The Children of Sanchez Read Free

readability. But the tape recorder was the least of the tools necessary to produce this book. In addition to the years of research that went into producing the setting and context, and the enormously skillful editing by Ruth Lewis, one has to have interviewees as articulate as the Sánchezes with all their force of personality and panache.
    The family’s vivid first-person testimony also produced some critics who thought it too frank and detailed in its description of poverty and family life. This was nowhere more true than in Mexico where conservative critics, inspired by nationalist sentiment (or by xenophobia in the view of Carlos Fuentes and other defenders of the book), were enraged by a foreigner “exposing” Mexico’s poverty, as if it were some carefully guarded national secret. In 1964, when the government-funded Fondo de Cultura Económica published the first Spanish-language edition, the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics petitioned Mexico’s attorney general to file criminal charges against Lewis for obscenity and defamation of the Mexican people and government. Lewis was called an FBI agent, and Jesús Sánchez’s characterizations of party-dominated unions as useless and of government officials as being on the payroll of drug traffickers, were said to have been words “put in his mouth” by a foreigner.
    For five months defenders and opponents of the book carried on what the
London Times
called “one of the stormiest public intellectual debates Mexico has known.” 5 In round-table debates, television programs, newspaper and magazine articles, critics and defenders argued the book’s merits and issues of government censorship. 6 Oneopponent of censorship asked if studying poverty had now become “subversive science.” Others wondered why, if a foreigner describing poverty in Mexico so endangered the nation, there had been no outcry a few years earlier when the Fondo published
Five Families
. With sales of the book suspended pending a decision from the attorney general, copies were selling on the black market for three to four times the list price. Meanwhile the Sánchezes became “Mexico’s most celebrated family” and the book a bestseller.
    In April 1965, Mexico’s attorney general handed down a decision saying the chances of the book offending public morals or threatening the public order were “so remote” that to press charges would do greater harm to “freedom and the law” than allowing the book to remain in circulation. 7 The decision also cleared the Fondo’s highly respected director of seventeen years, the Argentine-born Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, but even so, he was forced to resign and the Fondo relinquished its publication rights. (Recently the Fondo reacquired Spanish-language rights to
The Children of Sánchez
and is again publishing Lewis’s work.)
    There can be little doubt that those Mexicans who tried to suppress the book were most upset by the ability and willingness of poor people to describe their lives to a foreigner and to direct anger at the government and politicians. Some simply could not accept that it was
not
Lewis speaking. In a 1963 interview for the Mexican journal
Siempre
, Lewis attributed the literary qualities of the book solely to the eloquence of the Sánchezes. “If I could have written a book like
The Children of Sánchez
I would never have become an anthropologist.… [But] I am an anthropologist, first, second, and third. I am only an anthropologist.” 8 True, yet were it not for his ability to see the potential in the Sánchezes’ words, the tremendous effort of gathering and editing the data, and the compassionate yet uncompromising sensibility that gave this book its final form, we would never have known
the
Sánchezes.
    Of all the subtitles the Lewises considered for the book, their final choice, “Autobiography of a Mexican Family,” was probably the mostaccurate. Because in the end this is a book by and about a remarkable