by Oscar Lewis
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
* * *
1 Letter from Margaret Mead to Jason Epstein, February 28, 1962; letter from Luís Buñel to Oscar Lewis, February 6, 1966; Fidel Castro to Oscar Lewis in personal conversation, March 1968; Elizabeth Hardwick, “Some Chapters of Personal History,” New York Times Book Review, August 27, 1961,1; Time, December 26, 1969, 56.
2 Hardwick, “Some Chapters of Personal History.”
3 More of Consuelo’s interviews were hand-recorded than taped, and some she took down in shorthand and typed herself. In addition part of the material in her story and Manuel’s came from short essays they wrote on assigned topics.
4 The tapes, transcriptions, community survey data, and other primary material used in preparing the book were placed in the University of Illinois Library Archives more than forty years ago, where they have been used in the research of Latin Americanists, linguists, oral historians, and other scholars.
5 “Mexican Slum Story Defeats the Censorship,” London Times, May 20, 1965.
6 A summary of the legal case and of the national discussion that followed, including statements made by Carlos Fuentes and others, can be found in Mundo Nuevo, September 1966.
7 Decision of the attorney general of Mexico, Preliminary Investigation no. 331/965. The text was published as an appendix to the 3rd-5th editions of Los Hijos de Sánchez and in Mundo Nuevo, September 1966.
8 Interview with Elena Poniatowska, Siempre (Supplement), June 19, 1963. Translated from the Spanish.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
INTRODUCTION
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, twenty-seven; 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.
In my research in Mexico since 1943, I have attempted to develop a number of approaches to family studies. In Five Families, I tried to give the reader some glimpses of daily life in five ordinary Mexican families, on five perfectly ordinary days. In this volume I offer the reader a deeper look into the lives of one of these families by the use of a new technique whereby each member of the family tells his own life story in his own words. This approach gives us a cumulative, multifaceted, panoramic view of each individual, of the family as a whole, and of many aspects of lower-class Mexican life. The independent versions of the same incidents given by the various family members provide a built-in check upon the reliability and validity of much of the data and thereby partially offset the subjectivity inherent in a single autobiography. At the same time it reveals the discrepancies in the way events are recalled by each member of the family.
This method of multiple autobiographies also tends to reduce the element of investigator bias because the accounts are not put through the sieve of a middle-class North American mind but are given in the words of the subjects themselves. In this way, I believe I have avoided the two most common hazards in the study of the poor, namely, over-sentimentalization and brutalization. Finally, I hope that this method preserves for the reader the emotional satisfaction and understanding which the anthropologis
t experiences in working directly with his subjects but which is only rarely conveyed in the formal jargon of anthropological monographs.
There are very few studies in depth of the psychology of the poor in the less well-developed countries or even in our own country. The people who live at the level of poverty described in this volume, although by no means the lowest level, have not been studied intensively by psychologists or psychiatrists. Nor have the novelists given us an adequate portrayal of the inner lives of the poor in the contemporary world. The slums have produced very few great writers, and by the time they have become great writers, they generally look back over their early lives through middle-class lenses and write within traditional literary forms, so that the retrospective work lacks the immediacy of the original experience.
The tape recorder, used in taking down the life stories in this book, has made possible the beginning of a new kind of literature of social realism. With the aid of the tape recorder, unskilled, uneducated, and even illiterate persons can talk about themselves and relate their observations and experiences in an uninhibited, spontaneous, and natural manner. The stories of Manuel, Roberto, Consuelo, and Marta have a simplicity, sincerity, and directness which is characteristic of the spoken word, of oral literature in contrast to written literature. Despite their lack of formal training, these young people express themselves remarkably well, particularly Consuelo, who sometimes reaches poetic heights. Still in the midst of their unresolved problems and confusions, they have been able to convey enough of themselves to give us insight into their lives and to make us aware of their potentialities and wasted talents.
Certainly the lives of the poor are not dull. The stories in this volume reveal 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. These stories also reveal an intensity of feeling and human warmth, a strong sense of individuality, a capacity for gaiety, a hope for a better life, a desire for understanding and love, a readiness to share the little they possess, and the courage to carry on in the face of many unresolved problems.
The setting for these life stories is the Casa Grande vecindad, a large one-story slum tenement, in the heart of Mexico City. The Casa Grande is one of a hundred vecindades which I came to know in 1951 when I studied the urbanization of peasants who had moved to Mexico City from village Azteca. I had begun my study of Azteca many years before, in 1943. Later, with the help of the villagers, I was able to locate Aztecans in various parts of the city and found two families in the Casa Grande. After completing my study of village migrants, I broadened my research design and began to study entire vecindades, including all the residents irrespective of their place of origin.
In October, 1956, in the course of my study of the Casa Grande, I met Jesús Sánchez and his children. Jesús had been a tenant there for over twenty years and although his children had moved in and out during this time, the one-room home in the Casa Grande was a major point of stability in their lives. Lenore, their mother and the first wife of Jesús, had died in 1936, only a few years before they moved into the Casa Grande. Lenore’s elder sister, Guadalupe, age sixty, lived in the smaller Panaderos vecindad on the Street of the Bakers, only a few blocks away. Aunt Guadalupe was a mother substitute for each of the children; they visited her often and used her home as a refuge in time of need. The action of the life stories, therefore, moves back and forth between the Casa Grande and the Panaderos vecindad.
Both vecindades are near the center of the city, only a ten-minute walk from the main plaza or Zócalo with its great Cathedral and Presidential Palace. Only a half-hour away is the national shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, to which pilgrims flock from all parts of the nation. Both Casa Grande and Panaderos are in the Tepito section, a poor area with a few small factories and warehouses, public baths, run-down third-class movie theatres, overcrowded schools, saloons, pulquerías (taverns where pulque, a native alcoholic drink, is sold), and many small shops. Tepito, the largest second-hand market in Mexico City, also known as the Thieves’ Market, is only a few blocks away; other large markets, La Merced and Lagunilla, which have recently been rebuilt and modernized, are within easy walking distance. This area ranks high in the incidence of homicide, drunkenness, and delinquency. It is a densely populated neighborhood; during the day and well after dark, the streets and doorways are filled with people coming and going or crowding around shop entrances. Women sell tacos or soup at little sidewalk kitchens. The streets and sidewalks are broad and paved but are without trees, grass, or gardens. Most of the people live in rows of one-room dwellings in inside courtyards shut off from view of the street by shops or vecindad walls.
The Casa Grande stands between the Street of the Barbers and the Street of the Tinsmiths. Spread out over an entire square block and housing seven hundred people, the Casa Grande is a little world of its own, enclosed by high cement walls on the north and south and by rows of shops on the other two sides. These shops—food stores, a dry cleaner, a glazier, a carpenter, a beauty parlor, together with the neighborhood market and public baths—supply the basic needs of the vecindad, so that many of the tenants seldom leave the immediate neighborhood and are almost strangers to the rest of Mexico City. This section of the city was once the home of the underworld, and even today people fear to walk in it late at night. But most of the criminal element has moved away and the majority of the residents are poor tradesmen, artisans, and workers.
Two narrow, inconspicuous entrances, each with a high gate, open during the day but locked every night at ten o’clock, lead into the vecindad on the east and west sides. Anyone coming or going after hours must ring for the janitor and pay to have the gate opened. The vecindad is also protected by its two patron saints, the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Virgin of Zapopan, whose statues stand in glass cases, one at each entrance. Offerings of flowers and candles surround the images and on their skirts are fastened small shiny medals, each a testimonial of a miracle performed for someone in the vecindad. Few residents pass the Virgins without some gesture of recognition, be it only a glance or a hurried sign of the cross.
Within the vecindad stretch four long, concrete-paved patios or courtyards, about fifteen feet wide. Opening on to the courtyards at regular intervals of about twelve feet, are 157 one-room windowless apartments, each with a barn-red door. In the daytime, besides most of the doors, stand rough wooden ladders leading to low flat roofs over the kitchen portion of each apartment. These roofs serve many uses and are crowded with lines of laundry, chicken coops, dovecotes, pots of flowers or medicinal herbs, tanks of gas for cooking, and occasional TV antenna.
In the daytime the courtyards are crowded with people and animals, dogs, turkeys, chickens, and a few pigs. Children play here because it is safer than the streets. Women queue up for water or shout to each other as they hang up clothes, and street vendors come in to sell their wares. Every morning a garbage man wheels a large can through the courtyards to collect each family’s refuse. In the afternoon, gangs of older boys often take over a courtyard to play a rough game of soccer. On Sunday nights there is usually an outdoor dance. Within the west entrance is the public bathhouse and a small garden whose few trees and patch of grass serve as a meeting place for young people and a relatively quiet spot where the older men sit and talk or read the newspapers. Here also is a one-room shack marked “administration office,” where a bulletin lists the names of families who are delinquent in paying their rent.
The tenants of the Casa Grande come from twenty-four of the thirty-two states of the Mexican nation. Some come from as far south as Oaxaca and Yucatán and some from the northern states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa. Most of the families have lived in the vecindad for from fifteen to twenty years, some as long as thirty years. Over a third of the households have blood relatives within the vecindad and about a fourth are related by marriage and compadrazgo (a ritual relationship between parents, go
dparents, and godchildren). These ties, plus the low fixed rental and the housing shortage in the city, make for stability. Some families with higher incomes, their small apartments jammed with good furniture and electrical equipment, are waiting for a chance to move to better quarters, but the majority are content with, indeed proud of, living in the Casa Grande.
The sense of community is quite strong in the vecindad, particularly among the young people who belong to the same gangs, form lifelong friendships, attend the same schools, meet at the same dances held in the courtyards, and frequently marry within the vecindad. Adults also have friends whom they visit, go out with, and borrow from. Groups of neighbors organize raffles and tandas, participate in religious pilgrimages together, and together celebrate the festivals of the vecindad patron saints and the Christmas posadas as well as other holidays.
But these group efforts are occasional; for the most part adults “mind their own business” and try to maintain family privacy. Most doors are kept shut and it is customary to knock and wait for permission to enter when visiting. Some people visit only relatives or compadres and actually have entered very few apartments. It is not common to invite friends or neighbors in to eat except on formal occasions such as birthdays or religious celebrations. Although some neighborly help occurs, especially during emergencies, it is kept at a minimum. Quarrels between families over the mischief of children, street fights between gangs, and personal feuds between boys are not uncommon in the Casa Grande.