The Children of Sanchez (2 page)

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 beyond 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.

For five months defenders and opponents of the book carried on what the
London Times
called “one of the stormiest public intellectual debates Mexico has known.”
⁵
In round-table debates, television programs, newspaper and magazine articles, critics and defenders argued the book’s merits and issues of government censorship.
⁶
One
opponent of censorship asked if studying poverty had now become “subversive science.” Others wondered why, if a foreigner describing poverty in Mexico so endangered the nation, there had been no outcry a few years earlier when the Fondo published
Five Families
. With sales of the book suspended pending a decision from the attorney general, copies were selling on the black market for three to four times the list price. Meanwhile the Sánchezes became “Mexico’s most celebrated family” and the book a bestseller.

In April 1965, Mexico’s attorney general handed down a decision saying the chances of the book offending public morals or threatening the public order were “so remote” that to press charges would do greater harm to “freedom and the law” than allowing the book to remain in circulation.
⁷
The decision also cleared the Fondo’s highly respected director of seventeen years, the Argentine-born Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, but even so, he was forced to resign and the Fondo relinquished its publication rights. (Recently the Fondo reacquired Spanish-language rights to
The Children of Sánchez
and is again publishing Lewis’s work.)

There can be little doubt that those Mexicans who tried to suppress the book were most upset by the ability and willingness of poor people to describe their lives to a foreigner and to direct anger at the government and politicians. Some simply could not accept that it was
not
Lewis speaking. In a 1963 interview for the Mexican journal
Siempre
, Lewis attributed the literary qualities of the book solely to the eloquence of the Sánchezes. “If I could have written a book like
The Children of Sánchez
I would never have become an anthropologist.… [But] I am an anthropologist, first, second, and third. I am only an anthropologist.”
⁸
True, yet were it not for his ability to see the potential in the Sánchezes’ words, the tremendous effort of gathering and editing the data, and the compassionate yet uncompromising sensibility that gave this book its final form, we would never have known
the
Sánchezes.

Of all the subtitles the Lewises considered for the book, their final choice, “Autobiography of a Mexican Family,” was probably the most
accurate. Because in the end this is a book by and about a remarkable family—its history, the personalities of its members, and the dynamic of their relationships. As you read it I hope you will see them in all their humanity and complexity while never losing sight of what Hardwick called the book’s “chief character,” the poverty that shadowed the family’s every step.

—SMR

In the course of writing this book I have asked a number of my friends and colleagues to read and comment on the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Professor Conrad Arensberg and Professor Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University, to Professor William F. Whyte of Cornell University, and to Professor Sherman Paul of the University of Illinois, for reading the final version. I should also like to thank Margaret Shedd, Kay Barrington, Dr. Zelig Skolnik, Professor Zella Luria, Professor Charles Shattuck and Professor George Gerbner for reading an early version of the Consuelo story; Professor Richard Eells for reading part of the Manuel story, and Professor Ralph W. England for reading the Roberto story. For their critical reading of the Introduction I am grateful to Professor Irving Goldman, Professor Joseph B. Casagrande, Professor Louis Schneider, Professor Joseph D. Phillips, and my son Gene L. Lewis.

I am grateful to Dr. Mark Letson and Mrs. Caroline Lujan, of Mexico City, for analyzing the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests and for their many helpful insights on the character structure of the members of the Sánchez family. The test protocols, the analyses and my own evaluation of them will be published at a later date. To Asa Zatz I am indebted for his fine translation of much of the field data upon which this book is based. To Gerald Markley, I am grateful for his assistance in translating some of the materials which appear in the Marta story. To my wife, Ruth M. Lewis, companion and collaborator in my Mexican studies, I give thanks for her invaluable assistance in organizing and editing my field materials.

I am indebted to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship in
1956; to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and to the Social Science Research Council for grants-in-aid in 1958, and to the National Science Foundation for a research grant in 1959. Finally, at the University of Illinois, I should like to thank the University Research Board for financial assistance, the Center For Advanced Studies for a fourteen-month research assignment in Mexico, and the Department of Anthropology for a leave of absence to carry on this research.