Oscar Lewis - The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family

Praise for Oscar Lewiss
THE CHILDREN OF SNCHEZ

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 Snchez 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 Lewiss books on Mexico and Puerto Rico awakened in many of us a feeling that we must do more to alleviate the worlds poverty.

The Christian Science Monitor

Panoramic. The Children of Snchez is an amazing achievement. So exciting, so moving, so full of human warmth and sadness.

The Spectator

The exciting thing about The Children of Snchez, 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

[Lewiss] masterpiece. Uniquely, for me, his book depicts a worldthe society of povertywhich 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 senseit 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 Snchez is a masterpiece.

New Statesman

A work of enormous influence and very great beauty. The Children of Snchez 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 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 Snchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Snchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of PovertySan 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 Harpers. 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 Snchez 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)

Tepoztln: 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 Meads letters to Jason Epstein and Oscar Lewis.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Lewis, Oscar, 19141970.
The children of Snchez : autobiography of a Mexican family / by Oscar Lewis.
1st ed.
p. cm.
1. FamiliesMexicoCase studies. 2. PoorMexicoMexico CityBiography. 3. Mexicosocial 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 Snchez family,
whose identity must remain anonymous

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.