Voices of the Poor

...Though Lewis deals with only a segment of the Puerto Rican poor in his book, it is possible that the cultural disintegration is even more widespread among the middle class...

...And one rarely encounters as Gargantuan a figure as Fernanda, the mother of the Rios family, who is "as frank as I am ugly" and who-like many other women in the slums-has been "in the life" of prostitution to keep her family alive...

...While today's U.S...

...Cruz lived in Las Esmeralda, the fictional name for a labyrinthine seaside slum in Puerto Rico's capital city...

...This point was illustrated in a recent piece in the San Juan daily tabloid El Imparcial...

...Thus, while the culture of poverty is painful in Mexico (as Lewis has pointed out in previous books such as The Children of S??nchez and Five Families) it is doubly acute in Puerto Rico...

...While many Puerto Ricans are minimally functional in their own language, the native tongue has been displaced as the language needed in order to "get ahead," since even the humblest file clerks are expected to have a working knowledge of English...

...And if Gunnar Myrdal's "law of cumulative circular causation" is indeed valid-that any association tying together partners of unequal strength will, instead of equalizing their position, make the rich richer and the poor poorer-then Puerto Rico, which in a few decades has lifted itself up from the status of "The Poorhouse of the Caribbean," may be perpetually doomed to being "The Poorhouse of the U.S.A.' La Vida also indicates that culturally Puerto Rico is in a steady process of disintegration, what Seda-Bonilla calls "an existential collapse a landslide type of social erosion of the concepts that help to define the identity of individuals and their traditional obligations and rights while no substitute models of behavior have been offered-except those which accord political capital to opportunistic politicians or those which have been acquired by migrants in the slums of large cities in the United States...

...state, Puerto Rico has a long uphill path ahead...

...An operation may make Cruz physically "straight," but unless she is a rare exception the tenacious nature of her basic values and attitudes will keep her submerged in the culture of poverty...

...But at the end of the road is the dismaying reality that from 20-25 per cent of the American people are poor...

...It's not uncommon to hear someone refer to "el invoice" in a San Juan office building, and most gas station attendants will give you a blank look if you ask to have your bujias-spark plugs-changed, but will spring into action when you say espares, which is a mongreliza-tion of the English...

...I wipe my ass with men...

...Puerto Ricans have lived a century in the space of a decade or two...

...Nowhere is this slow, painful process more poignantly illustrated than in the case of Fernanda's youngest daughter Cruz, who has a crippled leg...

...Lewis affirms this in his introduction: "In Mexico even the poorest slum dwellers have a much richer sense of the past and a deeper identification with the Mexican tradition than do Puerto Ricans with their tradition...

...Cruz explains one vicious-circle aspect of slum life: "Every other Thursday before the social worker comes I can clean my house from top to bottom so there are no crumbs on the floor for the rats to eat [but] when the house is clean we are in more danger of being bitten...

...The people at the project, she says, "just laugh" and now "I would like to have an operation to make me straight...

...that they lack adequate housing, medicine, food and opportunity...

...Reviewed by KAL WAGENHEIM Editor, San Juan "Review" In The Other America, Michael Harrington states that "the poor need a novelist as well as a sociologist if we are to see them an American Dickens to record the smell and texture of their lives...

...This is the reality to which Puerto Rico-rapidly being converted to "The American Way of Life"-has the privilege of aspiring...

...In La Esmeralda I never seemed to need as many things as I do here...

...in 1960, 80 per cent of the island's families earned less than $3,000 yearly and 42 per cent earned less than $1,000 a year...

...The poor countries, Lewis says, "may seek a more revolutionary solution creating basic structural changes in society...

...Though the U.S...

...corporate structure, which makes the economy tick and henceforth determines the values and standards by which one must abide in order to be successful...

...But in addition to its literary qualities, and in addition to its detailed exposition of life in the culture of poverty, La Vida also has a lot to say to the observer of Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States, which began in 1898 as a case of pure rape and has now been "legitimized" by a pragmatic island government which feels that it has no alternative...

...Though the solution to really eliminating poverty-to creating an authentically "Great Society"-may be elusive, La Vida is a major contribution toward defining the challenge...

...Those in the culture of poverty are, as he points out, on the margin of society, in less direct contact with imported values...

...But not so in the underdeveloped countries where "because of the magnitude of the problem, psychiatrists can hardly begin to cope with it...

...Mingled in that majority are the people of La Vida, denizens of the sub-culture of poverty, who neither participate in the society's institutions nor reap any of its benefits...

...Almost as though in reply to this challenge, Oscar Lewis has combined tape-recorded testimony with meticulous observation, eliminating his questions and rearranging the material into what he calls "coherent life stories.' The result is a monumental half-million word document of a Puerto Rican slum family which Lewis calls "a new kind of social realism," and which is, in fact, about as close to a novel as a social scientist can get without abandoning his m?©tier...

...In La Vida their anguished voices come through loud and clear...

...Many have yet to own their first auto, yet transcontinental jetliners zoom by overhead on their way to New York, three hours distant...

...I can defend myself in the wild ones...

...The Other Puerto Rico" forms a large portion of the population...

...After explaining how she often carries a Gem razor blade in her cheek ("you have to defend yourself") she says: "I would rather be a man than a woman not a woman would have escaped me God made me a woman, a real bitch of one...

...A recent item in the New York Times, where a Cherokee Indian schoolteacher pointed to "a drastic rise in mental health problems among Indians" and complained that Indian youth "is not effectively identified with his heritage, nor can he identify with the hostile, white world facing him," is not irrelevant in a discussion of Puerto Rico...

...Being twice as poor as the poorest U.S...

...pattern of attempting to "slowly raise [the poor's] level of living and to incorporate them into the middle class...

...A number of women were asked whether the city's streets should be identified by names (many bear the names of the island's historical figures) or numbers, and most women opted for numbers because "we never heard of those people anyway...

...In inquiring about the future of the culture of poverty, Lewis feels that in the U.S., where at least the poor are in the minority, "a social-work solution may be feasible...

...While the poorest 45 per cent of Puerto Rican families earned 18.2 per cent of total income in 1953, they were relatively poorer a decade later, commanding only 16 per cent of total income...

...In Puerto Rican schools relatively little emphasis is placed upon Puerto Rican history - the whole period of the Spanish-American War, when the U.S...

...yet practically everyone, except for those in the remotest areas, owns or has access to a TV set...

...occupied the island, is ignored as though it were too traumatic an experience to cope with - while many texts are either in English, especially at the college level, or are translations from the English and promote North American values...

...Culturally, they are probably closer to their grandparents than are the urban and suburban middle class, who are right on the front lines of the cultural collision with the United States (an exception, of course, are the prostitutes in La Vida, whose favorite clients are free-spending American sailors...

...But as tragic counterpoint to Cruz' nascent middle class desire to own "things," her two main sources of income have disappeared...

...While illiteracy in Puerto Rico is technically 13 per cent, only 150,-000 newspapers are sold daily on an island of 600,000 families...

...welfare state capitalism" permits heretofore undreamed-of comfort for a huge middle class on the mainland (and a fairly large one in Puerto Rico), La Vida offers crushing evidence that it has been wholly inept in changing what Lewis calls "the iron entrenchment" of the life patterns of the very poor...

...When Cruz agrees to move from La Esmeralda to a housing project, she is ambivalent: "May God deliver me from quiet places...

...If, as Lewis estimates, about 25 per cent of America's 40-50 million poor are in the culture of poverty, Puerto Rico's dilemma is even more urgent since its per capita income is only half that of the poorest state in the Union (yet cars, food and other essentials are priced above New York City levels...

...Here the very poor are not only alienated from their own countrymen, but are even further removed from the U.S...

...Lewis observes that such a way of regarding life is usually absorbed by a child by the age of six or seven...

...Since Puerto Rico is a capillary of the giant body of the U.S...

...It is the first of a series of volumes based on Lewis' study of 100 Puerto Rican families, in which he attempts to "give a voice to the people who are rarely heard...

...is gradually relaxing the reins of political control, its impact in economic and cultural areas is so overwhelming that Puerto Rican anthropologist Eduardo Seda-Bonilla was recently moved to comment: "American managers and entrepeneurs occupy the higher power positions in the society...

...an "elegant" slum by prevailing standards, where annual per capital income is $240...

...And, after moving: "This house is so big I have so many shelves and so few dishes that I have to put a dish here and a dish there just to keep each shelf from being completely empty...

...In the slum, she survived by occasional prostitution and selling lottery tickets ("Let me buy from Lame Cruz because cripples bring good luck...

...They have all they can do to care for their own growing middle class...

...Thus, any steps taken are likely follow the U.S...

...with Puerto Rican 'supporting characters' in the middle and the majority in the lower positions selling their work in the cheap labor market...

...I'm forty now and I've had six husbands and if I want I can have six more...

...Some parts of La Vida-translated from the slangy Spanish of the Rios family, their friends and neighbors-equals the best in our literature, ranging from pathetic tales of misery, brutality and "the cheapness of life" to passages which rival Henry Miller's most wildly erotic outbursts...

...Puerto Rico certainly qualifies as a "poor" country, suggesting a "revolutionary solution," but with its colony-like status under the United States, that is unlikely...

...a Caribbean Casbah which is a virtually self-contained community of small proprietors, dock workers, handymen, taxi drivers, construction laborers, prostitutes, pimps, drug pushers-the whole gamut of lower class society...

...economy, the presence of such extensive generation-tras-generation poverty in the midst of a boom era is indicative that the body itself has something intrinsically wrong with it...