The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family Paperback - 1979

First line

I CAN SAY I HAD NO CHILDHOOD, I WAS BORN IN A POOR LITTLE VILLAGE in the state of Veracruz.

Media reviews

“One of the outstanding contributions of anthropology—of all time.”
—Margaret Mead
 
“Lewis has made something brilliant and of singular significance, a work of such unique concentration and sympathy that one hardly knows how to classify it. It is all, every bit of it except for the introduction, spoken by the members of the Sánchez family. They tell their feeling, their lives, explain their nature, their actual existence with all the force and drama and seriousness of a large novel. . . . The result is a moving, strange tragedy, not an interview, a questionnaire or a sociological study.”
—Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Times Book Review
 
“A significant account of poverty as a culture unto itself. . . . An anthropological classic.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“This book—often brutal, sometimes revolting, but always powerful and compelling in its vivid truth—reveals poverty as the reader could not know it unless he lived it.”
—The Washington Post
 
“Extraordinary. . . . 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.”
—Time
 
“Oscar Lewis’s books on Mexico and Puerto Rico awakened in many of us a feeling that we must do more to alleviate the world’s poverty.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
 
“Panoramic. . . . The Children of Sánchez is an amazing achievement. . . . So exciting, so moving, so full of human warmth and sadness.”
—The Spectator
 
“The exciting thing about The Children of Sánchez, the fact which makes it a new point of departure in its field, is its humanity, its quality of projecting the individual, agonizing voice of the poor as they describe their own plight. This is a real accomplishment, original and full of substance.”
—Michael Harrington, Commonweal
 
“[Lewis’s] masterpiece. . . . Uniquely, for me, his book depicts a world—the society of poverty—which creates its own survival structures and rationale. Its voices are at once warm and cynical, hoping and resigned. To read it is to be forcibly woken from the middle-class dream.”
—Colin Thubron, The Sunday Telegraph (London)
 
“Lewis has created a book of far greater and more lasting significance than any sociological treatise is likely to be . . . a work that eludes classification, for what it tragically and beautifully portrays is not fiction. . . . This book is a classic in the exact sense—it is a standard by which other books of the same kind may be judged, and it is a touchstone for our evaluation of literature and of life itself.”
—The Scotsman
 
“Rightly revered. . . . Most participant-observer sociologists (like Robert Coles) owe much to its perceptive author.”
—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
 
“Indeed, both sociology and psychology stand to benefit from a study in which social surroundings and emotional problems are so clearly intertwined.”
—Scientific American
 
“Here at last is a social scientist who neither explains poverty nor sits in judgment of it. . . . Whether judged as literature or as sociology The Children of Sánchez is a masterpiece.”
—New Statesman
 
“A work of enormous influence and very great beauty. . . . The Children of Sánchez does not need any frame of reference; it is raw material made miraculously available to workers in a host of fields ranging from pure sociology through anthropology to psychology.”
—The Sunday Observer
 
“The crime of poverty is exposed in these stories with a precision and immediacy which never destroys the humanity of the individual. . . . We gain in the case of this book, a narrative which is continuously readable and continuously frightening.”
—The Sunday Times (London)