The Children of Sanchez [Paperback]

Oscar Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 1979

A pioneering work from a visionary anthropologist, The Children of Sanchez is hailed around the world as a watershed achievement in the study of poverty—a uniquely intimate investigation, as poignant today as when it was first published.
 
It is the epic story of the Sánchez family, told entirely by its members—Jesus, the 50-year-old patriarch, and his four adult children—as their lives unfold in the Mexico City slum they call home. Weaving together their extraordinary personal narratives, Oscar Lewis creates a sympathetic but ultimately tragic portrait that is at once harrowing and humane, mystifying and moving.
 
An invaluable document, full of verve and pathos, The Children of Sanchez reads like the best of fiction, with the added impact that it is all, undeniably, true.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“One of the outstanding contributions of anthropology—of all time.”
—Margaret Mead
 
“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 Sánchez family. They tell their feeling, 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
 
“A significant account of poverty as a culture unto itself. . . . An anthropological classic.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“This book—often brutal, sometimes revolting, but always powerful and compelling in its vivid truth—reveals poverty as the reader could not know it unless he lived it.”
—The Washington Post
 
“Extraordinary. . . . Not only a fascinating documentary but a work of art created by reality itself, an edited record of fact that comes closer than most contemporary fiction to the force of literature.”
—Time
 
“Oscar Lewis’s books on Mexico and Puerto Rico awakened in many of us a feeling that we must do more to alleviate the world’s poverty.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
 
“Panoramic. . . . The Children of Sánchez is an amazing achievement. . . . So exciting, so moving, so full of human warmth and sadness.”
—The Spectator
 
“The exciting thing about The Children of Sánchez, 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
 
“[Lewis’s] masterpiece. . . . Uniquely, for me, his book depicts a world—the society of poverty—which 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 sense—it 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 Sánchez is a masterpiece.”
—New Statesman
 
“A work of enormous influence and very great beauty. . . . The Children of Sánchez 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)

About the Author

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 Sanchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Sanchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San 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 Harper’s. 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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books (February 12, 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394702808
• ISBN-13: 978-0394702803
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #211,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hardcore realism, November 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Children of Sanchez (Paperback)

This book certainly lacks scientific data and all the other scholarly details usually found in an anthropological study. But there's nothing scientific about poverty. Footnotes and graphs have no place in this kind of examination. It's an emotional book, intimately conveying the scorn and contempt of family that's half-starved and forced to live in claustrophobic conditions.

"The Children of Sanchez" documents all the petty hostilities within the fragile family unit. And it documents them accurately. Living in Mexico City is hard. Rich or poor, chilangos are constantly forced to deal with incredible violence and instability; the city is unforgiving and cruel, with terrible pollution levels and wild corruption. Lewis has perfectly captured the daily horrors of this urbanized mess. Using the Sanchez family as a case group representative of many families in the capital, he shows how people are slowly crushed by their relatives, the justice system and the congestion.

Nothing in this book is false or misleading. I have lived and worked in Mexico City; I have lived with a middle-class Mexican family; and I have started a family in Mexico. The experiences of the Sanchez family mirror my own experiences. I have met and have known many people like the people in this book. I have seen my own family spend countless hours attacking each other. And I have seen people desperately trying to make ends meet in a city with no opportunities.

Read this book. It's all true!

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unbiased approach to anthropology, November 18, 2004

By 

Anthony M. Weed "Volunteer in a Mexican Orpha... (Cumberland, ME USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Children of Sanchez (Paperback)

This book for me is one of the most unbiased approaches to anthropogy I have ever read. It shocked me that he chose to take their interviews and turn them into stories using their own language. It is as if the people were talking to the reader. The conflicts are so real and believable that I do not think that Oscar Lewis allowed his own thoughts to even be part of his work. This is not a liberals approach to changing peoples positions on an issue. It is allowing people to see what it was like to be a struggling lower class family in the 1950s.

We a given a window into a family of 4 children and their struggles from early childhood to becoming adults. We also are given a small snipet of the Father's perspective of his childrens accomplishments.

This family's life is definately not the most glamorous look into their lives but it is very honest. We get to see them go through the struggles of poverty and being parents in a country that the only way to survive was to overcome the struggles that were given to them.

I disagree with anyone who thinks Lewis is some how trying to make us simpathize with this Family. I feel he is trying to let us discover the Sanchez family for who they are and what is important to them. I have made a point to read more of his work and I have found only an honest acessment of people and the conditions they live in.

Be warned this book tells the story through a Mexican perspective and their morals do follow western views so tightly. The content that is discussed is hard and should be read with maturity.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get inside the heads of this amazing family, September 26, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Children of Sanchez (Paperback)

This book is a remarkably intimate study of a family in Mexico City. How Oscar Lewis managed to get them to open up about their experiences, fears, loves, hates, dreams and suffering in such explicit detail is a mystery. Lewis must have assisted them to articulate their feelings and perspectives because their tales are beautiful to read. Five members of the Sanchez family give independent accounts of their lives of hardship. The same events in their lives are viewed from each family member's perspective providing a unique insight into the familie's life. It is particularly amazing how openly they talk about each other. I have to assume that none of them will ever read the book. Reading the account of their lives is a sociological experience that is difficult to imagine getting from a book but also a beautiful piece of writing. In my opinion a unique and outstanding achievement .