Tepoztlan: Village in Mexico

by Oscar Lewis

Surveys the history, economy and social customs of a Mexican village, noting the ways in which peasants have adapted to urbanization and industrialization

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology

104 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1960

About the author

Oscar Lewis was born in New York City in 1914, and grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. He received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1940, and taught at Brooklyn College and Washington University before helping to found the anthropology department at the University of Illinois, where he was a professor from 1948 until his death. From his first visit to Mexico in 1943, Mexican peasants and city dwellers were among his major interests. In addition to The Children of Sanchez, his other studies of Mexican life include Life in a Mexican Village, Five Families, Pedro Martinez, and A Death in the Sanchez Family. He is also the author of La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, which won the National Book Award, and Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba, with his wife, Ruth Maslow Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon. Lewis also published widely in both academic journals and popular periodicals such as Harper’s Magazine. Some of his best-known articles were collected in Anthropological Essays (1970). The recipient of many distinguished grants and fellowships, including two Guggenheims, Lewis was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 1970.

Reviews

[Bob Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A faded anthropological formula-book

If you google “Tepoztlán”, you’re going to find it’s a “destination” in Mexico, a “Mexperience” or a “Pueblo Magico”, and a town with a large number of hotels, restaurants, holistic spas, and tourist sites about 60 miles south of Mexico City in the state of Morelos. The population today is over 14,000 and tourism is their lifeline. I haven’t heard much about the place lately, but I’ll bet they are hurting with the pandemic.

But what Google doesn’t tell you very easily is that Tepoztlán was the site of anthropological research as far back as the 1920s. It wasn’t so far out of the capital and a pleasant place to live. Robert Redfield, one of the earliest anthropologists to study peasant life instead of isolated tribes, wrote a book on the village in 1930, based on work he’d done before. Some years later, in 1943, Oscar Lewis went back and did a study to see how things had changed, and then went back again in 1956 to follow up his work. He wrote a book about Tepoztlán too. This is not it. The book I’m reviewing here is one of the earliest numbers of what became a gigantic series of “Case Studies in Anthropology”. The authors were told to stick to a certain formula within around 100 pages. Theory is absent, so are references to anyone else’s work, no local voices are found—it’s solely the author, describing things according to THE PLAN. A number of top scholars did contribute to the series, so what they say is believable, it’s just HOW they say it. We cover a brief history (Tepoztlán goes back a couple of thousand years), then the political structure, the family and life cycle, economic and class structure, personality and psychological mindset, and change over the years. The majority of the 4,000+ people in Tepoztlán in 1947 were peasants, many still speaking Nahuatl. You will learn that only 21% of the families in town had cattle, and that in 1941 only 49% of school age kids were enrolled in class. Such statistics and in fact, much of the information, is so out of date as to be useless. The changes that Lewis described can only have increased vastly since the Fifties. However, one can easily discern older anthropological concerns from such a book—it is an example of what anthropologists wanted to teach students sixty or more years ago.

I read several of Lewis’ other books in the pre-Internet age, books such as "Five Families", "Pedro Martinez", and "The Children of Sanchez", all about Mexico, as well as "La Vida", about Puerto Rico. Even if you don’t agree with all Lewis’ ideas, the writing in those books (not this one) is among the most vivid in all the ethnographic literature. It definitely inspired me to write my own anthropology as vividly as I could. If you’d like to see the Spindler (editors) style, you could do worse than choose this one.

[Bramble · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of many village ethnographies you should read if you are interested: presents a now historic view, from a somewhat paternalistic anthropologist.