The Children of Sanchez Read Free Page A

family—its history, the personalities of its members, and the dynamic of their relationships. As you read it I hope you will see them in all their humanity and complexity while never losing sight of what Hardwick called the book’s “chief character,” the poverty that shadowed the family’s every step.
    —SMR
    ----
    1 Letter from Margaret Mead to Jason Epstein, February 28, 1962; letter from Luís Buñel to Oscar Lewis, February 6, 1966; Fidel Castro to Oscar Lewis in personal conversation, March 1968; Elizabeth Hardwick, “Some Chapters of Personal History,”
New York Times Book Review
, August 27, 1961,1;
Time
, December 26, 1969, 56.
    2 Hardwick, “Some Chapters of Personal History.”
    3 More of Consuelo’s interviews were hand-recorded than taped, and some she took down in shorthand and typed herself. In addition part of the material in her story and Manuel’s came from short essays they wrote on assigned topics.
    4 The tapes, transcriptions, community survey data, and other primary material used in preparing the book were placed in the University of Illinois Library Archives more than forty years ago, where they have been used in the research of Latin Americanists, linguists, oral historians, and other scholars.
    5 “Mexican Slum Story Defeats the Censorship,”
London Times
, May 20, 1965.
    6 A summary of the legal case and of the national discussion that followed, including statements made by Carlos Fuentes and others, can be found in
Mundo Nuevo
, September 1966.
    7 Decision of the attorney general of Mexico, Preliminary Investigation no. 331/965. The text was published as an appendix to the 3rd-5th editions of
Los Hijos de Sánchez
and in
Mundo Nuevo
, September 1966.
    8 Interview with Elena Poniatowska,
Siempre
(Supplement), June 19, 1963. Translated from the Spanish.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    In the course of writing this book I have asked a number of my friends and colleagues to read and comment on the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Professor Conrad Arensberg and Professor Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University, to Professor William F. Whyte of Cornell University, and to Professor Sherman Paul of the University of Illinois, for reading the final version. I should also like to thank Margaret Shedd, Kay Barrington, Dr. Zelig Skolnik, Professor Zella Luria, Professor Charles Shattuck and Professor George Gerbner for reading an early version of the Consuelo story; Professor Richard Eells for reading part of the Manuel story, and Professor Ralph W. England for reading the Roberto story. For their critical reading of the Introduction I am grateful to Professor Irving Goldman, Professor Joseph B. Casagrande, Professor Louis Schneider, Professor Joseph D. Phillips, and my son Gene L. Lewis.
    I am grateful to Dr. Mark Letson and Mrs. Caroline Lujan, of Mexico City, for analyzing the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests and for their many helpful insights on the character structure of the members of the Sánchez family. The test protocols, the analyses and my own evaluation of them will be published at a later date. To Asa Zatz I am indebted for his fine translation of much of the field data upon which this book is based. To Gerald Markley, I am grateful for his assistance in translating some of the materials which appear in the Marta story. To my wife, Ruth M. Lewis, companion and collaborator in my Mexican studies, I give thanks for her invaluable assistance in organizing and editing my field materials.
    I am indebted to the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship in1956; to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and to the Social Science Research Council for grants-in-aid in 1958, and to the National Science Foundation for a research grant in 1959. Finally, at the University of Illinois, I should like to thank the University Research Board for financial assistance, the Center For Advanced Studies for a fourteen-month research assignment in Mexico, and the Department of Anthropology