David H. Price, St. Martin's College dprice at stmartin.edu
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, Illinois, November, 18 1999.
During a routine search of American anthropologist Oscar Lewis' baggage at the United States / Mexico border crossing at Laredo, Texas on October 12, 1943, U.S. Government Boarder Agents found "subversive" Marxist literature and personal correspondence referring to Communist Party meetings in Lewis' bags. Because the possession of these materials was believed to be a violation of the Hatch Act a detailed report of this incident was sent to FBI headquarters. Over the next twenty seven years J. Edgar Hoover's FBI monitored the activities of Oscar Lewis, secretly interviewing his professional colleagues, monitoring his participation in political rallies, tracking his movements within the US and abroad, at times monitoring his mail, analyzing his published work and spying on him as he conducted field research in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba. This past year most of Lewis' FBI file was released under the Freedom of Information Act. This paper summarizes the information contained in Lewis' FBI file paying special attention to the FBI's obsessive interest in what they deemed to be Lewis' deviant politics, and also examining the context in which a Senior Fellow of the American Anthropological Association was moved to correspond with J. Edgar Hoover identifying Lewis and a dozen other anthropologists as Communists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_poverty In a 1998 article [1] Lewis writes:
The people in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. They are like aliens in their own country, convinced that the existing institutions do not serve their interests and needs. Along with this feeling of powerlessness is a widespread feeling of inferiority, of personal unworthiness. This is true of the slum dwellers of Mexico City, who do not constitute a distinct ethnic or racial group and do not suffer from racial discrimination. In the United States the culture of poverty of the Negroes has the additional disadvantage of racial discrimination. People with a culture of poverty have very little sense of history. They are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life. Usually, they have neither the knowledge, the vision nor the ideology to see the similarities between their problems and those of others like themselves elsewhere in the world. In other words, they are not class conscious, although they are very sensitive indeed to status distinctions. When the poor become class conscious or members of trade union organizations, or when they adopt an internationalist outlook on the world they are, in my view, no longer part of the culture of poverty although they may still be desperately poor.
The following are some of the cultural rules unique to poverty: While criteria for middle class decisions often relate to work and achievement, generational poverty class decisions are often based on the importance of one's personality to sustain multiple relationships. Time occurs in the present moment and future implications are seldom considered; being proactive, setting goals and planning ahead are not a part of generational poverty's culture. Extra money is shared among an individual's support system rather than using the extra money to "get ahead". From a poverty perspective, a person will never "get ahead" so it is important to share fortune with others to ensure one will be assisted in a time of need. A male's identity is often tied to being a lover and fighter while a "good" woman is expected to take care of her man and children. For many in generational poverty, jail is a part of life; unlike the middle class, a lack of resources means a lack of resources to avoid jail.
This list is by no means complete. So please share your views.
1. Oscar Lewis (January 1998). The culture of poverty. Society 35: 7.
See also: cycle of poverty
-- Michael Pugliese