Raymond T. Smith

Copyright 2000:   All Rights Reserved

Go To Site Map

The Ethnographic phase of the Urban Family Life and Poverty Project

The University of Chicago Urban Family Life Project was designed, as pointed out on the "Poverty Project" page, around Professor Wilson’s thesis that a severely dislocated, black, urban, socially isolated underclass has developed in the major cities of the United States during the past two decades. The data collection, especially in the main sample survey, was organised around the task of documenting the characteristics of this "underclass" and the dynamics of its social life. However, comparative data on three other "racial/ethnic groups," Mexican, Puerto Rican and White, were collected, though the samples were smaller, and no explicit hypotheses were developed as to how these four groups might differ among themselves. The same pattern of selection of informants by "ethnic group" was used in the ethnographic phase of the project, with the addition of an intensive study of a group of Assyrian immigrants carried out by Daniel Wolk.  Initially, during the autumn of 1985 and the winter of 1986, observers were deployed in various social service agencies in "ghetto" or poverty areas, agencies such as used clothing stores, soup kitchens, youth agencies, and church welfare agencies.  I returned from the Caribbean in April of 1986 and immediately developed, in consultation with Dolores Norton and Richard Taub, a detailed interview guide to serve as a basis for more intensive studies of the family histories of selected informants. Repeated interviews of the same informant were built around the construction of a genealogy, using it as a framework on which to build a detailed family history, and as a stimulus for the respondent to discourse freely on a wide range of topics, from courtship and marriage to work experience, racial issues, neighbourhood issues, and so forth.   Since most of the persons recruited to work as "ethnographers" were graduate students in sociology, social administration, or human development, it was anticipated (correctly with a few notable exceptions) that they would not have a deep interest in the technical aspects of genealogical analysis; the genealogical explorations were intended primarily as an elicitation technique for data on family life and individual biography. If by any chance the genealogical material were detailed enough it was intended to analyse it for comparison with similar materials collected in the 1960s and 1970s in Chicago by Schneider and Smith (see Schneider 1980, 1975; Schneider and Smith 1978) and by Smith in the Caribbean (Smith 1988). Although a number of good genealogies were collected, few were complete enough for detailed quantitative analysis and comparison, and their main value has been as an eliciting technique.

The ethnographers (several of whom were also playing an important part in the design and planning of the NORC sample survey and who later did a great deal of the work of cleaning and preparing the survey for detailed analysis), carried out more than 600 interviews with 107 informants as well as continuing to write up general ethnographic observational reports. Some continued to spend time in the social service agencies and the number of interviews carried out with selected informants varied a great deal depending on their age, availability and tolerance for repeated interviews. No attempt was made to obtain a representative sample of informants for this phase of the study. Ideally informants should have been selected through a locating survey, as was done in previous studies of this kind in Chicago and the Caribbean, but most interviewers had already established contacts through their stay in social service agencies and preferred to use them as the basis for finding informants.  All interviews were tape-recorded and then summary transcripts were written up by the interviewer.  Particularly interesting passages were noted (by reference to the tape counter) for verbatim transcription by special transcribers.

These voluminous bodies of text can be quite disturbing. They defy easy generalisation and the more hard-headed quantitative social scientists are apt to dismiss the particular cases as being "unrepresentative," as indeed they are. But they are not unreal. Out of the discourse of our informants all kinds of material emerges that challenges the bland generalisations of the sophisticated analyst of aggregate data who associates "teen-age pregnancy" or female-headed households with a shrinking "male marriageable pool" while passing quickly over the intervening details of courtship behaviour, decisions about abortion based on religious values, or patterns of domestic violence and marital infidelity. The genuine individuality of the case studies is the very stuff of ethnography, but it contains, and is expressive of, collective culture.

Our case materials reveal a number of features of family life and conjugal relations that seem at first to be contradictory. Most obvious is the contrast between a positive valuation of marriage and the reality of casual unions, high illegitimacy rates and "fatherless families." But these vexed questions of marriage, female-headed households, and teenage pregnancy are given considerably more depth than the flat images derived from aggregate statistics. As in previous studies we find that there is a much wider recognition of kinship ties, and involvement in extended kinship relations, than it is possible to determine through questionnaire surveys, but our data also show some interesting differences in the manifestation of gender hierarchies, especially between Hispanic and non-Hispanic cases.  It is quite impossible to present the detailed transcripts of the case studies here, for the obvious reason that they are confidential, and unlike the Social Opportunity Survey Files it is quite impossible to "sanitize" them by removing all identifying characteristics from the files.   Instead, a series of brief summaries of cases are given.  Any serious research scholar prepared to sign a confidentiality agreement may obtain access to the original, extended, files upon application.

The following summaries were prepared either by the person who compiled the case originally, or by Mikail Karlstrom, who worked as my research assistant.  In the more extended case of the persons given the pseudonyms "Samuel Icken" and "Katherine Crossley" I have extensively rewritten the original transcripts to ensure that the individuals cannot be identified while retaining enough of the detail to convey the extreme complexity of these individuals' family histories.

Samuel Icken and Katherine Crossley

Samuel Icken and Katherine Crossley live together in a rented apartment situated in a devastated, almost wholly African American, poverty area on the south side of Chicago. Since they are relatively old (he was fifty-six and she was fifty-one at the time of the interviews) their life experience, and particularly their employment experience, covers a period prior to the urban transformations of the 1980s. However, they have lived through those transformations and the case material includes a good deal of information on younger members of their families, and on the neighbourhood, so that these case histories embody the effects of recent change as well as providing a longer term perspective on the experience of urban African Americans.

As is the case with a very large proportion of black Chicagoans, both these individuals have roots in the southern United States. Samuel Icken’s mother was from Shreveport, Lousiana and his father from Memphis, Tennessee, though he was raised in Chicago from an early age when his mother moved here in the early 1930s. His memory of his grandparents is selective, though a more probing genealogical investigation would almost certainly have elicited more extensive knowledge of collaterals. He knows that his father had four brothers and four sisters and that his mother had one sister and five brothers, and even knows something about his parent’s parents. The shallow depth of the genealogy is typical for urban Americans (Schneider and Smith 1973; Schneider and Cottrell 1975). However, the most interesting aspect of the genealogy is the characteristic multiplicity of unions and the corresponding proliferation of half-siblings.  In spite of the voluminous body of literature suggesting that lower class African Americans have, or had, a "normal" nuclear family system, anyone who has worked extensively with genealogical materials must be aware of the complications introduced into that picture by the existence of multiple unions entered into by both men and women.

The research assistant responsible for developing this case (one of the very best of our interviewers) described Samuel in her first report as being "middle class or middle class for [the neighborhood] and a patriarch of the community judging by the frequency and manner of people greeting him. ... Samuel is a very polite, old world mannerly man."  The very first time the interviewer met him, on the street, he made a point of mentioning that some of his family work for the City government and went to college. Despite these appearances it turns out that Samuel has had a chequered career; dropping out of High School in the second year, he had a series of menial jobs working for a rug cleaning company, as an apprentice butcher, and as a shoe-shine stand operator. His first child was born when he was seventeen, and he subsequently had at least seven children by five different women. He was married for thirteen years but had no children by his wife who died a year before the interviews began. Samuel’s education was completed in prison where he spent a total of at least ten years beginning when he was nineteen. His last prison term ended when he was forty-seven, so that almost thirty years of his life were spent in and out of prison and engaged in criminal activity. The offences for which he was charged included, by his own count, 109 burglaries, larceny, selling and possession of drugs, and rape. His life experience included four gunshot wounds, the last of which resulted in a bullet remaining lodged in his neck. However, he did manage to complete High School during his incarceration.

The startling realities of this life history contrast sharply with Samuel’s general demeanour, two aspects of which are especially relevant. He did not attempt to hide his prison record, and in fact produced his arrest record to confirm it, but he did make a point of saying that he had now completely changed his life-style. This was only partially true. While he had not been convicted of any crimes for almost ten years, he still used drugs. The flows of income and expenditure in this household are extremely complex, and are discussed more fully below, but Samuel Icken receives Supplementary Social Insurance payments and Disability Benefits while his partner, Katherine Crossley is on General Assistance. They live in a subsidised apartment and use food stamps. However, he stresses that while he is a poor man he is not "broke," and Katherine Crossley also is emphatic that she is not "a bum" or a "throw away person." The razor thin line between presenting as decent an image as possible and being perceived as a member of "the underclass" is a constant preoccupation of the poor, and was clearly evident in this case. Both Samuel Icken and Katherine Crossley laid considerable emphasis on relatives who could be regarded as being "middle class." In his case it was the sister who works for the City; for her it is her mother who "owns an oil well." Her mother really does appear to derive enough income from a share of oil rights in the southern state where her family is from to enable her to live comfortably, and his sister Doris does have a decent income of her own, is married to a man who is also a government employee, and has several children in college.   This embeddedness in wider kinship ties that transcend class is not consonant with Professor Wilson's general concept of the "social isolation" of the inhabitants of poverty areas.  At the same time each was acutely aware of his or her shortcomings, such as excessive drinking, using foul language, or not really keeping the apartment as clean and tidy as it might be, so that the presentation of self oscillated between a desire to "look good" (Samuel Icken frequently said that the interviewer should make him look good in whatever was written), and a defiant reversion to "bad" behaviour. While Samuel was not particularly apologetic for his past, he was typical of lower class informants who draw a sharp conceptual line between high status and low status behaviour. In the Social Opportunity Survey for example (see appropriate web pages), an overwhelming majority of respondents expressed a fundamental belief in the existing system of social opportunities and tried to develop rational explanations of why they had failed to meet the challenge of upward social mobility. Most respondents who were Black perceived racial discrimination to be a general fact of life, but few linked it systematically to their own situation.

Another aspect of this case that merits attention is the difficulty of detecting any fundamentally different "culture," in spite of all the behavioural "irregularities" of Samuel and his associates. Many of those irregularities can be directly associated with the lack of a sufficient or stable income; things such as falling behind with rent and utilities payments, having one’s car repossessed because of failure to make payments on time, or resorting to minor deceptions in order to defeat petty bureaucratic rules. Drinking cheap wine to excess, smoking cigarettes, or using illicit drugs such as cocaine, may be foolish activities for people who cannot afford them but they are certainly not specific to the poor or to any particular racial group. There is nothing in these case materials to suggest that inhabitants of this area are so isolated that they develop specific cultural disabilities that make it impossible for them to aspire to steady employment or hamper them in obtaining it. Disabilities certainly do exist, and Katherine Crossley’s account of her experience with a job training course is a good example. In the course of listing the different jobs she has held she explained that she had been to secretarial school for a while and at one point:

However, she was insistent that she has the ability, and she has the necessary skill to do all kinds of jobs.

Now here’s ah son of a bitch out here at the Public Aid gonna tell me. Miss Wood say ah, `Looking at your file and your education and everything you could have a good job.’ I say you damn right. I said in fact I could have your fuckin job. Get out from behind this fuckin desk and let me sit there. Fuck it! I got a education honey. But you know what? I’m ill. I’m very ill and—-but I’m still trying.

It does not take much imagination, and certainly not a leap across cultural boundaries, to empathize with Katherine Crossley in her predicament.  However, we have seen that it is in the area of sex, marriage and family formation that apparent cultural differences are most manifest.

Even a cursory examination of the genealogies of these two informants shows the typicality of multiple sexual unions and a proliferation of half-siblings.   Samuel’s father had one child by each of two women before the five born to Samuel’s mother.  Her first child was born when she was thirteen years old, and was followed the next year by twins, only one of whom, Samuel, survived.  The informant listed his mother’s last child as being born just a year before her death at the age of thirty-six, and a full 20 years after her previous child. As we shall see later, there are grounds for thinking that this was actually her daughter’s child.   Samuel’s first child was born when he was 17 years old, the first of three children by Donna May Nathan who subsequently married someone else. Between his second and third child by Donna May, he had another daughter, Sandra, by Geraldine Unger, while in 1951 his last daughter by Donna May was born just months before Betsy, the daughter of June (whose last name he cannot remember although Betsy is now a frequent visitor to the apartment).  During the interviews his present companion, Katherine Crossley, reminded him of another daughter, Lenore, but Samuel Icken quickly pointed out that he "adopted" Lenore when he was living with her mother, Hannah, during the 1960s. His youngest child, Wanda (affectionately referred to as Chubby) is now 13 years old, born in the very year when he married Ursula Follet. Wanda is the daughter of Hilda Jones, not Ursula Follet, and Samuel Icken never lived with Hilda though he is on good terms with her and sees his daughter Wanda regularly.

The marriage to Ursula Follet was childless. She had been married twice previously and died just a year before the interviews with Samuel Icken began. He was at some pains to explain that Ursula was "a rich woman." Asked what he meant by that he explained that her brother owned "a company" and that she had bought all the furniture in the apartment. It was subsequently determined that the apartment was still rented in her name, the utility bills were still addressed to her, and Samuel still cashed her Social Security checks, even though it was more than a year since she died.  It was not possible to determine the exact nature of Samuel Icken’s relationship with Ursula Follet’s family, but his knowledge of her kin was fairly extensive even though some branches of the family did not live in Chicago.  The brother who "owned a company" turned out to be an executive in a multinational company whose wife operated a string of restaurants that they owned jointly. Another brother was a radio announcer in Arizona.

Whatever the family background of his wife, they lived in a rent subsidized apartment, and he seems not to have had any regular employment since the gunshot wound that qualified him for disability payments. After Ursula died it was a very short time indeed before Katherine Crossley moved in with him. She had been living nearby in a nonlegal coresidential union with a man she refers to as "Skip," though this union was revealed quite casually in general conversation after many hours of interviewing, general social contact, and work on a formal genealogy.  Katherine Crossley had not previously considered it worth mentioning. It does not take much imagination to realize how many unions of this kind remain unmentioned in questionnaire surveys.

Katherine Crossley was born Katherine Jackson in 1935, the daughter of Caroline Jackson and Drexel Deleon who were living together outside Chicago in Gary, Indiana.   Caroline already had a son by Drexel, and when Katherine was born she took little James to Chicago to see if her mother would look after the boy. While she was away Drexel Deleon was unable to take care of Katherine, only eight days old, since he was working at the time, and so he asked his neighbours, a childless couple named Lorimer, to take care of her.  She was raised by the Lorimers as their own child until she was 11 years old.  Both the Lorimers and Drexel Deleon moved many times during those years, and when Katherine’s parents (now separated) each tried to find the child, they were unable to do so. However, when Mrs. Lorimer died in 1946 the court tracked down Katherine’s mother and returned the 11 year old girl to her mother’s custody. To this day Katherine is bitter about what she sees as her mother’s desertion of her as a baby, and she never settled down to live with her mother without conflict and repeated running back to her foster father.  However, she did get along with her mother’s mother, who all this time had been raising her brother James.  However, this maternal grandmother died in 1949.  After five years, when she was sixteen, Katherine left her mother for good and went to stay with a girlfriend who was pregnant and needed help.   Soon after this June herself became pregnant with her first child, Charles; she claims that she got no help from her mother, worked until two weeks before the baby came, and returned to work two weeks later. Now an unmarried teenage mother, Katherine Crossley started to look for her father, and finally tracked him down through one of his brothers who knew that he was now living in Peoria, Illinois and working as a caretaker for a wealthy family.  Katherine wrote to him and he came up to Chicago to visit her and to inform her that she had yet another brother,  Drexel Deleon Jr., her father’s child by another woman. Drexel Jr. had been eight years old when Katherine was born, and had been brought up by his paternal relatives in Chicago after Katherine’s mother had left Drexel Deleon in 1934.

Following this reunion, Katherine Crossley moved to Peoria to live with her father and his wife, Ethel, a woman with whom Katherine developed close ties and who helped with the raising of Katherine’s children. In Peoria, Katherine met her first husband, John Madden, and they were married in 1957. Madden was in the army and Katherine followed him to North Carolina where her second son, Donald Madden, was born in 1959. Returning to Peoria, Katherine rented her own house close to her father, and her children spent a great deal of time with her father’s wife Ethel, especially while she was working. By this time she was separated from her husband, who was in any case posted overseas, and Katherine was working at one of the biggest hotels in Peoria. When this hotel transferred her to work in another city in Kentucky, she left her children with Ethel. The job did not work out but she found employment as a personal nurse for a well-to-do man who had suffered a stroke, and stayed with him until he died in 1971.  Having divorced John Madden in 1966, Katherine picked up her children and took them with her back to Chicago, where she had a series of jobs interspersed with periods on welfare.  In 1974 she married Stanley Crossley who had two grown-up children of his own by a previous union.   Stanley died in 1981 and shortly after that Katherine began to live with another man she refers to only as "Skip." When Samuel Icken’s wife died in 1985, Katherine left "Skip" and moved in with Samuel.

This attenuated account of the lives of Katherine Crossley and Samuel Icken fails adequately to convey the complexity and extensiveness of their kinship networks and relationships. Those relationships are not uniformly cooperative or intense. In fact they are often full of conflict, and recalled with less than affection. But they have a weight and importance that cannot be ignored. For example, Katherine Crossley presents her relationship with her mother as one of dislike, envy, and resentment, but she also points out that "anytime she needs me, I go. ... She don’t call on nobody but me. But she don’t do anything for me but give me a hard way to go." As we noted earlier, her mother has an income from a share of the royalties from an oil well in Louisiana, and she lives on her own property in Tennessee. Katherine Crossley frequently refers to her mother’s affluence; to her expensive car, furniture, extensive property and so forth, but she contends that she derives no personal benefit from her mother’s good fortune since she refuses to go and live with her mother in what she considers to be the wilds of Tennessee.

What is even more impressive is Katherine Crossley’s knowledge of, and relationships with, her children and their children—relationships that are just as full of conflict and cooperation as that with her mother. Her eldest son, Charles, lives in Chicago but in a different neighbourhood. Charles (who was 35 years old at the time of the interviews) has 5 living children (one died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), by five different women. During the period of the interviews, a 16 year old girl named Terry was staying in the apartment with Samuel and Katherine, and Terry was presented as Charles’ daughter by his wife, Wanda. Wanda and Charles are separated, and Wanda was in the process of trying to find a new apartment and was temporarily living close to our informants.  However, this temporary apartment was too small for her and her three children and so Terry, the eldest, was staying with Katherine. Katherine was not only feeding her, but also paying her bus fare to a distant school in the area where they had previously been living.  This arrangement with her eldest son’s estranged wife was regarded as quite natural, though Katherine did not hesitate to show her displeasure at Terry’s slovenly habits, voracious appetite, and free use of the telephone.   Eventually Terry was thrown out for a particularly objectionable act, and it was only on this occasion that Katherine revealed that Terry was not her son’s child anyway, but Wanda’s daughter born before she married Charles.  All the same Katherine remained in close touch with Wanda and her three children.  Charles’ other children, by women with whom he never lived, were also well known to Katherine, including the two that resulted from Charles’ affairs with white women.  The youngest of Katherine’s grandchildren through Charles is a 9 month old boy.

Katherine Crossley’s other son, Donald, also lives in Chicago but in a public housing project.  He has one three year old child, Dolores, by a woman named Valene who lives in the next building to Katherine.  Donald and Valene have never lived together, but the relationship between Valene and Katherine is a close one and Dolores spends a lot of time with her paternal grandmother. Among Katherine’s photograph collection is one of she, Valene and Dolores taken when they were visiting Donald in prison where he was serving time. Although these relationships have never been confined within the bounds of a standard "household" they are just as real as if they were.

Samuel Icken and Katherine Crossley are certainly among America’s poor and "deviant" population, but for all its apparent disorder their life has qualities that compel admiration. In the midst of trying to make ends meet, and not succeeding very well, their household is open to all kinds of visitors, relatives, friends and acquaintances who drop by to chat, to borrow, and frequently to stay for varying periods of time.  They are enmeshed in a complex web of relationships that extends back in time and on into the future, and in spite of the conflict and the violence that sometimes besets those relationships they are more than just viable.  Quite a few of the ties extend across class boundaries, and class differences certainly affect the quality of the ties.  Samuel Icken’s sister who works at City Hall and is married to another government employee, is the object of Samuel’s admiration and constant praise. However, she has never set foot inside his apartment; when she has occasion to come by she sits in the car until he comes down. Kinship ties are inflected by class differences in many different ways, but are rarely extinguished by them.

The relationship between Katherine Crossley and Samuel Icken is one of abrasive affection.  By no stretch of the imagination could one say that Katherine Crossley is subservient to, or dominated by, Samuel Icken. One could imagine the union breaking up on account of one of their frequent fights, but such a break-up would be absorbed within the larger pattern of kinship and friendship ties, and would not necessarily sever the relationship between the two completely.

Statistics show some marked differences between Mexican and African American patterns of household composition and conjugal relations, and therefore it is instructive to see if, or how, these differences manifest themselves in the case materials.

A Mexican case: Carmen Diaz

Carmen Diaz lives on the edge of the largest Mexican neighbourhood in Chicago. Born in Chicago, she is of Mexican origin in that her maternal grandfather came from Mexico to Texas where he met her grandmother, who was at that time married but separated and living in a household with four generations of women. Her grandparents became American citizens and moved north to a small town in southern Illinois where Carmen’s mother was born and grew up. She knows quite a lot about her maternal grandparents, especially the fact that the women all had children when they were quite young. She notes that when her mother was small she had "four generations above her in the home—her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother, and her great-great grandmother." At the age of sixteen Carmen’s mother moved to Chicago to find work, and shortly afterwards gave birth to her first child, followed two years later by Carmen and then another six children—five girls and three boys in all. Carmen’s parents were never married, for the simple reason that her father was married to someone else, and they never lived together. However, the children saw a great deal of their father as they were growing up and had a close relationship with him; he worked nearby and lived in the neighbourhood with his wife and four girls. After a period in the army he returned to find that his wife had a child by another man, a child that he accepted as his own.

Carmen Diaz produced a wealth of material on the apparently confused but actually extensive kinship networks in which she grew up, and she took note of the negligible difference between marriage and living together, though she always distinguished between the "outside" and "inside" lines. Unlike recent immigrants from Mexico, Carmen Diaz had virtually no knowledge of kin still living in Mexico, and although she had a general idea of where her grandfather came from, she has made no effort to establish contact with his kin still in Mexico. She was at some pains to point out that her mother, who lives nearby, has less "Spanish culture" than she has, a fact she attributes to having been looked after as a child by a Texas Mexican family that were Spanish speakers. During Carmen’s childhood her mother was working two jobs, so she left her children during the week with the family that lived upstairs, a family that had five children of their own. Carmen grew up calling the older woman in that family "grandmother," and the younger adults "aunt" and "uncle."

So, when Carmen Diaz was a child she had access to, and in a sense "lived in" at least three households; that of her mother, of her protokin who cared for her during the week, and of her father who lived nearby and who she visited frequently. When one of Carmen’s sisters, Joanne, got pregnant and had a baby at the age of thirteen, it was her father who took in the child and looked after it until he died, when it was sent back to Carmen’s mother, before being adopted legally by Joanne’s husband.

Carmen herself has seven children, five boys ranging in age from 5 to 15, and a 16 year old daughter. These children have five different fathers, four of whom Carmen was married to at some time. Two of her husbands are dead (she was divorced from one before he died), one returned to Mexico where he already had a wife, and she is separated from her current husband who is living with another woman. The father of her illegitimate child is now in prison.

A number of themes in Carmen Diaz’s account of her life are of particular interest to this analysis, the first being her sensitive discussion of the inside/outside distinction arising from non-legal unions. Discussing her own current marriage she made it clear that she gets along quite well with her husband and bears no particular ill-will to the woman with whom he is now living. Her tolerance has two major components. She points out that she understands the situation particularly well because when she was growing up "we were the illegitimate family." However, there is another theme embedded in this one. Carmen herself is quite conscious of the fact that she is a Mexican American and not a Mexican, and she contends that Mexican men prefer to marry American women, presumably for status reasons. However, they do not find it easy to abandon the habit of male dominance; "they want to command. And if you are raised here, you don’t want to be ordered around." Mexican women, unlike those born in the United States, are, she says, "non-persons" with no self-respect. "If a Mexican husband says jump, a Mexican woman says ‘how high?’ If he says shit, she asks what color." But for all their domination, Mexican husbands are hard-working, stable, and reliable. Carmen’s first marriage at the age of seventeen was short-lived; she was divorced three months before her first child was born. The following year she married a Mexican-born man who, for all his domineering provided her with a stability and security she had never known before. Unfortunately he was killed just two and a half years after they were married, and their son was born 10 days after he died. A subsequent affair resulted in another child a couple of years later, followed by another short-lived marriage to a man who, she subsequently discovered, had a wife in Mexico already, to whom he soon returned. So, at the age of 28 years and with four children by four different fathers, she finally married her present husband Jesus. It is clear that from the very beginning he had the "outside" woman with whom he is now living since she has a child by him who is the same age as his eldest son by Carmen.

In spite of their separation, Carmen claims to love her husband and is clearly admiring of his hard working life and the attention he pays to her children. All her seven children treat him as their father, although they know of their various "real" fathers, and he provides her with as much money for their support as he can afford. At the time of the interviews he was busy directing the older boys in the renovation of the downstairs part of the dilapidated house where Carmen and her children live.

Although she might fit all the stereotyped images of a typical "welfare mother," Carmen Diaz is not on welfare. She worked full-time until recently, and at the time of the interviews was receiving unemployment compensation and actively looking for another job. Her pattern of child-bearing and multiple unions fits within a general framework of conjugal unions and family life that is male dominated and based on the expectation of female submission. One informant referred tolerantly to one kinsman with many "outside" children by saying "He was uh, a milamores [thousand loves]." Two factors intervene to upset these expectations; the problem of poverty that interferes with a man’s capacity to be an adequate provider for his family, and the growing unwillingness of women to tolerate male domination, and particularly that aspect of it permitting "outside" unions. In this respect there are growing similarities between low income African Americans and Hispanics. Carmen Diaz is a good example of a woman moving away from acceptance of absolute male dominance, unprepared to put up with beating and infidelity, preferring to live a life of her own sustained by work if she can get it, or welfare support if she cannot.

  NOT FINISHED, GONE FLYING: COME BACK LATER