From Tepoztlán to Tepito: a critical genealogy of the concept of ‘culture of poverty’ in Oscar Lewis’s work

Abstract

This article analyzes the genealogy of the concept of the ‘culture of poverty’ in Oscar Lewis’s work, beginning with his break from the folk-urban continuum model proposed by Robert Redfield in Tepoztlán and tracing its reformulation in the urban studies he later developed in Tepito. The article argues that the concept did not emerge as an essentialist framework or as an explanation that blamed the poor for their condition, but rather as an ethnographic response to the limitations of the Redfieldian model and as an attempt to integrate psychosocial dimensions into the study of urban marginality. Methodologically, the study is based on an extensive documentary analysis, a comparative examination of the main ethnographic works of both authors, and a historical-anthropological reconstruction of the Redfield-Lewis debate. The findings show that academic criticism focused on the robustness of Lewis’s ethnographic realism and on the scope of his generalizations. The article concludes that the ‘culture of poverty’ is a historically contextualized concept whose analytical relevance persists when it is interpreted within its original intellectual, methodological, and ideological framework.