of Cintron's argument about ethnography. Writing about a people is one discourse of measurement among many that attempts to shape or made order out of that which is overwhelmingly expansive and complex.