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1
Puerto Rican Poverty
(Continued from page seven)
the individual has a profound feel-
ing of "marginality, helplessness,
dependence and inferiority." The
institutions and values of the cul-
ture of poverty are consequently re-
sponses both to economic depriva-
tion and to this sense of alienation
and frustration. Lewis's theory is
particularly interesting because it
claims that, in any industrial or
quasi-industrial society which satis-
fies certain conditions, an identical
set of quite specific culture patterns
will arise. The culture of poverty is,
in o t h e r words, international.
Among its characteristics Lewis
finds a strong sense of community,
a compulsive gregariousness, enor-
mous emphasis on sex, mother-
dominated families often based on
consensual unions, authoritarianism
on the family level, female aggres-
siveness, and a general impulsive-
ness.
The book, itself it seems to me,
admirably supports Lewis's analv-
sis, there is no evidence that the
facts are arranged to fit any kind of
thesis. The book is composed of a
series of long tape-recorded conver-
sations, a technique which was used
in Lewis's best-known book, The
Children of Sanchez, a classic study,
of a Mexico City slum family. He
first turned to the intensive study
of family life, he explains, because
"It seemed to me that descriptions
of a way of life on the abstract level
of culture patterns left out the very
heart and soul of the phenomenon
we were concerned with, namely,
the in d i v i d u a l human being."
Wh ole-f a mily studies, he says,
"bridge the gap between the con-
ceptual extremes of culture at one
pole and the individual at the other;
we see both culture and personality-
as they are interrelated in real
life."
The members of the Rios family
of San Juan are the mother Fernan-
da, her three daughters Soledad,
Felicita and Cruz, and her son Sim-
plicio. For the average- middle-class
reader, the story of these lives is
from the beginning -an intense,
shocking, disturbing, profoundly re-
vealing experience. It is revealing
not only for what these people, in
their amazingly candid and vivid
discussions, tell about their own so-
ciety and values, but also for what
is implied about our own.
Here is a world of brutality, vio-
lence and promiscuity, where wom-
en cut each other with razor blades
and turn their husbands in to the
police; where children are beaten
routinely and learn the rudiments
of sex almost before they can talk.
Husbands and wives, parents and
children, neighbors and comrades
pursue and flee each other, love
and suffer, in a grimly colorful, ani-
malistic dance. The Rios family live
constantly searching, constantly un-
fulfilled lives. But _they are also
lives of warmth, color, laughter,
and generosity. It is this aspect, the
courage and the flamboyance with
which these people struggle against
crushing conditions that prevents
this book from being depressing.
But it is not optimistic either, be-
cause so many of these people are
defeated by la vida. The book pre-
sents, all in all, a relentlessly tragic
picture.
We soon see how irrelevant our
own moral standards are to such
lives. The fact that Fernanda, Sole-
dad and Felicita each went into
prostitution to support their chil-
dren can only be evaluated in the
total context of the relevant cultur
al and economic factors. The cul-
ture of poverty is a matter of life
and death; and culture itself be-
comes 'only the most generalized
tool in the struggle for physical and
emotional survival.
That a certain amount of repeti-
tion and tedium should appear in
the course of this book's 670 pages
of autobiographical reflection is
perhaps unavoidable. Lewis does
not have a novelist's discretion in
arranging and inventing his mate-
rial, because his aim is to present as
complete and honest a picture as
possible of life as it is actually lived
in the slums of Puerto Rico and
New York. But the longueurs, I be-
lieve, are justified by the book's
many intense moments and fine mi-
nor touches. There is Fernanda at
the age of ten forbidding the neigh-
borhood bartender to give her fa-
ther any more rum; there is Fernan-
da recalling her first frightened,
guilt-ridden night as a prostitute;
there is Soledad telling of the shoot-
ing of her favorite husband, a thief;
or Felicita, generally accused of
neglecting her children, thinking
about her future:
Since Georgie left. I haven't been
able to go back to work or any-
thing. I have no feelings, my heart
is empty. ..When you get the kind
of opportunity that I had, when you
can relax, knowing that your chil
dren are eating, you feel at peace.
But if you have to go back to your
other life. .:I cry though the
nights at the thought of it._
She is, of course, talking about
prostitution. "Because of my suffer-
ing," says Cruz, in many ways the
most courageous of the children
"my heart is hard as concrete."
Only in this century have men
come to a full understanding of
their immense capacity for evil, a
realization that has been-strength-
ened by the ambiguous promises of
modern technological civilization.
Correspondingly, we have relearned
the enormous valor and resource-
fulness of the human spirit. This is
the optimistic side of books like La
Vida. Nor need one, like Marx,
adopt a gloomily deterministic in-
terpretation of economic substruc-
ture and cultural superstructure.
One might just as easily rejoice in
the variety and ingenuity of these
multifarious modes of living. Even
the German death camps could not
stifle a rudimentary cultural organi-
zation.
Yet a sensible cultural pluralism
need not refuse to admit the pres-
ence of greater or lesser degrees of
human misery in various environ-
ments. Sometimes the struggle
against despair is lost: Though he
declines to moralize about the ethi-
cal standards of the Puerto Rican
culture of poverty, and does not
deny the real opportunities for hap-
piness that it provides, Oscar Lewis
nevertheless concludes,
On the whole it seems to me that it
is a relatively thin culture. There is
a great deal of pathos, suffering
and emptiness among those who
live in (it). it does not encourage
much support or long-range satis-
faction and its encouragement of
mistrust tends to magnify helpless-
ness and isolation.',
He feels that in the United States
the members of the culture of pov-
erty(six to ten millions, he estimates)
are a relatively small percentage of
the total population of the poor due
to peculiar features of North Amer-
ican civilization. This fact is a posi-
tive sign, since there is evidence
that "the elimination of physical
poverty per se may not be enough
to eliminate the culture of poverty,
which is a whole way of life." Sole-
dad Rios has fainting spells in her
New York apartment. She is subject
to madness (the "Puerto Rican syn-
drome") and considers herself an
old woman at the age of twenty-
five. Cruz Rios, with her children in
the housing project in San Juan, is
scarcely eighteen - not even an
adult by our standards - when she
says,
I feel so sad at times that I turn on
the radio and do't even bear it. I
just stand there with my eyes wide
open, thing, and I seem to see
bugs and scorpions in my mind. Ri
is as if the scorpions were stinging
me...
La Vida cannot be forgotten. For
the citizens of a powerful and
wealthy country, which continues to
pour millions of dollars a day into
the slaughter in Vietnam, while a
minimum of six million people in
its midst is in the culture of pover-
ty-a way of life which leaves as
its legacy brutality, despair and
waste of life-the implications are
disturbing, and only too clear.
Paul Sawyer
Mr. Sawyer is a fourth-year student
majoring in English at The University
of Michigan.
The Arrogance of Power, by Sen..
J. Wiliam Fulbright. Random
House. $4.95 and $1.95.
Words of wisdom come so infre-
quently from the United States Sen-
ate that one is loath to question
even a r e a s o n a b 1 e- facsimile-
especially where foreign policy- is
concerned. - But Washington be
praised! Here at last we have a Sen-
ate committee chairman telling us
that perhaps the Cuban Revolution
wasn't so bad, either for us or for
the Cuban people (who, after all,
live only a hundred or so miles
from the American-supported dun-
geon of Haiti). Here at last we have
a man of power telling us that
America should look at China with
love, not hate and fear, and should
be ready to help her when she is
ready to accept it. And here at last
we have a senator of long tenure
telling the American people they
are, in fact,, shamefully anti-
revolutionary and cannot hope to
understand the needs and wants of
the rest of the world well enough to
tell it how to live.
The senator, of course, is J. Wil-
liam Fulbright, chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee and the Washington establish-
ment's most outspoken critic of the
current Vietnam policy. But his
book is more than a criticism of the
Vietnam war-it outlines the sena-
tor's view of the American mind on
foreign policy.,
Fulbright talks first of the "arro-
gance of power-a psychological
need that nations seem to have in
order to prove that they are bigger,
better, or stronger than other na-
tions." This need, he feels, is the
basic underpinning of America's
drive to world military commit-
ments, As the world's strongest na-
tion, the United States seems "pow-
erful, but not self-confident," and
so must use its power to build self-
confidence. Further, America "may
be drifting into c o m m i t m e n t s
which, though generous and benev-
olent in intent, are so far-reaching
as to exceed even America's great
capacities." These commitments,
Fulbright explains, are based large-
ly on America's desire to protect
other nations from the ugliness of
Communism as she understands it.
The senator traces the long histo-
ry of America's self-image as cru-
sader and puritan. He writes of the
intervention in Cuba in 1898, and of
Woodrow Wilson's intervention in
Mexico-both instances of the Unit-
ed States' benevolent but misguided
meddling. Fulbright believes there
was a strain of puritanism sur-
rounding the Korean War also; but
though our missionary zeal was em-
ployed to save South Korean free-
dom, he comments that now "Amer-
icans little know or care" about the
state of South Korean politics.
Then he turns to Vietnam. For
this sore case he proposes a general
cease-hire, a U.S. promise for even-
tual complete withdrawal, elections
in the south to include the National
Liberation Front, and an all-Asia
conference to arrange a nation-wide
referendum on reunification. The
international conference w o u l d
guarantee general elections and
would subsequently "undertake to
negotiate a multilateral arrange-
ment for the general neutralization
Sof Southeast Asia." He concedes
that the achievement of this last ob-
jective is "very doubtful." Finally,
if agreement cannot be reached to
end hostilities, Fulbright urges U.S.
withdrawal from the war in its cur-
rent form and recommends the sub-
sequent establishment of military
enclaves.
So much for Vietnam. Ile gives
no legal history of the involvement
there, which is just as well, as it has
been raped enough already. But
most of what he says here he has
said before. Yet his "plan" is vague,
general, and unready for applica-
tion to the complexities of the pres-
ent situation. Fulbright does not of-
fer -a full story of the forces that led
us there in the first place; nor does
he consider what could happen the
next time a brush war breaks out.
What Fulbright tells us is that we
really didn't mean it. Vietnam was
all a benevolent misconception:
The official war aims of the Unit-
e'd States government, as I under-
stand them, are to defeat what is
regarded as North Vietnamese
aggression, to demonstrate the fu-
tility of what the communists call
"wars of national liberation" and
to create conditions under which
the South Vietnamese people will
be able freely to determine their
own future.
I have not the slightest doubt of
the sincerity of the President and
the Vice-President and theSecre-
taries of State and Defense in pro-
pounding these aims.
Fulbright then destroys the idea
that the war is, in fact, one of
aggression from Hanoi. He tells us
the domino theory is not relevant
and certainly not worth the cost. Fi-
nally he indicates that "guaran-
teeing South Vietnamese" freedom
is uncertain by present methods,
and under those circumstances, not
worth the cost in either American
or Vietnamese men and money.
Fine. But it seems rather strange
that the Chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee can,
on the one hand, tell us thathe now
regrets the freedom given the ad-
ministration by the Tonkin resolu-
tion, and, and the other, that he
does not for one minute have "the
slightest doubt" about the adminis-
tration objective of free elections in
the South. Is he, in his position,
really convinced that the Johnson
administration is willing to let the
Viet Cong into the government? Is
he also convinced that Johnson is
considering peace -terms in the best
long-run interests of the Viet-
namese people, or rather of his own
administration at home? Fulbright's
statement exonerates the admins-
tration, but his oversimplification
leaves us in doubt.
For the senator appears to have
bent over too far to establish the
"sincerity" of the American people
in all this. If one is going to under-
take an analysis of the character of
a nation, to explain why that nation
forms its foreign policy the way it
does, then it would seem one should
do just that. Fulbright wanders
from the point. For example, in the
midst of an explanation of the
well-meaning American messian-
ism, Fulbright finds it necessary to
explin why the Rusk-Johnson Asia
Doctrine is not relevant to Ameri-
can security considerations. In the
midst of telling us that America's
"honest purpose" in stamping out
leftists in Latin America "is the ad-
vancement of development and de-
mocracy," he must also explain that
there was no national security justi-
fication for intervening in Santo
Domingo or for nearly blasting
Cuba into the stonegage. Ithwould
seem that in stringing together a
series of speeches on a highly com-
plex topic, the senator has passed
over some of the more obvious but
less tasteful emphases.
And so he concludes:
There are two Americas. One is
the America of Lincoln and Adlai
Stevenson; the other is thedAnmeri-
ca of- Teddy Roosevelt and the
modern superpatriots. One is gen-
erous and humane, the other nar-
rowly egotistical; one is self-
critical, the other self-righteous;
one is sensible, the other romantic;
one is good-humored, the othertsol-
emn; one is inquiring, the other
pontificating; one is moderate, the
other filled with passionate intepsi-
ty; one is judicious and the other
arrogant in the use of great power.
Unfortunately, there are other
Americas. One is paranoid about
world .Communism and has been
since 1945. To that one Fulbright
offers-a new understanding of Com-
munism. One is a munitions manu-
facturer who grabs up generals with
Pentagon contacts as fast as they
can retire. One is an advisor to the
Dominican intervention with clear
interests in Dominican sugar cane.
One is a general in Vietnam who
tells the London newspapers about
"zapping the Cong." One is a mid-
dle-class Californian who demands
laws to keep the "yellow peril" out
of his state, and who certainly cares
little about napalming a few more
of them in Vietnam. These Ful-
bright passes over
And in passing them over, the de-
bunker of myths refuses to do his
job. As chairman of the Senate For-
eign Relations Committee he was
admittedly laggard in searching out
errors and shortcomings in adminis-
tration conceptions of the war; he
~ continues to do less solid reporting
than he could.
To Senator Fulbright, the Ameri-
cans who compose our mind on for-
eign policy "cry out against poverty
and injustice," but somehow have
been misguided on the realities of
world politics, Communism, and so-
cial revolution. Perhaps the senator,
if he is going to do a serious analy-
sis of the American mind on foreign
policy, might stop treating the
A Dose of the Arkansas Cure-All
American'
as an is(
open his e
against pt
tice" in A
Harlem.
What h(
that our a
$3 billion
Does "ber
ten offer
military as
"Mistak
just happ
lost out tc
happen be
of forces c
there. Eac
be, in its t
batted. Fu
with only t
Mr. Wasse
dent major
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Bre o #
"this
o rd i msC l e
TH
Anna Grigorievna
Dostoevsky gave the
Soviet State Archives<
a white tin case..
..,containing 15 notebooks 4
for Dostoevsky's novels.
In 1921 the case was ;
opened... now the first
three have been " t
translated into English
The Notebooks for
CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT
Fyodor Dostoevsky
edited and translated by Edward Wasiolek
Written during the lonely and
exultant moments of the crea-
tive process, these wo.rking
notebooks record the unfolding
of Crime and Punishment. Here J& K
is the embryo of the novel:
Dostoevsky's intentions, trials, 2
mistakes, and uncertainties.
Characters evolve and change.
Plans, actions, and scenes are
written and then discarded as '
the novel develops. Characteri* .
nations and points left obscure
in the novel are clarified once
and for all by this intense dia. UNIVERMIT
logue between the author and F cCIco
his work. The Notebooks pre- RS
sent a fascinating glimpse of gand Londo
Dostoevsky's imagination and Ch canada:Undrsny
the creative process. $6.95 Tornto Press
Ml
I
"An invaluable antidote to
the official rhetoric of goven-
AMWLt'"--MAkX IFaAM FL, frOait
page, N. Y, Tim.. Boo Re.
cloth-. $s "Vintage 3ook
paperbac .95. Now at
your boooe
* MIDWEST LITERARY REVIEW * May, 1967
May, 1967 * MIDWEST LITER,