Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
1. Joan M. Nelson, Access to Power: Politics and the Urban Poor in Developing Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3.
2. See especially Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez (New York: Vintage, 1961); Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959); and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966). In this regard, it is also interesting to see the firsthand account of interpersonal relations in a Brazilian favela, which sometimes varied from quarrelsome to violent. Carolina María de Jesús, Child of the Dark (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962).
3. Lewis's hypotheses are set out most clearly in the introduction to La Vida, xlii-lii, and in “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215 (1966):19-25.
4. Compare The Culture of Poverty: A Critique, edited by Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971); Charles Valentine, Culture and Poverty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), and Valentine et al., “Culture and Poverty: A Critique and Counterproposals,” Current Anthropology 10 (1969):181-201; Janice Perlman, The Myth of Marginality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976); and Helen I. Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).