2018/04/12 by Emilio de Antuñano · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Anthropology #Art #Basic needs #Culture of poverty #Demography #Ethnography #Ethnology #Gender studies #Latin American Urban Studies #Latin Americans #Law #Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics #Political science #Population #Poverty #Praise #Slum #Sociology #Urban Agriculture and Sustainability
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/0096144218768501
openalex publication_date 2018/04/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This paper examines U.S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s research in Mexico City in the 1950s to reflect on how urban poverty has been construed in the United States and Latin America in the twentieth century. It asks why Lewis’s early work on rural-urban migration won him praise among scholars of Latin America while his later research on the “culture of poverty” was lambasted across the world—with particular intensity in the United States. Through a careful examination of Lewis’s ethnographic work in the Mexican “slum” of Colonia Morelos and the debates that it generated, I argue how and why Mexican slums were construed as sites of community and hope while their U.S. counterparts became associated with an irreversible “urban crisis.”