Word: santana
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...that there is a universality to economics, while personal reflections are individual and speak only particular truths. But a profile need not speak for an entire system--and, as it did here, trying to form such generalizations prevents a writer from penetrating the surface. A seven-page recounting of Santana's shopping strategy on the day she receives her welfare check, complete with the number of blocks she walks in each direction, names of the streets she passes, exactly what she buys and precisely how much she spends, sheds little light on the internals of being a welfare mother. Rather...
...claim Sheehan's work useless; she has found, after a grueling and frustrating search (as she describes in an afterword) a woman who allowed her, and, vicariously, the reader, into her home, to observe, to question and to describe. Sheehan is familiar enough to be there when Santana discovers her son is mainlining heroin; but is that so routine that Santana accepts it in stride, without a moan or a whimper even? So it appears from the description the reader is offered...
THOUGH ON THE WHOLE this approach further stereotypes a welfare mother's lot, Sheehan does include some perceptions that hold our interest in this welfare mother. Santana does not worry about her so-called cheating of the welfare system, accepting extra money from the man she lives with and collecting for one child more than lives at home, because she needs it--there is no other way for her to get by. Similarly, she does not preoccupy herself with what an outsider may think of a welfare mother who does not even attempt to work; she has learned that...
Despite these insights, reading A Welfare Mother is an excruciatingly frustrating experience. The typical reader might mutter back at the author, "But what did she say?" The text is an ambling description that lacks any clues to the humanity behind the name Carmen Santana. It is written as a newspaper article, in crisp, clear, objective, unemotional prose, and from start to finish the journalistic facade never cracks...
...Carmen Santana is a welfare mother. She lives in a four-room apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn with the four children she had by a man named Vicente Santana, whom she lived with from 1959, when she first came to New York from Puerto Rico, until 1969. A present member of the household is Francisco Delgado, whom she took up with some months before she and Mr. Santana parted...