by Oscar Lewis
His four eldest were left with no inheritance but said by then they expected none. Harder for them was having no say over their father’s funeral and burial. Delila had Jesús buried in her mother’s plot rather than with the relatives of his eldest children, as they would have preferred. Jesús himself, however, never abandoned any of his older children for the younger ones; he kept track of all of them and worried about their futures. Despite all the anger and recriminations the children directed at their father in the pages of this book, their sense of loss when this seemingly indestructible man “fell down and did not get up again” was profound. He had been, as Marta said, both mother and father to her.
Sixteen years earlier the Sánchez family had received, with similar disbelief, the news of Oscar Lewis’s death from a heart attack. He was not yet fifty-six. From the time he met them until his death Lewis had always been in touch with the family and working on projects with one or more of them. Their letters of condolence described the depth of those ties: Marta said she had lost a “great and beloved friend who had been more than a father” and Roberto, who called Lewis “mi compadrito del alma,” vowed he would find a way to visit Oscar’s New York gravesite. Even Jesús, who always kept a certain distance, wrote Ruth that he would send a few lines now and then so that she would never forget him. At that point in the relationship there was no chance Ruth Lewis or her children, who had done some of their growing up in Mexico and had become friends with Jesús’s children and grandchildren, would ever forget them.
Ruth Lewis continued to visit and correspond with the family. In December 1986, after preparing a lengthy questionnaire, she went to Mexico with the intent of updating information on the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Jesús appeared to be in robust health, his hair still jet black, and in better humor than she had seen him for years. But as she talked with the family, celebrated the holidays, and reminisced about all their years together, Ruth realized a line had been crossed: “our relationship had become so emotional and so complicated and we knew so much about them and they knew so much about themselves, and about us, that I just didn’t have the heart anymore to ask a lot of impertinent questions or treat them as subjects of study. I was tired of all that social science objectivity.”2 So she put down the pencil for good. Little more than a week later she was at Jesús’s funeral, standing back from the family group clustered near the casket—not family, but not just an observer either. Manuel came to stand with her.
Ruth never went back to Mexico but the letters and phone calls continued until her death in 2008. She had outlived all but Marta and Consuelo. Manuel and his wife of more than forty years lived in the new housing built near the site of the Casa Grande until his death in 2002 at age seventy-four. Roberto and his wife were still living in the house where they had spent all their married life when he died in 2001 at age seventy-one. Their only child—Lewis’s godson—died while still in his twenties. Consuelo, now seventy-eight, broke contact with Ruth Lewis in the 1980s and also keeps a distance from her own family. Marta, now in her late seventies, lives at least part time with her married children who went to work in the maquiladores near Acuña.
Much was written about the relationship between the Lewises and the Sánchezes during the controversy surrounding the book’s publication in Mexico. In that decade of ideological warfare, it was not surprising that this discussion was often cast in the language of imperialism and exploitation, with the Lewis-Sánchez relationship characterized as one of dominant and subordinate partners. It is hard to believe that anyone making such a claim had read the book and understood who the Sánchezes were. The father participated in the project just as much as he wanted and no more; he talked only when he had something to say. He was proud, vain, hardworking, and ambitious within his own world, which is to say he did not set his sights on an unreachable horizon. But he was angry at a political and economic system that held him back and was not afraid to say it forcefully. And Consuelo and Manuel had veritable arsenals of words. Lewis wanted those observations on life, poverty, and the barriers to their ambition to come directly from the Sánchezes, to “let the poor speak for themselves” as he frequently said. The Lewises had the final say on which words appeared in print but had no control over any other aspect of the family’s participation in the project, before or after publication.
No one involved foresaw the impact the book would have in Mexico, and when reporters began looking for the family Lewis very much wanted them to retain their anonymity. Yet Marta was the only one of the five not to reveal her identity or try to use her connection to the book for some personal advantage (as, obviously, they were completely entitled to do no matter how it bothered Lewis). Jesús and Manuel actually sought out the press on occasion. In 1970, for example, months before Lewis’s death, Jesús gave an interview to Siempre in his successful attempt to stop his employer of forty-five years from forcing him into retirement without the severance pay he had expected.
Both Jesús and Manuel boasted about the utility of their participation in the Lewises’ work; Manuel in fact called it his Seguro Social, and said he felt they had made a contribution to the world and that he wasn’t just “a worm crawling across the face of the earth.” Another Casa Grande resident—born just about the time Lewis began his work there—told a Boston Globe reporter covering the vecindad’s 1986 demolition, “We were known world-wide, but it’s all over now,” echoing Manuel’s claim that The Children of Sánchez had put them on the map.3 Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid confirmed the Casa Grande’s place in Mexico’s modern urban history by attending ceremonies for the opening of the new housing complex built at the site.
The Lewises also were aware of what they had gained from working with the Sánchezes, and it was more than the satisfaction of “arousing social conscience.” Ruth Lewis said the work left them with “a sense of awe about people, what they experience, how they handle the things they go through, the terrible problems they have, and the spirit they have—the tremendous spirit.”
—SMR
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1 Not long before his death, Jesús agreed to Delila’s demand for a divorce. He told Ruth Lewis he was planning to sell his property—then worth far more than he had paid for it—and would give half of the proceeds to his wife. But he died before any of these arrangements could be made.
2 All quotations from Ruth Lewis are from interviews taped by Susan Rigdon in January and February 1987.
3 Phillip Bennett, “Storied Symbol of Poverty Is Gone,” Boston Globe, August 20, 1986.