Customer Reviews

Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty

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I first read Five Families when I was a 23yo public health nurse from the Midwest, working in a Mexican-American barrio in East Los Angeles. A co-worker advised me to read this book in order to better understand the families I found myself working with.
I devoured it.
Then I came to realize that it's a seminal work in modern cultural anthropology, a book that will surely stand the test of time, a 'study' written in a style that makes it accessible to all readers.
Five Families is a dramatic and forceful account five poor Mexican families. It's a book that will leave you changed.

I first read this book many years ago, along with some of the author's other works, and decided to take read it again. Time certainly has not diminished the power of the author, winner of the 1967 National Book Award for his book, "La Vida", to take the reader into the lives of others. This is an anthropological work that reads as if it were a riveting novel, so fascinating is its subject matter.

The author takes the reader into the lives of five different Mexican families for one entire day, so that the reader can see how it is that they live their lives. The families are both rural and urban and represent a cross-section of Mexico at the time that this book was written. All but one of the families portrayed are poor, yet they all share some similar characteristics.

Written during the nineteen fifties, this book is, for the most part, a look at a culture of poverty. It is also a look at a culture that is in transition, shifting from rural to urban with its often resulting poverty and pathology. Yet, it is also a culture into which, North American material comforts and influence were making inroads. That then nascent influence is often reflected in even the poorest of the families laid bare here.

The author basically gives the reader a typical day in the lives of each of these families. It is an intimate, objective look that creates a fascinating family portrait. It is a totally engrossing work of not only anthropological import but of historical value, as well. The author has managed to freeze in time a segment of Mexican life during the nineteen fifties. Who would have thought that reading about people shopping, preparing meals, and talking about their relationships would prove to be so fascinating?

Those who are interested in other cultures, as well as the way people live their lives, will really enjoy this book. The author provides a fascinating, freeze-frame glimpse into the lives of others. I simply loved this book. Bravo!

I just read this book, as I have read his other works. Oscar Lewis gives an extensive complete examination into the lives of extreme poverty. He gives exacting detail of the homes, lifestyles, and characteristics of the poor in Mexico. The last chapter delves with the poor who have accomplished "some wealth" and their upbringing still manages to evolve the same as if they were still poor. Wonderful thorough book!

Having recently devoured "Random Family" by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, it was fascinating to read the book that started it all - the ethnographic genre that gives the reader an intimate but non-judgmental, security-camera-eye view into other people's lives. Though "Five Families" was written fifty years ago, the culture of poverty is depressingly familiar. Anyone who's read the recent novel "Brick Lane" by Monica Ali will instantly recognize, for example, the loan sharks who prey so mercilessly on the poor.

Though they take place thousands of miles and fifty years apart, this seminal work and the two books mentioned above share traits which, to my understanding, make up the so-called "culture of poverty" - and please add to this or correct me if I'm wrong:

Dislocation from a remembered village life.

Large families.

Clusters of children born outside the family.

Hopeless and helpless debt.

The (unaffordable) price of school reckoned in hours away from home. (The labor of children puts food in parents' mouths.)

Intense and desperate superstition.

Chronic physical ailments and mistreatment by employers. [One can see why welfare really would be preferable.]

Lifelong envy and yearning for a better life.

There's a reason the reviews are short here: Reading these tragic portraits is like coming out of a movie into the glare of the afternoon sun.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Brick Lane: A Novel

I first read this book many years ago, along with some of the author's other works, and decided to take read it again. Time certainly has not diminished the power of the author, winner of the 1967 National Book Award for his book, "La Vida", to take the reader into the lives of others. This anthropological work reads as if it were a riveting novel, so fascinating is its subject matter.

The author takes the reader into the lives of five different Mexican families for one entire day, so that the reader can see how it is that they live their lives. The families are both rural and urban and represent a cross-section of Mexico at the time that this book was written. All but one of the families portrayed are poor, yet they all share some similar characteristics.

Written during the nineteen fifties, this book is, for the most part, a look at a culture of poverty. It is also a look at a culture that is in transition, shifting from rural to urban with its often resulting poverty and pathology. Yet, it is also a culture into which, North American material comforts and influence were making inroads. That then nascent influence is often reflected in even the poorest of the families laid bare here.

The author basically gives the reader a typical day in the lives of each of these families. It is an intimate, objective look that creates a fascinating family portrait. It is a totally engrossing work of not only anthropological import but of historical value, as well. The author has managed to freeze in time a segment of Mexican life during the nineteen fifties. Who would have thought that reading about people shopping, preparing meals, eating, and talking about their relationships would prove to be so fascinating?

Those who are interested in other cultures, as well as the way people live their lives, will really enjoy this book. Moreover, the foreword by Pulitzer Prize winning author and noted anthropologist, Oscar La Farge, is positively prescient. The author provides a fascinating, freeze-frame glimpse into the lives of others. I simply love this book. Bravo!