Oscar Lewis is best known to Latin Americanists for his Life in a Mexican Village and Five Families. The latter book was a description of the daily life of five ordinary Mexican families on five ordinary days, so detailed and intimate that it gave the reader a much greater feeling of immediacy and involvement than an ordinary ethnography can achieve. Now in Children of Sánchez Lewis has used a technique which further deepens the focus by depicting the history of a single family in multifaceted detail.
Lewis says (p. xi): “This book is about a poor family in Mexico City, Jesús Sánchez, the father, age fifty, and his four children: Manuel, age thirty-two; Roberto, twenty-nine; Consuelo, twentyseven; and Marta, twenty-five. My purpose is to give the reader an inside view of family life and of what it means to grow up in a one-room home in a slum tenement in the heart of a great Latin American city which is undergoing a process of rapid social and economic change.”
“What it means” to grow up (and continue living) in these circumstances is that one inhabits a “world of violence and death, of suffering and deprivation, of infidelity and broken homes, of delinquency, corruption, and police brutality, and of the cruelty of the poor to the poor.” It may be hard to see how these people could have remained human, but the book also shows that they have a strong appreciation of the finer human values, however difficult it may be to practice them under the conditions described.
The broader scientific objective of this investigation is to contribute toward an anthropological literature on the “culture of poverty.” Lewis feels that the Sánchez family history not only tells us something about Mexico City, but it is to an important extent representative of the plight of the mass of lower-class people in the larger part of the world. He says (xxv), “It seems to me that the culture of poverty has some universal characteristics which transcend regional, rural-urban, and even national differences.” Lewis’ elaboration of the argument is convincing, and his call for more descriptive literature on this international subculture should be taken seriously, by anthropologists particularly. I was myself surprised to discover how correct was Lewis’ point that even rural-urban differences are transcended, and especially that this should be so in Mexico where the life of the metropolis appears so wildly distinct from that of the rural villages. Yet it seems that the habits, customs, values, family organization, as well as the psychological traits in general of the Sánchez family in the heart of Mexico City are remarkably similar to those of families I have known in the tiny mestizo hamlet of Baborigame, buried in the remote high sierra of southwestern Chihuahua. On the other hand, I am not convinced that these characteristics transcend national cultural differences as much as Lewis thinks. The cultural-psychological anomie described in Children of Sánchez seems to me much more generally and deeply characteristic of Mexico than it is of, say, poor families in Spain or Paraguay. However, such comparisons need to be fully explored by work of the kind that Lewis has initiated.
It may be apparent that this book can be judged as both science and literature. As a contribution to social science, there is no doubt that the information presented and the understandings that result will prove to be important, and very little doubt as to the accuracy of the data. The material was gathered in tape-recorded interviews in which each of the five subjects told his life history in his own words. It is only in the translation and editing, therefore, that Lewis could have intruded himself and thus possibly have skewed the material. But he was wary of this and furthermore, because the different histories are concerned with what were mostly the same events, there is a built-in check for reliability. Of course it could be argued that because the book consists of the peoples’ own versions of what they thought, felt, and did that this is not necessarily the same as objective truth. Nevertheless, it is data of a certain kind, and it is indispensable for a good understanding of these people in relation to culture and circumstances.
Judged as art, the book is unexpectedly powerful. In part this must lie in its form of naturalism, particularly because the stories are told uninhibitedly and artlessly. When Hemingway used a “natural” rather than a highly literary style in describing such poignant things as love, danger, and death, the art was largely in the incongruous-seeming understatement. That style conveyed a powerful effect and so does the idiom of the relatively uneducated spokesmen in Lewis’ book—or if anything more so, because of our feeling that the horrifying events were literally true and many of them even commonplace to the narrators. In addition, some kind of force seems to reside in having the same events told from different points of view (as Lawrence Durrell has demonstrated). This method is not only more fully informative as depiction but also seems to heighten the reader’s sensibility, somewhat as thematic repetition, rhythm, and counterpoint can do in certain arts. This may not have been Lewis’ intention, thus it is not literally “art,” but it is effective.
The already-apparent success of The Children of Sanchez among the general public is probably not due only to the above qualities. It may be, rather, because an effective job has been done in depicting a subject, poverty in the non-industrialized world, that has become unfamiliar to our well-meaning citizens at the same time that our political interest in it has increased. So insulated by wealth have many Americans become that a believable depiction of poverty is shocking to them. Also, those few who are not shocked by it probably find it (as I do) a wonderful book with which to jar the complacency of some other people. It is perhaps not exactly complimentary to the author to say that the book will sell because it is timely or that the bourgoisie will buy it to épater each other, but it can be considered fortunate that this is so. The more widely it is distributed the better, whatever the reasons.
