PEDRO MARTINEZ by Oscar Lewis. 507 pages. Random House. $8.75.
In these days of Fidel Castro and the Alliance for Progress, the Latin American peasant has taken his place with the Mets fan as one of nature’s most familiar and least understood noblemen. Silhouetted against a tropical sunset, there he stereotypically stands, leaning on his hoe and dreaming dreams of land reform and a greater gross national product per capita.
Genuinely getting to know him comes harder, and therein lies the value of Oscar Lewis, 49, a University of Illinois anthropologist gifted with facile Spanish, a guileless face and a pleasantly disarming manner. Lewis’ method is to insinuate himself into the bosom of a Mexican family and stay for months, becoming as much a household fixture as the tortilla griddle, as comfortable as a worn pair of huaraches. The pencil scribbles across the notebook pages; the recorder spools gently turn.
The result has been a series of books that are a reproach to most novelists. The Children of Sanchez, published in 1961, was ostensibly a recording of the lives as-told-by-themselves of a poor family living in a poor section of Mexico City. It proved to be richer in incident than many a historical romance, and more vividly squalid than many a sociological novel of the Chicago school.
Whips & Sticks. Pedro Martinez, a fictitious name chosen to preserve anthropological anonymity, is a more fully developed character than any single Sanchez child, more intricately related to his country’s disheveled past and closer to its soil. Pedro’s setting is “Azteca” (another pseudonym), an ancient farming village in the stony highlands about 60 miles south of Mexico City. Like most Mexican peasant children, he had a haphazard upbringing. His father died when he was three months old, after which his mother, “being just a girl, she got herself a boy” and went off with him. Pedro was raised off and on by an aunt, a grandmother, a godmother, an uncle and, finally, by his mother and her new man. He went to school occasionally, but was endlessly yanked out to tend the oxen, water the hog-plum trees, deliver the tortillas his mother made, and work as a hired hand on farms. He was beaten with fists, whips and sticks. Before he was ten, “there was this older girl . . . She needed a man already and well, she forced me.”
Caught up in the revolution of 1910, Pedro finally realized that young men like himself were being turned into cannon fodder by a variety of self-proclaimed generals and reformers. He deserted and went home. There he led the life of a poor farmer, struggling to grow corn on a rented field a good two hours’ walk from his mud-walled house. He took women where he found them, ran his home with paternalistic authoritarianism. But he commanded enough local respect to become a political figure of sorts, first as a leader of his barrio, later as a town councilman, eventually as a judge.
Beat the Children. More than most peasants, Pedro had the leverage to improve for others the lot he himself endured on the way to eminence. For more than two decades, he worked at doing just that. But as a judge he took to convivial drinking with the courthouse gang, and to the customary mordidas (“bites,” or small bribes) that are Mexico’s traditional lubricant for the wheels of justice. At home he began flying into uncontrolled rages; he beat his children, until, resentfully, they began drifting away.
At 75, Pedro’s conversations with Lewis become suffused with bleary disillusion: “At one time, I believed in a lot of things . . . Now I believe in nothing. The trouble is, there is no lawfulness here. Even the lawyers agree. The Governor . . . told me, ‘Yes, the real law is money. If you have money, the law is yours. If you haven’t any, there is no law, so don’t you go believing in it.’ ”
Anthropologically, Martinez does for Mexican village life what The Children did for a Mexican urban slum. But the reader begins to suspect that either every run-of-the-barrio Mexican is an innate storyteller of eloquence and rustic insight—or else that Oscar Lewis is an interviewer and editor of resourcefulness above and beyond the call of scientific duty.
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