The Children of Sanchez (5 page)

It will become apparent to the reader that there is a marked contrast between Jesús Sánchez and his children. This contrast reflects not only the difference in rural and urban backgrounds but also the difference between pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Mexico.
Jesús was born in a small village in the state of Veracruz in 1910, the very year which marked the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. His children were born between 1928 and 1935 in the slums of Mexico City. Jesús was brought up in a Mexico without cars, movies, radios or TV, without free universal education, without free elections, and without the hope of upward mobility and the possibility of getting rich quick. He was raised in the tradition of authoritarianism, with its emphasis upon knowing one’s place, hard work, and self-abnegation. The children of Sánchez, although subject to his domineering and authoritarian character, were also exposed to post-Revolutionary values, with their greater emphasis upon individualism and social mobility. It is all the more striking, therefore, that the father who never aspired to be more than a simple worker managed to raise himself out of the lower depths of poverty, whereas the children have remained at that level.

In the nineteenth century, when the social sciences were still in their infancy, the job of recording the effects of the process of industrialization and urbanization on personal and family life was left to novelists, playwrights, journalists, and social reformers. Today, a similar process of culture change is going on among the peoples of the less-developed countries but we find no comparable outpouring of a universal literature which would help us to improve our understanding of the process and the people. And yet the need for such an understanding has never been more urgent, now that the less-developed countries have become a major force on the world scene.

In the case of the new African nations that are emerging from a tribal, nonliterate cultural tradition, the paucity of a great native literature on the lower class is not surprising. In Mexico and in other Latin American countries where there has been a middle class, from which most writers come, this class has been very small. Moreover, the hierarchical nature of Mexican society has inhibited any profound communication across class lines. An additional factor in Mexico has been the preoccupation of both writers and anthropologists with their Indian problem, to the neglect of the urban poor.

This situation presents a unique opportunity to the social sciences and particularly to anthropology to step into the gap and develop a literature of its own. Sociologists, who have pioneered in studying urban slums, are now concentrating their attention on suburbia to the relative neglect of the poor. Today, even most novelists are so
busy probing the middle-class soul that they have lost touch with the problems of poverty and the realities of a changing world. As C. P. Snow has recently stated: “Sometimes I am afraid that people in rich countries … have so completely forgotten what it is like to be poor that we can no longer feel or talk with the less lucky. This we must learn to do.”

It is the anthropologists, traditionally the spokesmen for primitive people in the remote corners of the world, who are increasingly turning their energies to the great peasant and urban masses of the less-developed countries. These masses are still desperately poor in spite of the social and economic progress of the world in the past century. Over a billion people in seventy-five nations of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Near East have an average per capita income of less than $200 a year as compared with over $2,000 a year for the United States. The anthropologist who studies the way of life in these countries has become, in effect, the student and spokesman of what I call the culture of poverty.

To those who think that the poor have no culture, the concept of a culture of poverty may seem like a contradiction in terms. It would also seem to give to poverty a certain dignity and status. This is not my intention. In anthropological usage the term culture implies, essentially, a design for living which is passed down from generation to generation. In applying this concept of culture to the understanding of poverty, I want to draw attention to the fact that poverty in modern nations is not only a state of economic deprivation, of disorganization, or of the absence of something. It is also something positive in the sense that it has a structure, a rationale, and defense mechanisms without which the poor could hardly carry on. In short, it is a way of life, remarkably stable and persistent, passed down from generation to generation along family lines. The culture of poverty has its own modalities and distinctive social and psychological consequences for its members. It is a dynamic factor which affects participation in the larger national culture and becomes a subculture of its own.

The culture of poverty, as here defined, does not include primitive peoples whose backwardness is the result of their isolation and undeveloped technology and whose society for the most part is not class stratified. Such peoples have a relatively integrated, satisfying, and self-sufficient culture. Nor is the culture of poverty synonymous with
the working class, the proletariat, or the peasantry, all three of which vary a good deal in economic status throughout the world. In the United States, for example, the working class lives like an elite compared to the lower class of the less developed countries. The culture of poverty would apply only to those people who are at the very bottom of the socio-economic scale, the poorest workers, the poorest peasants, plantation laborers, and that large heterogenous mass of small artisans and tradesmen usually referred to as the lumpen proletariat.

The culture or subculture of poverty comes into being in a variety of historical contexts. Most commonly it develops when a stratified social and economic system is breaking down or is being replaced by another, as in the case of the transition from feudalism to capitalism or during the industrial revolution. Sometimes it results from imperial conquest in which the conquered are maintained in a servile status which may continue for many generations. It can also occur in the process of detribalization such as is now going on in Africa where, for example, the tribal migrants to the cities are developing “courtyard cultures” remarkably similar to the Mexico City
vecindades
. We are prone to view such slum conditions as transitional or temporary phases of drastic culture change. But this is not necessarily the case, for the culture of poverty is often a persisting condition even in stable social systems. Certainly in Mexico it has been a more or less permanent phenomenon since the Spanish conquest of 1519, when the process of detribalization and the movement of peasants to the cities began. Only the size, location, and composition of the slums have been in flux. I suspect that similar processes have been going on in many other countries of the world.

It seems to me that the culture of poverty has some universal characteristics which transcend regional, rural-urban, and even national differences. In my earlier book,
Five Families
(Basic Books, 1959), I suggested that there were remarkable similarities in family structure, interpersonal relations, time orientations, value systems, spending patterns, and the sense of community in lower-class settlements in London, Glasgow, Paris, Harlem, and Mexico City. Although this is not the place for an extensive comparative analysis of the culture of poverty, I should like to elaborate upon some of these and other traits in order to present a provisional conceptual model of this culture based mainly upon my Mexican materials.

In Mexico, the culture of poverty includes at least the lower third of the rural and urban population. This population is characterized by a relatively higher death rate, a lower life expectancy, a higher proportion of individuals in the younger age groups, and, because of child labor and working women, a higher proportion of gainfully employed. Some of these indices are higher in the poor
colonias
or sections of Mexico City than in rural Mexico as a whole.

The culture of poverty in Mexico is a provincial and locally oriented culture. Its members are only partially integrated into national institutions and are marginal people even when they live in the heart of a great city. In Mexico City, for example, most of the poor have a very low level of education and literacy, do not belong to labor unions, are not members of a political party, do not participate in the medical care, maternity, and old-age benefits of the national welfare agency known as
Seguro Social
, and make very little use of the city’s banks, hospitals, department stores, museums, art galleries and airports.

The economic traits which are most characteristic of the culture of poverty include the constant struggle for survival, unemployment and underemployment, low wages, a miscellany of unskilled occupations, child labor, the absence of savings, a chronic shortage of cash, the absence of food reserves in the home, the pattern of frequent buying of small quantities of food many times a day as the need arises, the pawning of personal goods, borrowing from local money lenders at usurious rates of interest, spontaneous informal credit devices (
tandas
) organized by neighbors, and the use of second-hand clothing and furniture.

Some of the social and psychological characteristics include living in crowded quarters, a lack of privacy, gregariousness, a high incidence of alcoholism, frequent resort to violence in the settlement of quarrels, frequent use of physical violence in the training of children, wife beating, early initiation into sex, free unions or consensual marriages, a relatively high incidence of the abandonment of mothers and children, a trend toward mother-centered families and a much greater knowledge of maternal relatives, the predominance of the nuclear family, a strong predisposition to authoritarianism, and a great emphasis upon family solidarity—an ideal only rarely achieved. Other traits include a strong present time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism based upon the realities of
their difficult life situation, a belief in male superiority which reaches its crystallization in
machismo
or the cult of masculinity, a corresponding martyr complex among women, and finally, a high tolerance for psychological pathology of all sorts.

Some of the above traits are not limited to the culture of poverty in Mexico but are also found in the middle and upper classes. However, it is the peculiar patterning of these traits which defines the culture of poverty. For example, in the middle class,
machismo
is expressed in terms of sexual exploits and the Don Juan complex whereas in the lower class it is expressed in terms of heroism and lack of physical fear. Similarly, drinking in the middle class is a social amenity whereas in the lower class getting drunk has different and multiple functions—to forget one’s troubles, to prove one’s ability to drink, and to build up sufficient confidence to meet difficult life situations.

Many of the traits of the subculture of poverty can be viewed as attempts at local solutions for problems not met by existing institutions and agencies because the people are not eligible for them, cannot afford them, or are suspicious of them. For example, unable to obtain credit from banks, they are thrown upon their own resources and organize informal credit devices without interest. Unable to afford doctors, who are used only in dire emergencies, and suspicious of hospitals “where one goes only to die,” they rely upon herbs or other home remedies and upon local curers and midwives. Critical of priests “who are human and therefore sinners like all of us,” they rarely go to confession or Mass and rely upon prayer to the images of saints in their own homes and upon pilgrimages to popular shrines.

A critical attitude toward some of the values and institutions of the dominant classes, hatred of the police, mistrust of government and those in high position, and a cynicism which extends even to the church gives the culture of poverty a counter quality and a potential for being used in political movements aimed against the existing social order. Finally, the sub-culture of poverty also has a residual quality in the sense that its members are attempting to utilize and integrate into a workable way of life the remnants of beliefs and customs of diverse origins.

I should like to emphasize that the Sánchez family is by no means at the lowest level of poverty in Mexico. About a million and a half people
out of a total population of approximately four million in Mexico City live in similar or worse conditions. The persistence of poverty in the first city of the nation fifty years after the great Mexican Revolution raises serious questions about the extent to which the Revolution has achieved its social objectives. Judging from the Sánchez family, their friends, neighbors, and relatives, the essential promise of the Revolution has yet to be fulfilled.

This assertion is made in the full knowledge of the impressive and far-reaching changes which have been brought about by the Mexican Revolution—the transformation of a semifeudal economy, the distribution of land to the peasants, the emancipation of the Indian, the strengthening of labor’s position, the spread of public education, the nationalization of oil and the railroads, and the emergence of a new middle class. Since 1940 the economy has been expanding and the country has become acutely production conscious. Leading newspapers report daily in their headlines record-breaking achievements in agriculture and industry and proudly announce huge gold reserves in the national treasury. A boom spirit has been created which is reminiscent of the great expansion in the United States at the turn of the century. Since 1940 the population has increased by over thirteen million, to reach a high of thirty-four million in 1960. The growth of Mexico City has been phenomenal, from one and a half million in 1940 to over four million in 1960. Mexico City is now the largest city in Latin America and the third or fourth largest city on the American continent.

One of the most significant trends in Mexico since 1940 has been the increasing influence of the United States on Mexican life. Never before in the long history of U.S.-Mexican relations has there been such a varied and intense interaction between the two countries. The close co-operation during World War II, the rapid tempo of U.S. investment, which has reached almost a billion dollars as of 1960, the remarkable influx of U.S. tourists into Mexico and of Mexican visitors to the United States, the annual migration of several hundred thousand Mexican agricultural workers to the United States, the exchange of students, technicians and professors, and the increasing number of Mexicans who are becoming U.S. citizens have made for a new type of relationship between the two countries.