The Children of Sanchez Read online

  Praise for Oscar Lewis’s

  THE CHILDREN OF SÁNCHEZ

  “Lewis has made something brilliant and of singular significance, a work of such unique concentration and sympathy that one hardly knows how to classify it. It is all, every bit of it except for the introduction, spoken by the members of the Sánchez family. They tell their feelings, their lives, explain their nature, their actual existence with all the force and drama and seriousness of a large novel.… The result is a moving, strange tragedy, not an interview, a questionnaire or a sociological study.”

  —Elizabeth Hardwick,

  The New York Times Book Review

  “Oscar Lewis’s books on Mexico and Puerto Rico awakened in many of us a feeling that we must do more to alleviate the world’s poverty.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Panoramic.… The Children of Sánchez is an amazing achievement.… So exciting, so moving, so full of human warmth and sadness.”

  —The Spectator

  “The exciting thing about The Children of Sánchez, the fact which makes it a new point of departure in its field, is its humanity, its quality of projecting the individual, agonizing voice of the poor as they describe their own plight. This is a real accomplishment, original and full of substance.”

  —Michael Harrington, Commonweal

  “[Lewis’s] masterpiece.… Uniquely, for me, his book depicts a world—the society of poverty—which creates its own survival structures and rationale. Its voices are at once warm and cynical, hoping and resigned. To read it is to be forcibly woken from the middle-class dream.”

  —Colin Thubron, The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “Lewis has created a book of far greater and more lasting significance than any sociological treatise is likely to be … a work that eludes classification, for what it tragically and beautifully portrays is not fiction.… This book is a classic in the exact sense—it is a standard by which other books of the same kind may be judged, and it is a touchstone for our evaluation of literature and of life itself.”

  —The Scotsman

  “Rightly revered.… Most participant-observer sociologists (like Robert Coles) owe much to its perceptive author.”

  —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “Indeed, both sociology and psychology stand to benefit from a study in which social surroundings and emotional problems are so clearly intertwined.”

  —Scientific American

  “Here at last is a social scientist who neither explains poverty nor sits in judgment of it.… Whether judged as literature or as sociology The Children of Sánchez is a masterpiece.”

  —New Statesman

  “A work of enormous influence and very great beauty.… The Children of Sánchez does not need any frame of reference; it is raw material made miraculously available to workers in a host of fields ranging from pure sociology through anthropology to psychology.”

  —The Sunday Observer

  “The crime of poverty is exposed in these stories with a precision and immediacy which never destroys the humanity of the individual.… We gain in the case of this book, a narrative which is continuously readable and continuously frightening.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  Oscar Lewis

  THE CHILDREN OF SÁNCHEZ

  Oscar Lewis was born in New York City in 1914 and grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1940, and taught at Brooklyn College and Washington University before helping to found the anthropology department at the University of Illinois, where he was a professor from 1948 until his death. From his first visit to Mexico in 1943, Mexican peasants and city dwellers were among his major interests. In addition to The Children of Sánchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Sánchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, which won the National Book Award, and Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba, with his wife, Ruth Maslow Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon. Lewis also published widely in both academic journals and popular periodicals such as Harper’s. Some of his best-known articles were collected in Anthropological Essays (1970). The recipient of many distinguished grants and fellowships, including two Guggenheims, Lewis was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 1970.

  Susan M. Rigdon is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, where she worked with Ruth Maslow Lewis for more than thirty years. She is the author of The Culture Facade: Art, Science, and Politics in the Work of Oscar Lewis.

  ALSO BY OSCAR LEWIS

  Living the Revolution:

  An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba (1977)

  with Ruth M. Lewis and Susan M. Rigdon

  Anthropological Essays (1970)

  A Death in the Sánchez Family (1969)

  A Study of Slum Culture: Backgrounds for La Vida (1968)

  La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—

  San Juan and New York (1966)

  Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family (1964)

  Tepoztlán: Village in Mexico (1960)

  Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty

  (1959)

  Village Life in Northern India: Studies in a Delhi Village (1958)

  Group Dynamics in a North-Indian Village:

  A Study of Factions (1954)

  Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Restudied (1951)

  SECOND VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 2011

  Copyright © 1961 by Oscar Lewis, copyright renewed 1989 by Ruth Lewis Foreword and afterword copyright © 2011 by Susan M. Rigdon

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1961, and subsequently published in paperback in the United States by Vintage Books, New York, in 1963.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mary Catherine Bateson for permission to reproduce Margaret Mead’s letters to Jason Epstein and Oscar Lewis.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:

  Lewis, Oscar, 1914–1970.

  The children of Sánchez : autobiography of a Mexican family / by Oscar Lewis.

  —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Families—Mexico—Case studies. 2. Poor—Mexico—Mexico City—Biography. 3. Mexico—social conditions.

  HQ562.L38

  309.172

  61006270

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74454-8

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Cardon Webb

  v3.1

  I dedicate this book

  with profound affection and gratitude

  to the Sánchez family,

  whose identity must remain anonymous

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  MARGARET MEAD ON The Children of Sánchez

  FOREWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  GENEALOGY

  Prologue

  Jesús Sánchez

  Part I

  Manuel

  Roberto

  Consuelo

  Marta

  Part II

  Manuel

  Roberto<
br />
  Consuelo

  Marta

  Part III

  Manuel

  Roberto

  Consuelo

  Marta

  Epilogue

  Jesús Sánchez

  AFTERWORD

  Margaret Mead on

  THE CHILDREN OF SÁNCHEZ

  When Random House asked famed anthropologist Margaret Mead to blurb a new book by Oscar Lewis, she graciously responded with the following letters to then-Editorial Director Jason Epstein and the author himself.

  February 28, 1962

  Mr. Jason Epstein

  Random House, Inc.

  457 Madison Avenue

  New York 22, N.Y.

  Dear Mr. Epstein:

  I am very glad to send you comment on Dr. Lewis’ Children of Sánchez. The only reason that I did not comment before was that I was in Europe when the book arrived in my office, and by the time I got back, the press was filled with such laudatory reviews that I thought any comments I might make would be redundant. I have recently had occasion to use the book in a seminar of very senior people of several disciplines which has made all the issues involved fresh in my mind.

  I think Children of Sánchez is one of the outstanding contributions of anthropology—of all time. Drawing on his many years of detailed responsible participating field work in Mexico, and upon his sympathy for the Mexican people, Oscar Lewis has produced a work which uniquely combines the requirements of science and of humanism. By preserving the actual words of each informant, he preserves the authenticity of the material, and presents it in a form that gives the roundedness which is essential to all good anthropological field work. That his informants were specially gifted in the expressiveness of a people whose speech has not been very influenced by formal schooling should not be taken as an accident, for they were chosen from some hundred families that he knew. The length of the book is crucial; a shorter book might have failed to balance pity with terror, violence with little unremembered acts of kindness. His special interest in poverty and the accompaniments of poverty sharpens the relevance of this book to problems of modern urban life. Beside its vividness, its intensity, its fully felt experience, the attempts at “social realism” of the Depression years built as they were upon sympathy and dogma but lacking scientific and experiential substance, pale into insignificance. Oscar Lewis has succeeded, by his choice of his raconteurs, in achieving the type of pity for man’s estate in a harsh world which chimes beautifully with Mexican aspirations for themselves, and the aspirations of the privileged for the underprivileged wherever they may be.

  Sincerely yours,

  Margaret Mead

  February 28, 1962

  Professor Oscar Lewis

  University of Illinois

  Urbana, Illinois

  Dear Oscar:

  I mean this, all of it. It occurs to me also how absolutely delighted Ruth Benedict would have been.

  Yours,

  Margaret Mead

  FOREWORD

  From the day it first appeared in print in 1961, The Children of Sánchez was received as a work that speaks passionately and directly to a wide audience about the great injustice of poverty. Margaret Mead called it “one of the outstanding contributions of anthropology—of all time”; Luís Buñuel said it would be the “pinnacle” of his career to make a film that was true to the book; and Fidel Castro called it “revolutionary” and “worth more than 50,000 political pamphlets.” In her New York Times review, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that Oscar Lewis had “made something brilliant and of singular significance, a work of such unique concentration and sympathy that one hardly knows how to classify it.” Time magazine put it on its Best Books of the Decade list.1 Translated into many languages, adapted for stage and screen, it has never been out of print.

  The Children of Sánchez had its beginnings in a traditional anthropological field project in 1956—a follow-up study of village migrants to Mexico City. But within months of meeting the Sánchez family while conducting a survey of their vecindad, Oscar Lewis knew he had met people with the courage and the observational and verbal skills to convey their life experiences in ways few others possessed. The Sánchez family made their initial appearance as one of the families presented in Five Families (1959), the first of three books to come out of the study of the Casa Grande and Panaderos vecindades. At the time Lewis and his wife and principal collaborator, Ruth Maslow Lewis, had been studying families and households for more than a decade and were creating a format “halfway between a novel and an anthropological report” to present their mass of field data. Five Families combined dialogue from taped interviews with household observations to portray a day in the life of each family. The intention was to follow Five Families with a full-length study of each family told in their own words.

  The Children of Sánchez was the first of these, and it was also the Lewises’ first experiment using overlapping voices to tell a family’s story directly, with no commentary. Lewis called this “ethnographic realism” and even considered presenting the first-person narratives with no more than a single paragraph of introduction. But he was aware that when social science reads like literature, readers may be satisfied with the story and lose sight of the larger point. So he added an introduction with background material and elaborated on his idea of a culture of poverty, a concept first presented in Five Families.

  When The Children of Sánchez was published, most readers focused on the family members and the conditions of their lives—as Lewis had hoped—and not on sociological concepts. The debate over the culture of poverty began after the publication of Michael Harrington’s 1962 bestseller The Other America, in which Harrington applied Lewis’s culture of poverty thesis, without attribution, to all poverty in the United States, something Lewis never would have done. But Harrington—a man of the Left like Lewis—saw the usefulness to his own cause of Democratic Socialism of Lewis’s overarching point that class-stratified capitalist systems create and perpetuate marginalized communities of the poor. It was through Harrington’s book and his role as an adviser to Kennedy and Johnson aides in the War on Poverty that the concept entered the policy debate. But the phrase also had a simple sound-bite utility that quickly separated it from Lewis’s all too brief explanation, which distinguished the culture of poverty from the economic condition of being poor. As an anthropologist studying culture, Lewis used the vocabulary of an anthropologist, not an economist, which made it easier to reduce an argument about the systemic causes and consequences of poverty to a secondary cultural explanation for the perpetuation of poverty in marginalized communities. Soon the elasticity of the phrase made it as useful for the Right as for the Left. The debate over the concept continues to this day.

  Although the culture of poverty controversy came well after The Children of Sánchez was published, the debate over how much of the book was Lewis and how much Sánchez began with the first reviews. This stemmed from a common misconception, shared by most reviewers, that the book was based solely on tape-recorded interviews that were then edited by Lewis according to his sense of how the narrative should flow. Hardwick expressed the most extreme version of this view when she described Lewis’s role as that of “the film director who, out of images and scenes, makes a coherent drama, giving form and meaning to the flow of reality.”2 This was one reason why the book was taken by some readers to be fiction. It was also the source of criticism both from those who thought Lewis edited his informants’ words to fit a personal agenda and from those who thought he accepted their words uncritically.

  By the time The Children of Sánchez was published, Lewis already had a well-deserved reputation as a prodigious field worker who specialized in community studies. In the last decade of his life, when he began publishing life histories, he always sought to present the individual within the context of the family, the family in the context of their community, the community in the context of the nation. Thus, the editing and shaping of the book were informed by a wealth of data b
eyond taped interviews.3 Providing context for the Sánchezes’ personal accounts were personality and psychological assessments, interviews with neighbors, spouses and children, community survey data, and of course the Lewises’ own deep knowledge of the family through years of personal contact and correspondence.4

  Lewis was a renowned and sympathetic interviewer, and for the Sánchez study he did almost all of the interviews himself, which was not the case on his large projects in Tepoztlán, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. But rarely did he edit interview transcriptions or day studies. This became Ruth Lewis’s primary task (as Lewis says in his acknowledgements); the couple made decisions jointly about the final version of each story but this basic division of labor held until Oscar’s death.

  The Children of Sánchez did leave some readers with the impression that anyone could turn on a tape recorder and produce a work of similar power and readability. But the tape recorder was the least of the tools necessary to produce this book. In addition to the years of research that went into producing the setting and context, and the enormously skillful editing by Ruth Lewis, one has to have interviewees as articulate as the Sánchezes with all their force of personality and panache.

  The family’s vivid first-person testimony also produced some critics who thought it too frank and detailed in its description of poverty and family life. This was nowhere more true than in Mexico where conservative critics, inspired by nationalist sentiment (or by xenophobia in the view of Carlos Fuentes and other defenders of the book), were enraged by a foreigner “exposing” Mexico’s poverty, as if it were some carefully guarded national secret. In 1964, when the government-funded Fondo de Cultura Económica published the first Spanish-language edition, the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics petitioned Mexico’s attorney general to file criminal charges against Lewis for obscenity and defamation of the Mexican people and government. Lewis was called an FBI agent, and Jesús Sánchez’s characterizations of party-dominated unions as useless and of government officials as being on the payroll of drug traffickers, were said to have been words “put in his mouth” by a foreigner.