Poverty Revisited

A DEATH IN THE SANCHEZ FAMILY by Oscar Lewis Random House, $5.95

For many of us who are still in our twenties, Oscar Lewis’ books were once spurs to action. Lewis was the anthropologist who told not about primitive, timeless societies as far away as the moon, but about people living in a poverty and misery we could do something about. Just as we came into our strength, Lewis made us aware that the bounty we had accepted as a given was not the lot of the children of a certain Jesus Sanchez in a filthy vecindad in Mexico City.

We were shown how chronic poverty and separation from old values produce not only physical suffering but also a maiming of the soul, a permanent loss of expectation, and a schizophrenia in everyday life which rattle to pieces the family and the self. Like any virulent culture, chronic poverty provides for its own continuity through generations.

Today the knowledge we gained from Lewis may seem commonplace, but even subtle polemics always contain obvious truths. And if our personal reactions—a term in the Peace Corps or a summer in Harlem or Mississippi—turned out to be minimal responses, the fault is ours and not Oscar Lewis’ or Michael Harrington’s. In our first optimism we thought we could lift the children of Sanchez out of their despair without breaking the vessel which trapped them. The generation which comes after ours may not be so naive as we were.

A Death in the Sanchez Family takes us back over the territory Lewis explored a decade ago. The people telling their story are the ones we knew then, adults now, a bit better off and more class-conscious, but still enmeshed in the machinery of survival.

Three of the Sanchez children come together to bury their aunt, a destitute, alcoholic woman who was their support in times of trouble. When there is virtually no cash on hand, the simple act of getting the shriveled old body put away in the ground with some slight decency can become unbearably complex and finally obscene.

Most cultures provide handsomely for death, because death dislocates survivors and reduces their effectiveness and their faith in the society. The community steps in and surrounds the mourners, through ritual and care asserting the priority of the culture over individual sorrows. But in the culture of poverty, where living every day is a crisis, an extraordinary event like a death so overtaxes the community that the strain on individuals becomes cruel. The Sanchez children have no time to sort through their feelings or resolve their griefs because they have to be out in the streets begging, borrowing, and pawning to get together forty dollars for the undertaker. They begin the funeral ordeal with love and an honest sense of duty to their Aunt Lupe, but by the end of four days they are scrapping over her pitiful few possessions, and her neighbors are jockeying feverishly for the right to move into her single wretched room. The hearse races through the streets, and the priest at the cemetery bilks a last eighty cents from the mourners for organ music at the burial Mass.

Lewis’ method, tape-recorded autobiographies of family members set in dramatic juxtaposition, again has its curiously powerful effect on us. Taken immediately into the lives and emotions of the narrators, for a brief time we see the world presumably as they see it. Since the material is primary, we feel that the interpretations we make are our own and not Lewis’. And the pride of possession of an idea can be as strong as any pride of ownership. Though by careful editing and by asking the storytellers the right questions, Lewis actually guides us along the path to particular conclusions, his hand remains nearly invisible.

The narrators themselves offer some clear insights into their lives. Perhaps through their contact with Lewis, maybe from their widening view of the world and its possibilities, they recognize that the indignities they suffer are not necessarily the indignities of the human condition. Consuelo, the daughter who has fought her way into near respectability as a stenographer, blames her aunt’s miserable life and death on Mexico itself:

Oh yes, we are making progress. We are advancing in technology and science; the steel structures are rising over the corpses. Everybody knows that the peasants and the poor in the cities are being killed by starvation or other means .... An entire generation is disappearing in an unforgivable fashion. I can no longer bear to sec how they are humiliated or how they die.

Despite recent advances in Mexico’s social welfare system, Consuelo’s statement is fair. Her Aunt Guadalupe could not take advantage of “free” medical care because she couldn’t afford the bus fare to the hospital.

In La Vida, Oscar Lewis admitted that the culture of poverty provides people with values which help them to tolerate and survive their regular degradation in the world which preys on them. Consuelo looks back with a certain fondness for her old life and for the old ideology. “I recognized the love and understanding that existed among them in spite of their poverty-stricken lives. What would I have done in the same circumstances?”

Anyone who read the first long Sanchez saga was led first through a new land of despair and stencil, but eventually came to rest in an old and well-known sanctum—the inner world of a breathing family, rife with love and hate, guilt and recrimination. I at least felt very much at home with them: it appears that all unhappy families also resemble one another.

Caught up in the daily struggle, the Sanchez children naturally don’t recognize tire “universal” quality of their family. Like their mentor Lewis, they blame the culture of poverty for all their unhappiness.

Certainly their anger is just. 1 doubt that anyone could ever totally reckon the damage which systematic deprivation does to a person. But pinning all the meanness of people on their culture does not work as a comprehensive explanation of their actions. The Sanchez children remember their aunt, poorest of the poor, as a generous and superior person. Yet according to the theory, she should have been among the most petty. In our own society a funeral is an expensively oiled and smooth-running machine for the mussless and fussless disposal of an offensive object. According to the theory, our wealth should insulate us and make us decent to each other at such times. Yet our catfights over a dead man’s many goods can be as vicious as the squabble among the Sanchez children over their aunt’s cheap religious pictures.

In spite of its modesty, A Death in the Sanchez Family is nearly as shattering to read as the first Sanchez book was. But I doubt that it will affect people as the earlier story did.

For the young Marxists of 1970, the culture of poverty must seem a literal blind alley of capitalist history. It offers no dynamic for radical betterment, only an ideology for adjustment. And those of us who now search for ways to resurrect the human spirit will find in a death in Mexico City only the same sad ego trips and pettiness we can observe daily in our own lives. Our righteous pity for other people may have waned with the realization that we must first become physicians to ourselves before we can save the world.