Abstract
This paper examines U.S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s research in Mexico City in the 1950s to reflect on how urban poverty has been construed in the United States and Latin America in the twentieth century. It asks why Lewis’s early work on rural-urban migration won him praise among scholars of Latin America while his later research on the “culture of poverty” was lambasted across the world—with particular intensity in the United States. Through a careful examination of Lewis’s ethnographic work in the Mexican “slum” of Colonia Morelos and the debates that it generated, I argue how and why Mexican slums were construed as sites of community and hope while their U.S. counterparts became associated with an irreversible “urban crisis.”
“In Mexico City,” anthropologist Oscar Lewis noted, “most of the poor live in slum-like housing settlements known as vecindades.” 1 In reality, most of Mexico City’s poor lived in the self-built peripheries of the city and not in its centrally located vecindades, but Lewis’s words rang true across the Americas. They certainly made sense to attendants at the Congreso de Americanistas in San José, Costa Rica—to whom Lewis presented his findings in 1958—as vecindades seemed to belong within a hemispheric family of low-income housing forms that included slums, conventillos, and cortiços. In Mexico, vecindades were, and still are, a keystone of the cultural construction of urban poverty. But they also represented a local adaptation to global processes such as rural-urban migration, urban growth, and intra-urban cycles of gentrification and decay. Lewis plays a prominent role in this intellectual history. Most of the action in his books about Mexico City, Five Families (1959) and The Children of Sánchez (1961), takes place in two vecindades located in Colonia Morelos, ground-zero for the theory of the “culture of poverty,” whose importance throughout the world can hardly be overstated.
The “culture of poverty”—the phrase as much as the theory—framed debates about poverty across the Americas for two decades after its initial formulation in 1958. 2 The “culture of poverty” was not the same as a condition of economic deprivation; rather, it was a “way of life [that tended] to perpetuate itself from generation to generation,” entrapping the poor in an endless cycle. 3 The idea received a tremendous backlash in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was denounced as methodologically vague and politically misguided. Poverty was not reproduced within the household, but it was the outcome of larger social, economic, and political structures, critics pointed out. The traits that Lewis identified as components of the culture of poverty—for instance, time orientation and spending patterns—represented, they argued, rational responses to scarcity and uncertainty. Worst of all, Lewis seemed to blame the victim for their own predicament. 4 Lewis spent the rest of his life defending the utility of the theory that made him (in)famous but that also had become a conceptual straitjacket.
Before putting forward the theory of a “culture of poverty,” Lewis had offered a more uplifting view of city life. In his 1952 seminal article “Urbanization without Breakdown,” Lewis argued that rural migrants in Mexico City did not experience the social “breakdown” predicted by contemporary sociologists on their arrival to the city but, instead, benefitted from communities and kinship networks that facilitated their transition. 5 By looking at small communities and kinship networks, Lewis was proposing a different scale along which to think of urban phenomena. This approach was praised and adapted by scholars across the world, particularly those conducting research in Latin American cities during the 1950s and 1960s. In the span of less than a decade, two antagonistic versions of Lewis seem to emerge: the good Lewis of “urbanization without breakdown” (1952) and the bad Lewis of “culture of poverty” (1958). Intriguingly, both authors studied the same vecindades in Mexico City, which took on different meanings and implications. On the one hand, vecindades eased the adaptation of rural migrants by “break[ing] the city up into small communities which act[ed] as cohesive and personalizing factors.” 6 But such small communities, even though useful for adapting to city life, also gave rise to the self-defeating culture of poverty.
This article interrogates the transition from the optimism of “urbanization without breakdown” to the deterministic pessimism of the “culture of poverty.” The differences between both theses, I argue, are less significant than their reception in the United States, Mexico, and Latin America. Lewis was lionized in the 1950s because he contributed an original method for analyzing Latin American cities and because he offered, at a time of profound uncertainty regarding urbanization in this region, an optimistic view on the possibilities that rural migrants had of adapting to city life. During the 1960s in the United States, Lewis’s ideas about the relationship between poverty and culture became subsumed by a bleaker prognosis about the “urban crisis.” In the aftermath of the 1965 publication of Daniel Moynihan’s “The Negro Case: The Case for National Action,” Lewis added fuel to a highly politicized debate on the questions of race and poverty in American cities. In sum, Lewis seemed to offer opposite conclusions for Mexico and the United States. In Mexico City, the capital of a poor and rapidly growing country, Lewis discovered resilient migrant communities that successfully adapted to city life. In the United States, a rich country where poverty was increasingly understood as a marginal phenomenon that was the outcome of individual failings, Lewis’s ideas about the distinct culture of the poor became an explanation for the perceived failure of African Americans to make it in the city.
My argument unfolds in three parts. First, I describe the transnational circuits of knowledge in which Lewis’s ideas were produced, stressing why Lewis transitioned from the study of “traditional” societies to that of urban culture. Then, I zoom in on Colonia Morelos, Lewis’s main research site, and juxtapose the history of the neighborhood against the categories through which Lewis analyzed it. Finally, I contrast how Lewis’s ideas were received in Mexico, Latin America, and the United States, hinting as well at some of the ways in which these interpretations continue to shape urban analyses across the hemisphere.
The Folk-Urban Continuum and the Question of the “Latin American” City
Oscar Lewis first came to Mexico City by way of the countryside, following migrants from the small town of Tepoztlán, less than two hours away from Mexico City. Born in 1914 in New York, Lewis was the youngest child of an immigrant Jewish family. He was the first in the family to attend college, enrolling in the College of the City of New York in 1930 and continuing to pursue a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University under the guidance of Ruth Benedict. Benedict was one of the leaders of the “culture and personality” school, which integrated the study of culture with psychology. Lewis would foray into psychological analyses during his studies in Tepoztlán and Mexico City, but he was, at least during his graduate school years, an eclectic anthropologist and, in the opinion of his biographer Susan Rigdon, a reluctant follower of the culture and personality school. 7 Lewis wrote his dissertation about the Blackfoot tribe in the Montana region, research that was part of a larger project studying Native American reservations in the United States coordinated by Benedict. On graduation, he worked as a field representative in Latin America for the National Indian Institute. In 1943, he was appointed as a liaison to the Inter-American Indian Institute (III), headquartered in Mexico City and run by Manuel Gamio, a student of Franz Boas and the dean of Mexican anthropology. The III had the goal of dealing with the “problem of the Indian in the Americas,” integrating indigenous peoples into the nation-state, easing their acculturation while improving their lives. 8 A joint effort between Mexican and U.S. anthropologists, the Indian Personality Project studied the development of Indian children as well as the environmental and governmental factors influencing it. This was an exemplary project inspired by the culture and personality school and in Mexican applied anthropology, geared toward gathering data, refining theory, and, most importantly, improving the conditions of the Indian communities under study. 9
Lewis and his team chose Tepoztlán as their research site because it was close to Mexico City and well served by the welfare institutions that the energetic and progressive Mexican government was putting in place in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920); other significant policies included a vast agrarian reform, the nationalization of the oil industry, and the already mentioned integration of the Indian into the body politic. Significantly, Tepoztlán had been studied in the 1920s by anthropologist Robert Redfield, providing him with the original inspiration for a “folk society,” the concept that catapulted him to prominence. Folk societies, Redfield theorized, were “small, isolated, nonliterate, and homogenous, endowed with a strong sense of group solidarity.” As an ideal-type, they displayed characters “logically opposed to those . . . found in the modern city,” that is, individualism, rationality, secularism, and heterogeneity. 10 Inspired by Tepoztlán, the “folk” concept was developed at the University of Chicago, where Redfield studied in the 1920s and where he then became a professor. The “folk society” concept and the folk-urban continuum derived from it represented a synthesis of much of the research on cities, social change, and modern culture conducted in Chicago by such authors as Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Louis Wirth, and others (the Chicago School of sociology). These ideas were inspired, in turn, by an earlier generation of European sociologists—Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Georg Simmel, among others—who had studied the transition from primitive and traditional communities to the modern world.
In other words, by engaging with, and then challenging, Redfield’s interpretation of Tepoztlán, Lewis was entering into an expansive conversation about the transition between primitive and modern societies. The controversy that followed has become a classic episode in the history of anthropology. 11 Unlike Redfield, Lewis did not find a “homogenous, isolated, smoothly functioning and well-integrated society made up of contented and well-adjusted people.” Instead, he described a town ridden with conflicts that were rooted in psychological factors and in the recent history of Tepoztlán. 12 Lewis and his team conducted archival research to unearth this history, revealing inequalities grounded in landed conflicts and the Mexican Revolution. Lewis also looked beyond Tepoztlán, conducting research in Cuernavaca, capital of the state of Morelos, and Mexico City, where hundreds of Tepoztecans had migrated and where Lewis commuted to on a weekly basis as he continued to run affairs at the III.
This migration provided Lewis with the seed for his next project. “Mexico City now has a population of about two million [of which] a million are from the out-skirts, from rural areas,” he wrote in a 1944 letter to his colleague Ernest Maes. “We should know what happens to these people when they come to the city.” 13 By highlighting Tepoztlán’s connections with Mexico City, Lewis was abandoning key premises from Redfield’s analysis, for instance, the notion of an isolated and homogeneous community. At the same time, his interest in Mexico City’s migrants from Tepoztlán clearly connected him with the Chicago School of sociology, which found in urban migration one of its classic themes. Redfield, in fact, began his career in the 1920s studying Mexican migrants in Chicago, a typical Chicago School of Sociology project. 14
Despite the precedent of the Chicago School studies of ethnic migrant neighborhoods, Lewis’s approach was, in the Mexican context, extremely original. As historian Mauricio Tenorio has argued, Mexico and the United States provided contrasting laboratories in the transnational history of the twentieth-century social sciences. 15 While Mexico was rich in folk communities such as Tepoztlán, American cities such as Chicago and Detroit embodied the industrial future toward which the world appeared to be heading. Thinking within these parameters, Mexico City was not a particularly compelling site for research during the first decades of the twentieth century. To the extent that it was a large, cosmopolitan, and modern city, it was disappointingly un-Mexican, but as far as cities went, it was comparatively small and parochial, not exactly where the most exciting action took place.
It was the presence of migrants from such places as Tepoztlán that made Mexico City a more intriguing place. Following the Mexican Revolution, Mexico City entered a period of fast growth fueled by millions of migrants. In 1910, Mexico’s capital was still anchored by its colonial grid even though it had begun a transformation driven by forces reshaping cities across the world: tramways, electric lights, and a churning real-estate market. Between 1910 and 1940, the city’s population increased from 470,000 to 1.7 million—it would reach 6.8 million by 1970. 16 The change in character was as significant as that in scale. In 1940, Mexico City was the engine of an industrial economy, the capital of a nationalistic and revolutionary regime, and a testing ground for original modes of urbanism and urban cultures.
In 1940, Mexico and its capital city seemed to be at a crossroads. On the one hand, a group of modernizers avant la lettre that included such economists as Manuel Germán Parra, Edmundo Flores, and Antonio Ruiz Galindo placed high hopes in the possibility that Mexico City could transform the country at large, from the psychology of the “landholder and the pion” to that of the “industrialist, the banker, the businessman, and the factory worker.” 17 But others doubted the plausibility and desirability of this change. Redfield, for instance, romanticized Tepoztlán and displayed, in the opinion of his critics, an escapist “antiurban bias.” 18 Likewise, historian Frank Tannenbaum—a close observer of the Mexican Revolution, admirer of its agrarian reform, and a friend of President Lázaro Cárdenas—argued in 1950 that the “Mexican village [was] infinitely more desirable as a basis for a culture than an industrial proletariat.” 19 As did other critics of modernity after the Great War, these thinkers found in Mexico a lost Golden Age, or at least the possibility of a different path. 20 Mexican modernizers saw this position as naïve at best and imperialistic at worst, a tool for maintaining underdeveloped Mexico under the helm of the United States.
Neither camp, however, questioned the utility of the folk-urban continuum for reading the differences between Tepoztlán and Mexico City. This Lewis did, first in Life in a Mexican Village, his 1951 book on Tepoztlán, and then in his 1952 article “Urbanization without Breakdown: A Case Study.” Urbanization, Lewis argued, was “not a simple, unitary, universally similar process but [one that assumed] different forms and meanings, depending upon the prevailing historic, economic, and cultural conditions.” 21 Crucially, instead of anomie, breakdown, and disorganization, Lewis described kinship networks binding migrant communities together. These networks did not disappear but intensified in the city, as they became more necessary than ever. As historians Adrián Gorelik and Ariel Rodríguez Kuri have suggested, these ideas also represented an invitation to optimism in midcentury Mexico and Latin America more broadly. 22 If the journey to the city was not as disruptive as sociologists had predicted and if it was an upwardly mobile move, then Latin America’s urbanization project was more promising, if still far from seamless.
As many critics pointed out, the folk-urban continuum was an ethnocentric model, based on the experiences of such North Atlantic cities as Chicago. 23 In the face of it, Lewis’s propositions were extremely stimulating, providing a framework to analyze urbanization, social change, and migration in other regions of the world such as Latin America. In the opinion of Richard Morse—whose 1958 biography of São Paulo, From Community to Metropolis, helped galvanize the field of Latin American urban history and Latin American urban studies tout court—the idea that megacities were composed by small communities was floating in the air in the 1940s, but it was not until Lewis’s “magisterial development” of it that social scientists acquired a framework for conducting this kind of research. 24 It was not as if they were trying that hard, at least in the case of Mexico. At the time, Mexican sociologists, anthropologists, and economists were chiefly concerned with the rural world and the perennial cuestión agraria. 25 It was not until 1956, when the Seventh National Congress of Sociology was celebrated in Monterrey, that Mexican sociologists explicitly turned their attention toward the “problem” of the city. 26 In the 1960s, reminisced French geographer Claude Bataillon, the “demand for Mexican urban studies, especially Mexico City studies, was immense yet unsatisfied.” 27 Lewis’s work on vecindades and rural migrants—which was quickly published in Spanish and read across multiple disciplines—placated this thirst for urban studies, not only in Mexico but also in “Latin America” and the “developing world.”
The work of Lewis was a harbinger of things to come. Beginning in the 1950s, a wave of studies on urbanization outside of Europe and the United States began to pick up steam. In 1955, UNESCO organized a conference on “Urbanization in East Asia.” It was so successful that the experience was repeated in 1959, when the seminar “Urbanization in Latin America” was celebrated in Santiago, Chile, under the direction of sociologists Philip Hauser and José Medina Echeverría. The Chile seminar brought together an emerging group of scholars of Latin American urbanization that included Gino Germani, José Matos Mar, and Andrew Pearse, who conducted the first urban/sociological surveys, respectively, in Buenos Aires, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro.
28
Lucio Mendieta y Nuñez, dean of Mexican sociology, was also present at the seminar, where he presented the findings of the 1956 Mexican Congress of Sociology. Lewis participated in the conference, although he was not included in Urbanization in Latin America, the edited volume that came out of the conference. “I am impressed,” wrote Lewis in response to the invitation to the congress, by how little we know about the life and problem, and particularly the psychology, of the lower classes in the larger urban centers of underdeveloped areas of the world. It seems to be that anthropologists and other social scientists are missing a bet here.
29
Lewis also contributed to the emerging field of Latin American urban studies as an educator. In 1959, while conducting research in Mexico City, Lewis taught a “Seminar on Urbanism in the Underdeveloped Countries,” which reviewed “the major theoretical and conceptual approaches in regard to the nature of urban life in the light of materials from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.” The class was framed by Lewis’s two main research interests: “the process of acculturation of peasant and tribal migrants” and “the culture of the [urban] lower classes.” 30 Mexican, U.S., and South American students attended the course, which included a substantial fieldwork component. Through this fieldwork, students studied Mexican vecindades as representative of a wider Latin American urban phenomenon. Especially for the non-Mexican students, the course represented an exercise in the comparison and translation of urban forms and categories. A Chilean student named Bernardo Valenzuela, for example, wrote of Colonia Morelos that “the streets of the barriada were filled with miserable dwellings, [vecindades] that exerted their influence towards villas miseria, clandestine settlements built overnight . . . the marginal men that the picturesque popular language had named as paracaidistas.” 31 Barriadas, villas miseria, and vecindades allowed the writer to make a transnational argument by making the experiences of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico part of a single master narrative.
By turning his attention to Mexico City, Lewis challenged the orthodoxy of the folk-urban continuum and participated in the creation of a disciplinary field and object of enquiry—what historian Adrián Gorelik calls the idea of the Latin American city. 32 The contours of this nascent field were partially defined by Lewis’s interests and questions: acculturation, social change, and migration. Although Lewis was initially optimistic about the possibilities encountered by migrants in Mexico City, his interest in culture and, more specifically, the cultural adaptation to the city, would eventually lead to other, more pessimistic conclusions.
City, Neighborhood, and Vecindad: The Question of Scale
The discovery of the city took Lewis, an anthropologist, into a territory previously charted by urban sociologists. This was not an eccentric case of cross pollination as the boundaries between both disciplines were quite fluid in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the University of Chicago, sociology and anthropology were united in a single department until 1929. As anthropologist Ulf Hannerz has argued, the Chicago School of sociology was a precursor to a long line of urban anthropologists that includes Lewis, Herbert Gans, and Erving Goffman. 33 Sociologists provided an inescapable battery of categories for reading urban phenomena: adaptation, disorganization, mobility, and ecological region. More significantly, they offered a method—surveys, life stories, questionnaires, and so on—for conducting research that combined breadth and depth.
Mexico City was experiencing momentous, if not immediately legible, transformations at the time of Lewis’s first visit. Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, the city’s long-standing and powerful regent (1953-1966), was in the process of “modernizing” Mexico City and its administration, for instance, through the construction of hygienic public markets and the tightening of zoning regulations. These actions were met with resistance from popular groups and political brokers that went all the way up to the federal government. Mexico City was—and still remains—a political machine buttressed by patronage networks and extremely resistant to top-down overhaul. 34
Uruchurtu’s ideal city was inspired by transnational urban categories that did not match with Mexico City’s morphology, social composition, and history. Ernest W. Burgess’ ecological model, for example, which posited a dynamic relationship between urban growth and ethnicity/class, was widely used, and revised, to account for patterns of growth in Mexico City. 35 Categories such as “industrialization,” “working-class,” and “slum” rendered urban processes legible, despite their analytical and descriptive limits. Mexico City’s population was not only (or mainly) employed in the industrial sector nor did its migrants settle in the inner-city area that American sociologists identified as the slum. Regardless, this corpus of theories, categories, and policies inspired ambitious urban projects. Urban planners labeled decaying central neighborhoods as slums (tugurios) and targeted them for urban renewal. Conversely, Uruchurtu curtailed urban growth in the self-built peripheries of the city, even though these places had become the most important housing option for the city’s low-income population. 36
Lewis recorded Mexico City’s transformation in books, articles, unpublished notes, and photographs. Along with Ruth Lewis and his research assistants, he spent long swaths of time in Mexico City for almost twenty years. In the mid-1940s, Lewis photographed the houses in Colonia Portales, south of the city where the better-off migrants that he first encountered lived. He conducted research in the wealthy neighborhood of Las Lomas, where the nouveaux riche Castro of Five Families lived. Lewis also conducted research in colonias proletarias north and east of the city center. Lewis visited as well the Presidente Alemán housing project, a modernist building designed by architect Mario Pani in 1949 and of which he had little good to say. Families spent long evenings watching TV, and no signs of drama and conflict were visible. Middle classes, Lewis concluded, are extremely boring. 37 Despite this variety of experiences, Lewis spent the most time in Colonia Morelos, a central neighborhood adjacent to, and partially subsuming, the barrio of Tepito. Lewis was fascinated by Colonia Morelos and Tepito, which he documented with wonderful ethnographic detail. It was there as well that the “culture of poverty” theory first took shape.
Colonia Morelos was subdivided in the 1880s, when Mexico City experienced, after decades of stagnation, a period of growth and stability during the authoritarian government of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). 38 As in cities across the world, tramways heralded the ending of a “walking city” and segregated the population along class lines. Following transnational architectural models and enjoying the political and economic stability of the period, urban developers cracked up the colonial orthogonal grid and built neighborhoods for the higher and the lower echelons of society. Colonia Morelos was a typical working-class neighborhood. Initially bereft of urban services, it became part of a U-shaped area northeast of the city center known as the half-moon of criminality early in the twentieth century. 39 By the time Lewis visited, the area was known as the “horseshoe of slums” (herradura de tugurios), becoming a target for urban renewal by urban planners. 40
Colonia Morelos was legible for social scientists as a slum, not dissimilar to slums in the United States and Europe. Lewis described the Casa Grande vecindad as a “large one-story slum tenement, in the heart of Mexico City.” 41 While the neighborhood had been shaped by Mexico City’s historical connections with its rural and Indian hinterland, the words, concepts, and categories that were used to define it were part of a universal repertoire. “Slum” was clearly one of these words. “Marginality,” a word that would acquire a distinct Latin American ring in the 1970s, was another one. Lewis described the residents of Colonia Morelos as marginal and compared them to slum dwellers in Chicago or New York. Marginality, in fact, had been an important concept for sociologists who early in the twentieth century measured the degree to which Polish, Chinese, or Mexican migrants were integrated into the American melting pot. “Melting pot” was another shared metaphor, which Lewis deployed in his description of vecindades, where a “process of fusion of regional elements [made] for the development of a new composite.” 42 While Lewis was aware of the traits that made Colonia Morelos a unique neighborhood, his early work on Mexico City specifically engaged with a sociological tradition—made visible in his use of words such as slum or acculturation—that favored the making of comparisons between cities in different countries.
Beginning with the publication of Five Families, however, Lewis seemed to abandon this urban sociological framework to interrogate the “culture of poverty” from the perspective of individuals and families—an approach that put the subjectivity and psychology of individuals at the forefront. The literary qualities of Five Families and The Children of Sánchez were praised outside of the anthropological gild, but their theoretical underpinnings and lack of systematic data rendered many social scientists uneasy: it is probably fair to say that Lewis was more admired as a writer than a theorist. Saul Bellow, as tough a critic as there could be (and an anthropology graduate), was “fascinated” by the “ethnographic realism” of Five Families, which he correctly suspected would win Lewis “jibes and blows” from anthropologists. 43 For all their power, much evidence and context was missing from these books, which did not offer the reader the kind of hard systematic data included in Life in a Mexican Village. The Children of Sánchez only had a twenty-page introduction where Lewis provided some context on Mexico City and Colonia Morelos and explained what the culture of poverty was. Even such cursory introduction was a concession to Jason Epstein, the editor at Random House who pushed Lewis to make explicit, “how far could one generalize from [the Sánchez family] to other families in the same class in Mexico City[,] to all poor urban South American families [and] to all poor families living in cities generally?” 44
It is important to stress the open-ended nature of the books because, behind their family-centered approach—in line with the culture and personality school—emerges an array of questions that had been tackled by urban sociologists. This is not necessarily evident when reading Five Families and The Children of Sánchez, but the influence of such authors as Louis Wirth, Robert Park, St. Clair Drake, and Horace R. Clayton becomes salient on revision of Lewis’s archival materials. In other words, the book could have been written as—and can be compared with—such studies as Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto, Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis, and Herbert J. Gans’s The Urban Villagers. This becomes much clear when one reviews the massive ethnographic materials amassed by Lewis and his assistants in preparation for the book. Judging from these materials, it becomes clear that Lewis was particularly interested in the relationship between mobility, urban growth, and social disorganization, as well as with the relationship between Colonia Morelos and Mexico City as a whole, all “classic” themes for urban sociologists. He also continued to be intrigued by the question of the adequate scale for interrogating the social relationships in the city: the vecindad, the neighborhood, the city, or even a larger regional scale. Despite these possibilities, The Children of Sánchez was read—especially outside of Mexico—as an analysis of poverty, in closer conversation with clinical psychologists, behavioral scientists, and anthropologists than with sociologists or economists. This angle was favored by Lewis himself, who argued that the “culture of poverty” could be found across the world in both city and countryside. 45
Lewis’s archive tells a different story. Colonia Morelos—as an object of enquiry rather than the backdrop of a story—was at the center of several interviews that Lewis conducted with residents of the neighborhood. “I want to understand,” Lewis asked Roberto Sánchez in March 1960, “the differences within Colonia Morelos, its poorer and its wealthier sections, if this neighborhood is really a homogenous unit or if it is rich in differences?” 46 A few months later, Lewis interrogated Manuel Sánchez about Colonia Tepito, asking in typical Chicago School sociological jargon if Tepito was a “transitory region where families move and afterwards, after two or three generation, move elsewhere, or if it is already a stable region.” 47 Enrique Valenzuela, one of Lewis’s research assistants, described Colonia Morelos as an “ecological region,” part of the “proletarian zones” of Mexico City, a context that had a decisive influence over the relationships in the area. 48
Lewis described Colonia Morelos almost a self-contained universe (Figure 1). He noted that its residents possessed a strong territorial identity and conducted most of their activities within a few blocks. He also pointed out that “many inhabitants of the vecindad [had] very little familiarity with areas of Mexico City as a whole.” 49 Children played in the patios of vecindades, and women ran errands in nearby streets, taking advantage of their myriad shops and stores. Colonia Morelos, wrote a student of Lewis, was “plagued by small shops and tendajones . . . in every corner, in every hallway, on the streets even, one encounters second or third-hand products, mixed with popular dishes.” 50 Commercial and artisan jobs abounded, while factory works were rare. Therefore, while Lewis reinterpreted folk communities such as Tepoztlán by showing that they were rife with conflict and change, he discovered in the city tightly knit communities with long histories. Kinship played a crucial role in binding these communities together, as generations of urban anthropologists would confirm. “Relationships of kinship,” wrote Bernardo Valenzuela, another student of Lewis, “reveal the powerful cohesive force of the neighborhood; this complex web of interpersonal ties loses strength and closeness as it is pulled away from the center.” 51
Sketch/map courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Archives and Judith Lewis.
In his later writings Lewis overemphasized the autonomy, isolation, and marginality of Colonia Morelos and its vecindades. “People with a culture of poverty,” he wrote in 1968, one of his last iterations of the culture of poverty, “are provincial and locally oriented and have very little sense of history.” 52 But the people that Lewis met in Colonia Morelos displayed a high mobility, to use a term that Ernest W. Burgess used to characterize the dynamism of modern life. Even though most of the people that he met there led peripatetic and adventurous lives—migrating from Central Mexico to Mexico City, from Mexico City to the United States, or from Colonia Morelos to colonias proletarias in the outskirts of Mexico City—reading Lewis, one senses that his characters always came back to the streets of Colonia Morelos. The unity and magnetic pull of Colonia Morelos were at odds with Lewis’s earlier sensitivity to migration at an urban, regional, and international level. They were also at odds with Lewis’s interpretation of Colonia Morelos and its vecindades as a national melting pot. It is true that Lewis repeatedly clarified that only a small percentage of the poor shared the culture of poverty, but it is significant that all of the children of Sánchez, the family that first embodied the term, were highly mobile. Manuel Sánchez, the eldest son, even migrated to the United States at some point in his life, which defies any meaningful definition of the “culture of poverty.”
Lewis began his career as an urban anthropologist following migrants from Tepoztlán to Mexico City. But Tepoztlán was only a small node in the large constellation of towns and villages that sent migrants to Mexico City. This diversity is evident in the records of Lewis and his students, which described the weekly journeys that artisans in Colonia Morelos did to Toluca, San Martín Texmelucan, and Texcoco. 53 Most residents from Peluqueros, one of the two vecindades described in Five Families, migrated from cities in Central Mexico. Of thirteen families living in the small vecindad, two came from Querétaro, three from León, and one each from Toluca, Cuernavaca, Aguascalientes, and Tulancingo, Hidalgo. Three were born in Mexico City. 54 The kinship (parentesco and compadrazgo) relationships binding together the residents of Peluqueros, conjoined with their artisanal jobs and their exclusion from formal institutions such as unions and political parties, led Lewis and his student to understand Peluqueros as a marginal settlement. “Not even politics reaches this world, one of them wrote, except on the occasion when their unconscious votes are courted by professional politicians.” 55
It is ironic that Lewis’s research in Mexico City, which began studying upwardly mobile migrants, ended up focusing on Mexico City’s marginal slums. A similar irony traverses the research of the Chicago School of sociology, which grappled with the contradiction between the seemingly narrow horizons of U.S. ethnic communities and the fact that their members had migrated from far-away places. Mexico City thus followed familiar scripts of urban growth, rural-urban migration, and social change. When Lewis did research in Mexico City, he was making comparisons with U.S. cities by using a shared sociological repertoire, that is, words such as acculturation, ecological region, and slum—a comparative approach that is explicit and obvious in “Urbanization without Breakdown.” This comparative approach, however, seemed to recede by the time Lewis published Five Families and The Children of Sánchez. The literary style of these books, which attempted to capture the subjectivity of its characters, in addition to their theoretical framework—the “culture of poverty”—made it more difficult to make explicit comparisons between cities in the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere.
Poverty and Community in Mexico and the United States
Lewis never ceased to look for, and find, communities in megacities. But such communities could carry different meanings and perform different functions, depending on the context. In “Urbanization without Breakdown,” Lewis argued that kinship networks eased the transition of migrants from small towns to large cities, a claim that challenged the relationship between urbanization and breakdown posited by early twentieth-century sociologists. In the Mexican context, “urbanization without breakdown” represented an optimistic proposition: that routes toward urban modernity were varied, and that the Mexican one ought not to be as disruptive as some feared. But the same community that could act as a “shock absorber for the rural migrants of the city” acquired, by the late 1950s, a more negative meaning. 56 Rather than smoothing social change, the social networks and culture of the vecindad could hinder upward mobility, creating dispositions and attitudes that prevented urbanites from escaping poverty. This “culture of poverty” was initially coined with a positive connotation: asserting that the poor had a culture and that their lives were not defined by material deprivation. But the meaning of the term became increasingly negative. By 1966, when La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty was published, Lewis would write that the culture of poverty was “relatively thin” and that “the poverty of culture is one of the crucial aspects of the culture of poverty.” 57
The “culture of poverty” became the target of acerbic scholarly criticism. The term acquired a life of its own, becoming a sound bite easily separated from, as anthropologist Eleanor Burke Leacock put it, “Lewis’s contribution of data on life among poor Mexican families [which remained] generally respected.” 58 Critics contended that the formulation provided a new scientific veneer to old prejudices that held that the poor were poor because of their personal and familial shortcomings. Because the “culture of poverty” was transmitted across generations, it also gave new life to discredited ideas linking race and culture. Critics also pointed out that the culture of poverty gave more weight to psychological causes than social and economic structures as the master key for explaining poverty. Proponents of the culture of poverty, in short, “blamed the victim” for their own plight, an idiom that in fact originated in the context of these debates.
While Lewis was lambasted across the Americas, his formulation took on a different meaning in the United States, Mexico, and Latin America. As historians have shown, the soil was ripe for the “culture of poverty” to become a buzzword in the United States in the 1960s. 59 Taking advantage of labor opportunities opened by World War II, millions of African Americans moved from the South to northern cities that would soon be abandoned by white families pursuing the dream of suburbia. Antiracist civil rights legislation did not succeed in diminishing segregation in cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Washington. The persistence of segregation, compounded with the slow disappearance of industrial jobs in the city, hit African American neighborhoods and its residents, whose plight became extremely visible. In such context, amid the scandal that ensued the 1965 publication of Daniel Moynihan’s “The Negro Case: The Case for National Action,” Lewis’s arguments about the pervasiveness of class became arguments about the tenaciousness of race. As historian Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt has argued, “the War on Poverty became the war on the poverty on the black ghettos.” 60
The general affluence of the 1960s made it easier to view poverty as a pathology, particularly one that could be racially stigmatized. Followers of the culture and personality school favored this approach to the individual and the family, premised on the belief that behavior could be explained through psychological tests that disregarded the larger political economy of poverty and that could be applied in the most varied contexts, in small towns and large cities across the world. Lewis was never fully converted to this approach, but his work was influenced by his collaboration with psychiatrists and medical experts who provided evidence for sweeping, transnational, and decontextualized arguments that anthropologists rabidly criticized. 61 As historian Alice O’Connor explains, after his ambitious study of Tepoztlán, the idea of “the community or any other kind of larger context all but disappeared from Lewis’s analyses,” with the family becoming the main unit of analysis. 62 Lewis would write in his private correspondence, for instance, that “according to the Rorschach and T.A.T. analyses, [Jesús Sánchez] was fixated at the oral receptive level . . . and the history of his life has been a search for mother figures.” 63 The books that Lewis wrote after Tepoztlán could be read in this way, at least by culture and personality anthropologists and psychiatrists. This open-endedness was a partial result, as already pointed out, of the short introduction of the books and their highly original style and structure.
Lack of context for the reader did not imply ignorance on the part of the author, of course. Lewis was an informed and astute analyst of Mexican history and politics. He was well acquainted with “Mexicanist” circles in the U.S. and Mexico. For all the despair that the most extreme interpretations of the culture of poverty thesis could elicit, he was a firm believer in the change that a progressive government could bring to Mexico and other countries. For instance, Lewis was quite optimistic about the eradication of the culture of poverty on the part of the Cuban socialist regime. In reference to Mexico, he wrote to historian Frank Tannenbaum that “[w]e have the knowledge, skills, and resources to eliminate [poverty],” while lamenting “the failure of . . . Mexican institutions and leadership” in accomplishing such mission. And yet, he added in the same letter, the Sánchez’s “deep-seated personality problems” made them incapable of “fully tak[ing] advantage of the new opportunities of the Mexican scene.” 64 These writings reveal Lewis’s ambivalence toward the relationship between poverty, public policy, and culture. Although his books were written in part as a call to arms, from the left, to fight poverty, they could also elicit a feeling of futility about the possibilities of the task.
In Mexico, The Children of Sánchez stirred a nationalistic scandal. 65 The book was read by the pro-government Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (SMGE) as an American attack against the Mexican Revolution and government, a particularly hypocritical one since the United States was waging an imperialistic war against Vietnam while oppressing its black population at home. The SMGE denied the conditions portrayed in the book and questioned Lewis’s motivations, suggesting that he could be an FBI agent (in fact, Lewis was targeted by FBI agents, who were compiling a thick file on him). The SMGE accused Lewis of the crime of “social dissolution” and requested that the publisher, Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), did not reprint the book. The attorney general refused to take action against the charges, but Arnaldo Orfila Reynal (an Argentinian) was removed from the direction of the FCE. Public intellectuals came out in defense of Lewis. Most of them argued that The Children of Sánchez was an important book that brought to the fore a crucial problem. Urban chronicler and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis mocked the SGME by writing a “neat and decent” satirical script for the movie version of The Children of Sánchez. “Everything was joy and harmony” at the Sánchez “pent-house,” Monsiváis wrote. Marta and Consuelo played classic music while Roberto and Manuel served Chivas Regal to guests at a party. Luis Cataño Morlett, the most outspoken member of the SMGE, made a cameo in Monsiváis’s piece to explain to the viewer that in display was the “true, legitimate, and genuine existence of the Mexican poor.” 66
The FCE scandal probably helped Lewis’s reputation in Mexico on the long run, where he provided fresh air amid the conformity of the period. However, among scholarly circles, the culture of poverty received a significant backlash, both in Mexico and Latin America. The criticisms toward the book came from many of the same scholars who had praised “Urbanization without Breakdown.” Lewis’s old followers considered his new ideas methodologically imprecise and politically dangerous. In a representative rebuttal, Anthony Leeds argued that what Lewis called a culture was in fact a set of rational and functional responses to poverty and marginalization. Traits such as “gregariousness,” “lack of privacy,” and “living in overcrowded quarters” were not autonomous cultural traits but adaptations to low incomes and high rents. Leeds also faulted Lewis for not interrogating the relationship between the traits of the culture of poverty and the capitalist structure in which poverty emerged. 67
While Lewis was attacked with similar arguments across the Americas, the meat of his research elicited different responses. In the United States, Lewis’s characters were understood as clinical cases, displaying symptoms and behaviors that could be found in other locales in the world. Local context mattered little, so Lewis’s theory could be deployed to understand and ultimately stigmatize poor urbanites in the United States. The 1966 publication of La Vida hit too close to home in the United States and was met with a moral outrage similar to that of The Children of Sánchez in Mexico. The Ríos family, wrote Lewis, was “closer to the expression of an unbridled id than any other people I have studied”; compared to them, the Sánchez family seemed “mild, repressed, and almost middle-class.” 68 The introduction to La Vida was read widely, certainly more than the body of the book. It is probably Lewis’s most quoted piece, and one of the most disliked.
In Mexico and Latin America, Lewis was read as much more than a theorist. Culture of poverty aside, the content of his books was important and could be used across the disciplines at a time of great demand for urban studies. Context and details mattered, very much so, so the baby did not have to be thrown out with the bathwater. Lewis’s conclusions could be rejected or simply ignored while his research provided evidence for other arguments. For example, political scientists, sociologists, and geographers read passages of The Children of Sánchez as evidence of the social capital that Mexico City’s slums had. After reading Lewis and his students—some of whom published their own work—Claude Bataillon described Mexico City as a “cultural melting pot that offered a remarkable social and professional mobility,” a point that readers have continued to make. 69 Indeed, when Lewis’s urban writings were read along with those set in Tepoztlán, the conditions of Mexico City became in comparison benign. Such reading probably rang truer in Mexico than in the United States, since low-income urbanites such as the Sánchez were, in a poor and rural country, relatively lucky. A cartoon published in the weekly Siempre! captured this stance toward the book. In it, a pair of journalists interview a shirtless and undernourished man outside of his hut in a barren countryside. “Yes,” read the caption, “the Sánchez are our rich relatives in the city” (Figure 2).
Siempre, March 17, 1965.
Writing in the 1970s, two decades after Lewis conducted his research, sociologist Susan Eckstein described Tepito and Colonia Morelos in an ambivalent, not altogether negative light. Bustling with activity, its “buildings, streets, small shops, and local markets [were] filled with people selling a wide array of goods to customers from diverse parts of the city.” Eckstein characterized this “inner-city slum” as a stable community with “a core of residents who were born and raised locally” and who did “not wish to leave.” 70 A stable slum community would have been an oxymoron for earlier sociologists who had understood slums as disorganized and unstable. There was a richness in the slum amid the poverty that struck Lewis and his readers, certain exuberance close to what sociologists would later call social capital.
In his 1967 chronicle “Tepito como leyenda,” Carlos Monsiváis evoked the many layers of the legend of the barrio, a place where solidarity and misery coexisted. This richness contrasted with the “anonymous” and “impersonal” “megalopolis” that emerged following World War II. 71 Monsiváis was the most emblematic of a long line of writers who have made of Tepito one of the most beloved neighborhoods in Mexico City. The best evidence of this change is found in the word barrio, which has replaced “slum” (tugurio) as Tepito’s most common moniker. Tepito is a dangerous and rough neighborhood (a barrio bravo), a central node of crime and contraband, but it is also admired and praised as a place of community, tradition, and authenticity. Anthropologists and scholars of culture tend to write about it with sympathetic eyes. 72 Most of them quote Lewis, whose descriptions continue to influence how the place is perceived. Unknowingly perhaps, Lewis participated in a larger story by which the meaning of the word “slum” shifted in the 1960s, from a place of disorder to one of belonging and tradition, from metropolis to community.
A similar reevaluation of the slum—of some slums at least—was taking place in the United States. In 1961, Jane Jacobs published Death and Life of Great American Cities—she and Lewis shared an editor, Random House’s Jason Epstein. 73 A year later, Herbert J. Gans published Urban Villagers, a study that quoted Lewis and that, as Jacobs’s Death and Life, reinterpreted the slum as a place of community and belonging. One suspects that Jacobs would have read with delight the descriptions of Colonia Morelos that Lewis’s students compiled in the late 1950s, which describe the neighborhood as a universe of vecindades, restaurants, bakeries, beauty salons, and other small businesses bustling with people of all ages. 74
For all the differences between the anthropologist and the urban critic, Lewis and Jacobs shared a degree of obliviousness toward race and the circumstances that made black poverty and segregation qualitatively different from that suffered by other groups. Highly original when it came to analyzing streets, sidewalks, and store fronts, Jacobs was rather mute when it came to reflecting on the singular nature of the experience of African Americans in Harlem or Bronzeville, Chicago. This omission was so remarkable that Epstein urged her to include the “Negro question” in Death and Life—which she ultimately did not. 75 Likewise, Lewis’s emphasis on a culture of poverty shared by “Negroes, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, American-Indians, and Southern poor whites” had the effect of downplaying the unique role that enforced legal segregation had had in American cities. 76 As Epstein’s plea to Jacobs suggests, the “Negro question” was becoming the question for U.S. cities in the early 1960s, a centrality that would only increase with the publication of the Moynihan Report, the civil rights movement, and the urban riots of the period.
Starting in the 1980s, historians documented how government policies and market forces transformed segregation in American cities following World War II. If segregation increased, many of its mechanisms became more subtle, pervasive, and less reliant on explicit racist legislation; these mechanisms included redlining practices developed by the federal government, federal subsidies for the development of suburbs, and urban renewal and public housing projects in neighborhoods where African Americans lived. 77 By emphasizing the culture and behavior of individuals and families, the “culture of poverty” contributed to making invisible how this “second ghetto” was made. 78 The term also narrowed the political and urbanistic imagination in the United States for at least two decades, an ironic turn if we consider Lewis’s own beliefs regarding the role of public policy in combatting poverty. As historian Michael B. Katz and others have argued, “amputated from its liberal [1960s] origins,” the “culture of poverty” became “a conservative rationalization for cutting welfare” in the 1970s and 1980s. 79 Lewis died in 1970, so he would not live to see the afterlives and consequences of the term that he had coined. Given his intellectual and political trajectory, it is possible that they would not have pleased him. In any case, it is unlikely that he could have controlled how the “culture of poverty” would be understood, deployed, or manipulated.
*
Ideas seemingly came full circle. In the early 1950s, Lewis deployed, and then challenged, the “rural-urban continuum” theory to make sense of midcentury Mexico City. Less than a decade later, Lewis came up with the “culture of poverty” theory, which would boomerang back to the United States in the 1960s. But the story is not that simple. As historians have shown, theories and categories were generated through transnational circuits of knowledge that encompassed the city and the countryside, race and culture, Mexico and the United States. Where ideas were created matters less than the context in which they were received and the possibilities for use and misuse that they offered. The contrast between “urbanization without breakdown” and the “culture of poverty” is not as dramatic as the reception that both theories were granted in Mexico and the United States. Why, then, did “urbanization without breakdown” make Lewis a trailblazer within liberal circles in Latin America while the “culture of poverty” became a profoundly pessimistic notion, deplored by scholars and policymakers across the Americas?
In the 1960s United States, Lewis intervened in a fraught political and intellectual field where “the fusion of poverty, race, and cities” gave rise to the notion of a pervasive “urban crisis.” 80 Ultimately, it matters little that Lewis did not pay much attention to race. In the U.S. context, the “culture of poverty”—as a catchphrase, more than a theory—was bound to add fuel to arguments about the inescapability of race and the irreversible decline of the American city.
In the 1950s Mexico and Latin America, the demand for urban studies was enormous and unmet. “Urbanization” represented a state project that nevertheless elicited profound fears, since many considered Latin America a traditional, agrarian, and rural region of the world. In this promising yet uncertain context, “Urbanization without Breakdown” represented a breath of fresh air. Lewis’s emphasis on resilient migrant networks and the original urban cultures that they bred inspired a generation of authors—architect John F. C. Turner and anthropologists William Mangin and Janice Perlman come to mind—that portrayed Latin America’s migrant neighborhoods as spaces of community and hope. “Slums of hope” was, indeed, the formulation that captured this perspective during the 1960s and 1970s. 81 Latin American squatter settlements were not a problem but a solution to the challenge of urbanization, quipped William Mangin in a representative article from this period. While most of these authors conducted research in peripheral squatter settlements and not in the central slums studied by Lewis, his insights were still instrumental to the emergence of this scholarship. 82 Over the following two decades, the United States’ “urban crisis” and Latin America’s “slums of hope” shaped scholarly agendas and attitudes toward cities. Oscar Lewis was a critical influence for these contradictory interpretations. In the end, however, his ideas became entangled in the larger fears and expectations elicited by cities across the Americas.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was presented at the Latin American History Workshop at the University of Chicago, where I received important insights and criticisms. Conversations with, and readings from, Enrique Dávila, Brodwyn Fischer, Chris Lesser, Erin McCullugh, Mauricio Tenorio, and an anonymous reviewer also helped me improve the argument and presentation.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.