Apology for a Trainwreck

The ethnographies of Oscar Lewis paint a bleak picture of lower-class life.  The thousands of pages of published interviews in books like Five Families, The Children of Sanchez, Four Men, and La Vida show a relentless trainwreck of impulsive sex, unplanned pregnancy, child neglect, child abuse, drug addiction, drunkenness, degenerate gambling, intra-family violence, near-random violence, parasitism, and gross financial mismanagement.    The picture is so bleak that I struggle to believe Lewis...