From the details in “Uncle Marcos,” what do you infer about the social and economic situation of the family to which Clara and Uncle Marcos belong?

Esteban Trueba was born into a family with a good name but crumbling finances. As a young man, he takes initiative and works hard to secure his future, involving himself in serveral successful businesses. Clara is his wife.

Seated in their dining room among the battered, antiquated pieces that had been fine Victorian furniture long ago, Esteban Trueba and his sister Férula were eating the same greasy soup they had every day of the week, and the same tasteless fish they had for dinner every Friday. They were attended by the same servant who had taken care of them their whole lives, in the tradition of the paid slaves of the era.

But his blue-blood past was of no use to Esteban if there was not enough money in the house to pay the grocer and he had to go to school on foot because he did not have the fare for the streetcar. He recalled how they had packed him off to school with his chest and back lined with newspaper, because he had no woolen underclothes and his overcoat was in tatters, and how he had suffered at the thought that his schoolmates might be able to hear, as he could, the crunch of the paper as it moved against his skin.

He also set up a modest general store where the tenants could buy whatever they needed without having to make the trip by oxcart all the way into San Lucas. The patrén would buy things wholesale and resell them at cost to his workers. He introduced a voucher system, which at first functioned as a form of credit, but gradually became a substitute for legal tender. With these slips of pink paper his tenants could buy everything in the general store; their wages were paid in them. In addition to the famous slips of paper, each worker also had the right to a small plot of land that he could cultivate in his free time, as well as six hens a year per family, a measure of seed, a share of the harvest to meet his basic needs, bread and milk for every day, and a bonus of fifty pesos that was distributed among the men at Christmas and on Independence Day.

Socially Clara is somewhat of an outcast... demon possessed.

These words of Father Restrepo were etched in the family memory with all the gravity of a diagnosis, and in the years to come they had more than one occasion to recall them. The only one who never thought of them again was Clara herself, who simply wrote them in her diary and forgot them. Her parents, however, could not forget, even though they both agreed that demonic possession was a sin too great for such a tiny child. They were afraid of other people’s curses and Father Restrepo’s fanaticism.