Mexico City as an Urban Laboratory

Oscar Lewis, the "Culture of Poverty" and the Transnational History of the Slum

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5776548
AutoresEmilio De Antuñano (0000-0003-3950-5252, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen45
Número4
Páginas813-830
Fecha de publicación2018-04-12
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Urban History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0096-1442 • E-ISSN: 1552-6771
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0096144218768501
OpenAlexW2940822621
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8

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

Art · Basic needs · Culture of poverty · Ethnography · Ethnology · Latin Americans · Political science · Population · Poverty · Praise · Slum · Sociology · Anthropology · Demography · Gender Studies · Latin American Urban Studies · Law · Mexican Socioeconomic and Environmental Dynamics · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability