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El Barrio / 97dropped precipitously out of her life. During her Spanish Harlem years, whenshe was raising ƒrst Richard and then Hartley outside of the conventional bondsof marriage, it is hardly surprising that she would return to the subject of thefamily, which had preoccupied her during the years she bore her daughters.Neel’s situation, atypical for the white middle class, was the norm in her milieu.Many Hispanic families were matrifocal because that conƒguration providedmother and child with greater security. According to Oscar Lewis,Women felt that consensual union gives them a better break; it gives them some ofthe freedom and „exibility that men have. By not giving the fathers of their childrenlegal status as husbands, the women have a stronger claim on their children if theydecide to leave their men . . . [M]atrifocality, a high incidence of consensual unionsand a high percentage of households headed by women, which have been thoughtto be distinctive of Caribbean family organization or of Negro family life in theU.S.A., turn out to be traits of the culture of poverty . . . 20In her 1938 portrait of José’s brother Carlos’s wife Margarita, and their sonCarlitos, Neel presents the matrifocal family in terms of another period cliché:the tenement or peasant madonna, exempliƒed by Winhold Reiss’s The BrownMadonna, published in Locke’s New Negro (1925). Puerto Rican Mother andChild (Margarita and Carlitos) (1938, ƒg. 78) references that trope and the associationsof sentimentalized spirituality that serves to silence the social realityof raising children in poverty. As „attened as a Byzantine icon, Margarita hasthe tragic mien of the Virgin of Sorrows, but her distinctly undigniƒed crossedlegs, which form a hammock to support the child, suggest that she is veryyoung and quite awkward in her role. Once the false façade of idealization iscracked, its opposite can emerge. Does this woman-child, with her sexualizedinfant, refer instead to a dominant trope of Harlem Renaissance literature, thatof the tragic mulatta who is the silent bearer of racial impurity? 21 Neel digs tothe roots of period clichés and ƒnds fear of difference.Five years later, in The Spanish Family (1943, ƒg. 79), Margarita, now withthree children, is the stabilizing force for the infant on her lap and the jitterychildren at her side. Showing the family wedged together in front of the“Spanish” grillwork, a symbol of the “green poverty” they left behind, the compositionbrings to mind Dorothea Lange’s FSA photograph Migrant Mother(1936), the most frequently reproduced image from the Depression era. In theyear of the WPA’s demise, Neel repaints the subject in terms of ongoing urbanpoverty, which, with the war effort, was in danger of being ignored. Neel’s1940 portrait of Margarita’s husband in T. B. Harlem serves as an accompanimenthere: he is absent as a result of poverty-induced illness. However, thetheme of poverty is secondary to the stability provided by the centralized verti-