The Dust Bowl Okies and Fresno's FSA Camps

In nineteen thirty-six, a photographer named Dorothea Lange drove into the San Joaquin Valley on assignment for the Farm Security Administration. The agency had been established to document the condition of migrant agricultural workers in California, and what Lange found in the camps outside Fresno and in the surrounding farm counties was the human result of two simultaneous catastrophes that had converged on the same geography.

The first was the ecological collapse of the Great Plains. A decade of drought combined with decades of over-plowing that had stripped the native grassland had turned the topsoil of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, and neighboring states into mobile dust. The wind moved it in walls hundreds of feet high that turned midday to darkness. The farms that the dust buried or suffocated were already under water from the Depression. Families who had nowhere else to go loaded what they could carry onto trucks and drove west on Route sixty-six toward California, which agricultural labor recruiters had advertised as a place where work was available.

The second catastrophe was that the work paid almost nothing, the housing was worse, and California had neither planned for the arrival nor welcomed it. The men and women who came from Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas and who were collectively called Okies, regardless of their actual state of origin, found a labor market with far more workers than jobs. They lived in camps by the irrigation ditches, in shelters made of whatever materials were available: wood scraps, canvas, cardboard, mud.

The Farm Security Administration established a network of federal camps in the San Joaquin Valley specifically to provide minimal sanitary facilities and some degree of security. The Arvin Federal Camp and the Shafter Camp were among the largest, with others scattered across the valley. John Steinbeck visited the FSA camps while researching The Grapes of Wrath and based portions of the novel on what he observed. The Joads, the fictional family at the center of that novel, were drawn from composite observations of real families whose situations were not fictional at all.

Lange's photographs of the camps, including the image she titled Migrant Mother, taken at a pea-pickers' camp near Nipomo in the spring of nineteen thirty-six, became among the most reproduced documentary photographs of the twentieth century. The woman in the photograph, whose name was Florence Owens Thompson, was thirty-two years old when Lange photographed her. She was born in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma, and her family claimed Cherokee descent. She had seven children at the time. Lange initially did not record her name. Thompson later said she did not benefit from the photograph's fame.