Mexico · Nonfiction
The Children of Sánchez
Jesús Sánchez and his four adult children tell the stories of their lives in a poor Mexico City neighbourhood. Their accounts overlap and disagree, allowing family loyalties, private grievances and the struggle to get by to emerge through individual voices.
Oscar Lewis assembled these narratives as an anthropologist, but the result has the intimacy and tension of a family chronicle. This is a historical portrait of one household, not a stand-in for all of Mexico. Its value lies in the everyday details and the space it gives its speakers to explain themselves.
“One of the outstanding contributions of anthropology”
Margaret Mead, quoted by Penguin Random House
Anthropology; Family; Poverty; Oral history; Screen adaptation