by Oscar Lewis
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 herb
s 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.
The major television programs are sponsored by foreign controlled companies like Nestlé, General Motors, Ford, Procter & Gamble and Colgate. Only the use of the Spanish language and Mexican artists distinguish the commercials from those in the United States. American department-store retail practices have been made popular in most of the large cities by stores like Woolworth’s and Sears Roebuck and Co., and self-service supermarkets now package many American brand foods for the growing middle class. English has replaced French as a second language in the schools, and the French tradition in medicine is slowly but surely being replaced by U.S. medicine.
Despite the increased production and the apparent prosperity, the uneven distribution of the growing national wealth has made the disparity between the incomes of the rich and the poor more striking than ever before. And despite some rise in the standard of living for the general population, in 1956 over 60 percent of the population were still ill fed, ill housed, and ill clothed, 40 percent were illiterate, and 46 percent of the nation’s children were not going to school. A chronic inflation since 1940 has squeezed the real income of the poor, and the cost of living for workers in Mexico City has risen over five times since 1939. According to the census of 1950 (published in 1955), 89 percent of all Mexican families reporting income earned less than 600 pesos a month, or $69 at the 1950 rate of exchange and $48 at the 1960 rate. (There are 12.50 pesos to the dollar.) A study published in 1960 by a competent Mexican economist, Ifigenia M. de Navarrete, showed that between 1950 and 1957 approximately the lower third of the national population suffered a decrease in real income.
It is common knowledge that the Mexican economy cannot give jobs to all of its people. From 1942 to 1955 about a million and a half Mexicans came to the United States as braceros or temporary agricultural laborers, and this figure does not include “wetbacks” or other illegal immigrants. Were the United States suddenly to close its borders to the braceros, a major crisis would probably occur in Mexico. Mexico also has become increasingly dependent upon the U.S. tourist trade to stabilize its economy. In 1957 over 700,000 tourists from the United States spent almost six hundred million dollars in Mexico, to make tourism the single largest industry in the country. The income from the tourist trade is about equal to the total Mexican federal budget.
One aspect of the standard of living which has improved very little since 1940 is housing. With the rapidly rising population and urbanization, the crowding and slum conditions in the large cities are actually getting worse. Of the 5.2 million dwellings reported in the Mexican census of 1950, 60 percent had only one room and 25 percent two rooms; 70 percent of all houses were made of adobe, wood, poles and rods, or rubble, and only 18 percent of brick and masonry. Only 17 percent had private, piped water.
In Mexico City conditions are no better. The city is made more beautiful each year for U.S. tourists by building new fountains, planting flowers along the principal streets, building new hygienic markets, and driving the beggars and vendors off the streets. But over a third of the city’s population lives in slumlike housing settlements known as vecindades where they suffer from a chronic water shortage and lacking elementary sanitary facilities. Usually, vecindades consist of one or more rows of single-story dwellings with one or two rooms, facing a common courtyard. The dwellings are constructed of cement, brick, or adobe and form a well-defined unit that has some of the characteristics of a small community. The size and types of the vecindades vary enormously. Some consist of only a few dwellings, others of a few hundred. Some are found in the commercial heart of the city, in run-down sixteenth- and seventeenth-century two- and three-story Spanish colonial buildings, while others, on the outskirts of the city, consist of wooden shacks or jacales and look like semi-tropical Hoovervilles.
It seems to me that the material in this book has important implications for our thinking and our policy in regard to the underdeveloped countries of the world and particularly Latin America. It highlights the social, economic, and psychological complexities which have to be faced in any effort to transform and eliminate the culture of poverty from the world. It suggests that basic changes in the attitudes and value systems of the poor must go hand in hand with improvements in the material conditions of living.
Even the best-intentioned governments of the underdeveloped countries face difficult obstacles because of what poverty has done to the poor. Certainly most of the characters in this volume are badly damaged human beings. Yet with all of their inglorious defects and weaknesses, it is the poor who emerge as the true heroes of contemporary Mexico, for they are paying the cost of the industrial progress of the nation. Indeed, the political stability of Mexico is grim testimony to the great capacity for misery and suffering of the ordinary Mexican. But even the Mexican capacity for suffering has its limits, and unless ways are found to achieve a more equitable distribution of the growing national wealth and a greater equality
of sacrifice during the difficult period of industrialization, we may expect social upheavals, sooner or later.
Prologue
Jesús Sánchez
I CAN SAY I HAD NO CHILDHOOD. I WAS BORN IN A POOR LITTLE VILLAGE in the state of Veracruz. Very lonely and sad is what it was. In the provinces a child does not have the same opportunities children have in the capital. My father didn’t allow us to play with anybody, he never bought us toys, we were always alone. I went to school for only one year when I was about eight or nine years old.
We always lived in one room, like the one I live in today, just one room. We all slept there, each on his little bed made of boards and boxes. In the morning, I would get up and make the sign of the cross. I washed my face and my mouth and went to haul the water. After breakfast, if they didn’t send me for wood, I would sit in the shade. Usually, I would take a machete and rope and would go into the countryside to look for dry wood. I came back carrying a huge bundle on my back. That was my work when I lived at home. I worked since I was very small. I knew nothing of games.
My father was a mule driver in his youth. He would buy goods and transport them to distant towns for sale. He was completely illiterate. Later he set up a tiny stand on a road near the village where we were born. Then we moved to another village where my father opened a small general store. He had only twenty-five pesos in his pocket when he arrived there, but with that capital he began to work up his business. He had a compadre who sold him a large sow for twenty pesos and that sow gave him eleven pigs in each litter. At that time, a two-month-old pig was worth ten pesos. One was a gentleman with ten pesos then! Pesos were really worth something! And that was how my father began over again, with much perseverance and saving he lifted his head again. He began to learn to reckon, to add figures for his accounts and, all by himself, he even learned to read a little. Much later he opened a really big store with a lot of goods, in the village of Huachinango.
