To understand Mexico, an outsider should put aside his images of cactus and sombreros and even of Oscar Lewis’ Children of Sanchez for a while, and take an evening stroll down Avenida Revolucion or Avenida Insurgentes, or the ancient streets behind the Zocalo, or any of the other frenetic shopping areas of Mexico City. While the snarled and sometimes decrepit cars honk incessantly and puff out black fumes in the streets, the laborers and clerks of the city rush from shop to shop for after-work purchases, perhaps cheap bread, cheap shoes, expensive jeans. Families join for the excursion, mothers carrying blanketed infants, fathers tugging moonfaced children. The crowds are colored gaily by the neon storefronts that occasionally obscure the delightful porfirian or baroque architecture of old buildings. The shoppers wear hip-length sweaters or rebozos or windbreakers. Many wear clothes that are old but rarely tattered, neat and functional but rarely fashionable. By American standards, they are a poor people. Yet it is a poverty with which an American can sympathize, even if he has not experienced it. By all measures, Mexico is a developing country of the Third World, but Mexico City does not have the exotic and incredible, pervasive poverty of Calcutta, with its thousands of human wretches hunting for a piece of sidewalk on which to sleep. Nor does it have the poverty of the African Sahel, with its stick-boned, starving old people and little children. These are miseries so terrible that they blunt the senses and elude the imagination of most Americans. But this is not so in Mexico...

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