What Is Norma Mendoza-Denton's Ethnography Homegirl

Norma Mendoza-Denton spent time in the mid-1990s with Latina girls who were gang members of the Nurteñas and the Sureñas, and wrote the ethnography Homegirls about her observations. The girls interviewed all attended the same school, Sor Juana High School, in Southern California, not far from Los Angeles. The Latina girls she observed were immigrants from Mexico, mostly not by choice. They separated themselves into their gangs by whether they felt more connected to their traditional Mexican heritage or to their American side. Norma conducted participant observations and interviewed both the girls and other gang members they introduced her to. The girls of the rivaling gangs both accepted Norma wholly as a part of them that they invited her

She comes from a similar background as the girls, from a little town in Mexico and Norma talks about this in chapter two extensively (Mendoza-Denton 2008). Norma goes to classes with the girls, and essentially becomes friends with them through her research. She sits with them at lunches, goes to parties, and hangs out with them outside of school. She integrates with them in order to learn about them, acting as a friend and sometimes mentor. The girls themselves feel this way too and indicate it in multiple ways. One way in which they accomplish this, one of the Sureñas writes a poem to Norma in their poetry book (Mendoza-Denton 2008: 191). Norma was having relationship troubles and she shared this with the girls, who then wrote an anonymous poem in Spanish in support of her (Mendoza-Denton 2008: 191). This gave her an honorary membership in the poetry book, that she would have never known where circulating if she had not shared that information and if one of the girls had written the poem to her (Mendoza-Denton 2008:

One of the major revelations she makes is that The Sureñas know English and how to use it properly, but refuse to use it because they cling to their traditional Mexican heritage (Mendoza-Denton 2008: 59). She also noted the difference in how they pronounce the phoneme [I] when coupled with an “engma” sound after, most notably with “thing” words (Mendoza-Denton 2008: 235). The [I] phoneme is pronounced as “ee” when followed by “ng” (Mendoza-Denton 2008: 235). This was significant in their diction and was also coupled with the “Th-Pro (consisting of pronominal elements which share the semantic and morphological element thing, …)” (Mendoza-Denton 2008: 236). This basically boils down to the “th” sounding as “t” which makes the pronunciation of go from “thing” to