Books: From the Lower Depths

THE CHILDREN OF SÁNCHEZ (499 pp.)—Oscar Lewis—Random House ($7.50).

This extraordinary book was written by a social scientist with a tape recorder, a combination not usually promising literary excitement. But it is not only a fascinating documentary but a work of art created by reality itself, an edited record of fact that comes closer than most contemporary fiction to the force of literature.

The Children of Sánchez is the story of a family of live slum dwellers in modern Mexico City. Oscar Lewis, a University of Illinois anthropologist who has devoted most of his career to Latin America, met the Sanchez family in 1956 during a study of Mexico City’s Casa Grande vecindad (tenement). He took a preliminary look at them in a 1959 book describing a day in the lives of Five Families, concluded that the Sánchez clan was typical of much in Mexican life and decided to study them in depth. The book is told by the Sánchez family themselves in the uninhibited idiom of Mexico’s lower depths, which for originality of thought and richness of filth makes American-slum or Skid Row language seem puritanical and pale. But along with the four-letter words are warm passages of glistening simplicity and flights of startling insight. As each Sánchez tells of his own struggle for respect, love and individuality, the squalor fades into a natural backdrop for the intense drama of five human beings.

Walking in Darkness. Jesús Sánchez, born in 1910 in the state of Veracruz, grew up knowing that his place in life was that of a poor workman. “There is nothing better in this world than upright work,” he says—to the constant irritation of his children. Lenore (“the first woman I ever had”) bore him two boys, Manuel and Roberto, and two girls, Consuelo and Marta. Of the four, only Marta holds his affection. He considers the rest ungrateful, worthless drifters. “They don’t like to have anyone order them around.” he says. “First they want to be millionaires and then get a job.”

Lenore died shortly after Marta was born. Manuel, the oldest, was eight at the time. “I was asleep on a mat on the floor next to my brother Roberto. My little sisters, Consuelo and Marta, slept on the bed with my mamá and papá. As though in a dream, I heard my father calling. He called to us when he saw my mother slipping away from him. I was always a sound sleeper and my father had to shout. ‘Get up, you bastards! Hijos de la chingada! Your mother is dying and you lying there. On your feet, cabrones! Then I got up, very scared.”

Later, Jesés took another common-law wife—like all the men in his crowd, he was leary of church or civil marriage, preferring, at least in theory, to keep his freedom. Manuel imitated his father. By the time he was 14, he fell madly in love with a hot-blooded waitress, then, to spite her for an imagined wrong, took up with her best friend in the standard common-law arrangement. Before she died, he had four children by her. Once he tried to establish a small shoe factory, “but unfortunately, I was completely incompetent.” He became a gambler, a floater, a wetback, left his children with anyone who would take them. “Looking back on my life, I can see that it was based on a chain of errors,” he says. “I have treated it frivolously.”

His sister Consuelo, a woman of remarkable, poetic sensitivity who in the book serves as a kind of chorus for her family, perhaps understands him best. “He reminded me of a person walking backwards in darkness, without setting foot upon solid ground. His gaze was fixed upon little stars shining in the firmament. He tried to catch them and when he managed to get one, he would sit down there in the infinite emptiness and play with it until its dazzling light lost its power. He never looked to either side or downward, because if he did he would see the dark abyss beneath him.”

A Broken Road. By far the saddest, most sympathetic of the four children is Roberto, a brawler and thief whom Consuelo sees as “a frightened child whose intelligence has been sidetracked by the broken road.” Roberto, even more than the others, is looking for love and security. The night his mother died, he recalls, “I got secretly in bed with her. They were looking for me, and I was sleeping next to my mother under the sheet they had covered her with.”

Convinced that he is “unworthy of being loved,” Roberto is the most loved of all, except by his father—even though he spent seven months in one penitentiary, broke out of another under a hail of bullets. He emerged with an undying hatred of the police, but remains a simple, confused idealist. He is also a devout, mystical Catholic, who loves to walk barefoot to remote shrines as a gesture of penance and thanks.

Simplest of all the children is Marta, the youngest, a tomboy who worshiped Roberto, followed him joyously all over Mexico City clinging precariously to the back of a streetcar and, like Roberto, left school after the first grade. She also joined a gang of tenement girls, fell in love at age twelve, “slipped” at age 14. She had three children with the man. After many battles, they separated, and she was married to a drunkard who has to depend on her father for support.

A Breaking Name. As for Consuelo herself, nicknamed “Skinny,” she is a sickly, tormented introvert who stares at herself in the water of a pond and thinks, “Consuelo, Consuelo, what a strange name. It doesn’t even sound like the name of a person. It sounds thin, as though it were breaking.” Brittle and headstrong, she is the least understood, probably the least loved of the Sanchez children. She fought with her brothers to defend her father’s third “wife,” whom she loved, but she hated the fourth so much that she left home.

For a slum girl, Consuelo got a good education: grammar school and trade school, where she learned to type. She went to work for a businessman, lost her job when she refused to let him make love to her. Despite her revulsion of sex, Consuelo finally let herself be seduced. “Caray,” she says. “So many things have happened to me since then. What can I do to stop punishing myself? Was it bad luck or bad faith that was my undoing. Not a day goes by when I do not have some filthy proposition, nor a powerful reason to accept it. But now nothing-matters to me, not morality, nor principles, nor my love for my family.”

Take a Stone. These neither short nor simple annals of the poor—with their startling mixture of faith and cynicism, brutality and love—have compelling social and political significance to the U.S.; they describe some of the problems that plague Mexico’s poverty-ridden, one-party democracy, and, for that matter, much of Latin America. Not that the Sanchez family is anti-American or envious of U.S. riches, as one might expect; on the contrary, its members see the U.S. as a land of hope.

Unpredictable in all things, the Sánchez family not only exemplifies how environment affects people, but, more importantly, how different people differ in the same environment. Thus Author Lewis notes the supreme irony in the Sánchez story: by working doggedly through the years, “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.” The reason is given by Consuelo, the poet:

“For example, if someone gave Manuel a common stone, he would hold it in his hand and look at it eagerly. In a few seconds, it would begin to shine and he would see that it was made of silver, then of gold, then of the most precious things imaginable, until the glitter died.

“Roberto would hold the same stone and would murmur, ‘Mmmmm. What is this good for?’ But he wouldn’t know the answer.

“Marta would hold it in her hand for just a moment, and without a thought would throw it carelessly away.

“I, Consuelo, would look at it, wonderingly. ‘What might this be? Is it, could it be, what I have been looking for?’

“But my father would take the stone and set it on the ground. He would look for another and put it on top of the first one, and then another and another, until no matter how long it took, he had finally turned it into a house.”