AÑO XIV, NÚM. 53-54
AH, DE LA VIDA...
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“poverty” more generally. Giving material encouragement to the emerging analytical primacy of cultural and values studies over those of economic class and the practice of an enduring structural inequity, it thus came to pass that, as Laura Briggs so cogently notes, “at precisely the moment when the labor department, the media, and some social scientists were saying that ‘the [white American] working class’ was being absorbed into the ‘middle’ through improved wages and a greater access to consumer goods, another class, largely nonwhite, [the one labeled and championed by Lewis] emerged: ‘the poor’” (84)7. The pithy concision of Lewis’s “culture of poverty” conceptual and obliquely racialized thesis of “the poor,” could, intentionally or not, also effectively conceal an elastic ambiguity and the elusive fluidity of the term’s otherwise all-encompassing simplicity. The apparent transparency of its terse cogency actually allowed for a range of possible content and precise meanings: as merely apt or memorable rhetorical expedient, as circumstantially indicative empirical descriptor, as cautiously advanced general hypothesis, as presumptive source and setting of particular values, as fully causal explanatory principle or, as in Lewis’s own inconsistent use, as all of the above. Varying the specific sense, stress and inflection necessarily varied, too, the corresponding implications. Allowing each and all, consequently, to see in it what they would or principally required it hence emerged a term that in the end proved equally serviceable to the different purposes of liberal, moderate and conservative alike8. Far from avoiding or offering any antidote to that potentiality and effect, Lewis’s new Puerto Rican family case study more firmly confirmed and even further fueled it. Eagerly anticipated, La Vida’s eventual appearance met with no little fanfare and a more than passing general interest. It was widely, if not always without reservation, favorably reviewed in some of the country’s most prestigious and influential venues, including the cover page of The New Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. It was equally welcomed by the more popular mainstream American media, with its accustomed sensationalist accent, the occasionally scandalized shock or offended sensibilities of some but, on the whole, also with an otherwise largely admiring critical praise and acclaim. Even as he thought it made for