It Will Grab You
Holman, Philip A.
It Will Grab You LA VIDA: A PUERTO RICAN FAMILY IN THE CULTURE OF POVERTY—SAN JUAN AND NEW YORK, by Oscar Lewis. Random House. 669 pp. $10. Reviewed by Philip A. Holman A RMED WITH...
...The chapters on the "observed" days are then followed by the accounts of the individuals in their own words, which comprise the bulk of the volume...
...It Will Grab You LA VIDA: A PUERTO RICAN FAMILY IN THE CULTURE OF POVERTY—SAN JUAN AND NEW YORK, by Oscar Lewis...
...Equally vivid—and revealed more clearly in the "observed" days than in the interviews—are the real warmth and love that prevail in these same relationships...
...They are also—these same people—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, some the mainstays of their families, trying and failing, hoping still when life commands them to despair, and despairing...
...La Vida is divided into five major parts—one for each of the households...
...This massive, Tolstoian volume is the first fruit of his labors...
...The people in this book are whores, pimps, gamblers...
...Family and friends make love, argue, fight, laugh, cry, and clean house unhampered by her presence...
...and the physical cruelty to children...
...Following the observations in Fernanda's household is a series of chapters in which Fernanda tells of her life...
...The questions asked in the interviews were then eliminated and the material arranged generally in chronological order...
...love, hope, and despair...
...In La Vida (Life), sixteen members of the Rios family, comprising five households—three in San Juan and two in New York—tell the stories of their lives in their own words and in far more intimate detail than you or I are likely ever to tell ours...
...He is right...
...Thus, the first part opens with an "observed" day in the life of Fernanda, during the course of which we meet her current husband, Junior, who is celebrating his nineteenth birthday...
...Three hundred characters weave in and out of its six hundred pages as they weave in and out of the lives of four generations of a poverty-stricken Puerto Rican family who have committed their days and nights to these pages and, in so doing, have achieved an immortality far finer than the poor promise of their mortal lives...
...The principal topics are sex, violence, and poverty...
...the extent of violence...
...The publisher says La Vida is a masterpiece...
...They are the inheritors and— unless something happens, not something that they do but that we do— the progenitors of poverty and deprivation...
...Each part begins with one or more days actually observed in the lives of its members by Lewis' research assistant, Rosa Gonzalez...
...Among the qualities of these lives which may seem most vivid to a middleclass reader are the high degree of candor about sex and what Lewis politely calls the "earthy" language used to discuss it...
...The names in this book are fictitious, but the people are real...
...her daughters Felicita and Cruz-thecripple, and their children...
...La Vida is one of the finest human documents ever created...
...Above and beyond everything else, they are poor...
...and a potpourri of neighbors...
...the remaining daughter and son in New York...
...Junior's parents...
...The principal characters are Fernanda—forty, Negro, mother, grandmother, and prostitute, living in a San Juan slum with her sixth husband—and her four children by her first husband: daughters twenty-five, twenty-three, and nineteen, and a son twenty-one...
...The presence of Rosa, the researcher, does not appear to depress the flow of life...
...Since the personal accounts include not only those of the principals but also husbands, wives, children, and other present and past household members, the same events are often seen from various points of view...
...It tells, by contrast, as much about our middle-class culture as about the culture of poverty of its inhabitants...
...the frankness about sex in the presence of young children—not only talk but action...
...There is something in this book that will grab everyone—from the scatological scholar to the activist housewife...
...This is the pattern of each of the major parts of the book...
...Two of the daughters live in San Juan...
...Reviewed by Philip A. Holman A RMED WITH recorder and tape, Oscar Lewis—the William Manchester of the poverty set—has gone to a sunny slum by the side of the sea in Puerto Rico and to the gloomy ghettos of New York City...
...Her story was tape-recorded in extensive interviews...
...Not only the main themes of life, as revealed later in the individuals' own accounts, but even major crises occur on the "observed" days...
Vol. 31 • April 1967 • No. 4
