Books: The Culture of Poverty

LA VIDA by Oscar Lewis. 669 pages. Random House. $10.

At 40, Fernanda Fuentes Ríos, a Puerto Rican American of Negro blood, has had six husbands. Junior, her sixth, is 19. Fernandá’s youngest daughter Cruz is 18. She is currently estranged from her third husband, but not to the point of refusing him occasional access to her favors. Felicita and Soledad, two other daughters of Fernanda’s, are whores. They are also good mothers, although somewhat unconventional: the lullabies that soothe Felicita’s children would redden a longshoreman’s ears. Fernanda’s only son, Simplicio, 21, ran away from home at six and became a father at 14.

Suffocating & Ugly. Whatever the Ríoses may suffer from—and they are all desperately poor—it is clearly not repression. Anthropologist-Author Oscar Lewis found them “closer to the expression of an unbridled id than any other people I have studied.” As in his earlier experiments with total sociology —Five Families, The Children of Sánchez—Lewis lets his subjects tell their story into a tape recorder. In Sanchez, this approach produced something very much like poetry, as a fiercely proud, slum-dwelling Mexican family exposed their seams and their hearts to Lewis’ patient, uncritical machine. In La Vida, the effect is suffocating and ugly.

Poverty itself is both suffocating and ugly, and when its portrait is drawn by the victims, no one can doubt its reality. But there can be such a thing as too much detail, particularly if the details do not vary much. One rat bite can serve for a hundred. The assorted Ríoses are sometimes indistinguishable; the reader may find himself turning back to the chapter heading to see which one is talking now. He may get lost, too, in the endless procession of Ríos swains, lovers, husbands and cash customers, and in the steady passages between San Juan and New York.

Only a sociologist, perhaps, is equipped to digest the mountains of raw data that Lewis’ technique produces, to assay the yards of tape, the stenographic interviews, the conscientious catalogues of someone’s wardrobe, someone else’s orange-crate kitchen shelf. In a foreword, Lewis makes an effort to summarize, for non-sociologists, the book’s message. In most ways, this summary is more successful and more illuminating than the ensuing panorama of unbridled ids.

Lewis draws a distinction between poverty and what he calls the “culture of poverty”—a perpetuation, at society’s lowest levels, of the patterns of life that form, over generations and sometimes centuries, a kind of prison. It is a prison whose door stands open a crack, says Lewis, but it is also one from which the inmates do not readily escape: “It is much more difficult to eliminate the culture of poverty than to eliminate poverty per se.”

Undeniable Claim. La Vida asserts this point with overwhelming strength. The Ríoses are trapped, trapped among other reasons by force of habit, even by inclination—”Hey, I’m proud to be poor!” says Simplicio—and once this occurs to the reader, he begins to lose interest in them. They are, to begin with, not very interesting people, unlike the Sánchezes, whose brotherhood to all humanity constituted a claim that no one could deny.