Word: sanchez
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SEVERAL factors set off The Children of Sanchez from most other writings in the field. Most obviously, its form. Lewis presents a multiple autobiography of Jesus Sanchez and four of his children. Then, too, its subjects represent a new field of study. The Sanchez family are urban slum-dwellers. They are not all literate, but are very well-spoken, indicating perhaps that Lewis' technique could not be fruitfully applied to a culture with a limited vocabulary and a limited range of experience. Finally, the literary structure Lewis presents is a three-act drama (novel?) (each act covering the same time...
...protagonists stand out: Jesus Sanchez left his peasant home at an early age, coming to Mexico City, and eventually finding work in a restaurant. At the time of the writing he is 50, still works for the restaurant (in addition to holding several odd jobs), and supports 25 people in three dwellings, two of which are one-room affairs. Jesus is living with one of his three surviving common law wives (he had five, in succession). Immediately impressive is his energy, his strictness, his often fickle generosity. He plays favorites with a vengeance, seemingly contradicting his own heart...
...Mexican village of Tepoztlan; such was the picture that Oscar Lewis challenged when he broke precedent by restudying Tepoztlan. His invasion of another scholar's territory touched off a controversy. Lewis accused Redfield of looking at peasants through rosy-colored lenses; Redfiled damned Lewis' pessimism. The Children of Sanchez could provoke the same sort of hassle, but it shouldn't: by providing a short introduction and arranging the interview material, Lewis kept out of the picture to a great extent...
...also gives a few appalling statistics about the situation of the poor in Mexico, such as that one and a half million of the four million residents of the capital live in deprivation equal to or worse than that of the Sanchez family, and that according to the census 89% of all Mexican families earn less than 600 pesos ($69.) month...
...avoids "sentimentalization and brutalization. The latter, yes, but when he later states that the poor are "the true heroes of contemporary Mexico, for they are paying the cost of the industrial progress of the nation," he confuses heroes with victims in an unabashedly sentimental fashion. I doubt that any Sanchez thinks of himself as a hero: to the often great extent that they see how much they are victims of themselves as well as of social crisis, they emerge as a family that tells us that people are about much more accurately--and of course, movingly--than any social scientist...