In five pages the family members of this 1960's text are considered from a contemporary anthropological vantage point in order to conclude that the methods the author uses are now regarded as outdated. There are no other bibliographic sources cited.
Name of Research Paper File: AM2_PPsanchz.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Oscar Lewis "The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family" is an emotional story recounting the day to day
lives of a lower class Mexican family in Mexico City in the 1960s. Plagued by poverty, the challenges of living in the corrupt and unpredictable environment of one of
the worlds largest cities, and just the incredibly fragile relations which occur within a typical family, the Sanchez family walks on tedious grounds in most aspects of their daily lives.
Lewis offers an incredibly emotional account of the horrors they face as well as commendable detail in accounting for those horrors from a human interest perspective. As such
the book offers support to a variety of disciplines, not the least of which is anthropology. Although "The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family" is lacking in
the type of scientific data which characterizes a true anthropological study, it is a useful addition to such a study in that it offers first-person observations on a people and
the conditions which shape them. Lewis definitively illustrates for the Sanchezs, and indeed for the Tepito community as a whole, a cycle of poverty is at play which acts
to entrap its unfortunate victims into a set of circumstances which is all but impossible to escape. Despite this books usefulness to the anthropological field, there are some faults
which need to be examined. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to provide a critical analysis of both the contributions and the shortcomings of this emotionally moving depiction.
Lewis conducted the research for "The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family" during the 1960s. He approached his subject from