Volume 2, Number 10 · June 25, 1964
A Life
By Carlos Fuentes
Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family
by Oscar Lewis, Drawings by Alberto Beltrán
Random House, 507 pp., $8.75
Oscar Lewis's new book is the life of a Mexican peasant, now seventy-four years old, his wife, and their son, as told by the actors themselves and preserved by Lewis on tape. It follows Pedro from his birth in 1889 through his childhood, his young manhood as a peón in the brutal cacique-system of his native 'Azteca,' his marriage to Esperanza in 1910 (the year of the revolutionary explosion against the Díaz dictatorship), the birth of the first of twelve children, his life in Emiliano Zapata's agrarian army, his fight for the welfare of his people after the Revolution, the political infighting between radical and conservative groups in the village, his flight to Mexico City when local conditions are adverse to his faction, his return and conversion from Catholicism to Seventh Day Adventism, his social rise—of sorts—when he becomes a judge in the village, his life as an old, widowed man. Most of his children die young. Some manage to evade their traditional tragic destinies and become schoolteachers. Esperanza, his wife, leads on the surface the life of the dominated Mexican woman, the victim of a double sexual standard: a life of being made love to mechanically, giving birth, rearing children as she can, suffocating in a shack with the smoke of braziers. Yet like most Mexican women, she seems to draw strength from her husband's vibrant contact with the outer world. It is Pedro who must drink both the milk and hemlock of the world, and if this makes him the stronger one outside his house, it is Esperanza who, within the home, seems the more secretly powerful: Pedro lives by the rule of force, Esperanza by the demands of love. Their life together, the claims of the outside world and of their inner feelings, their illusions dreamt and lost, their relations with their children, form the subject matter of Pedro Martínez.
Review, 2835 words
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