A polyphonic, novel-like account of a Mexican family living in poverty, told through the voices of its members.
Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sánchez is one of the major works of mid-century ethnographic writing. Rather than presenting poverty as a set of abstractions or statistics, Lewis builds the book through testimony, contradiction, repetition, grievance, memory and family myth. Each speaker circles the same household from a different position inside it.
It is an uncomfortable and historically significant book. Very famous for its narrative force, controversial for its “culture of poverty” framework, and still useful as an artefact of anthropology, oral history, sociology and documentary prose. The Sánchez family becomes a way of reading domestic life by way of personal experiences of money, gender, authority, violence, religion, shame, survival, resentment, loyalty. For readers interested in anthropology, Latin American social history, oral testimony, poverty studies, family systems, or the borderlands between social science and literature.
Penguin Modern Classics paperback. First published in the USA in 1961; first published in Great Britain in 1962; Penguin edition 1964; this copy is a 1965 reprint. Noticeable wear to cover, creasing, rubbing, edgewear, tanning and general age-related handling. Internally readable.
