The Dust Bowl Was Not Welcomed Here

This is where California began for the Okies.

After three days or four days across the desert, across the New Mexico and Arizona flats and then the Mojave, through one hundred and twelve degree heat with a radiator that boiled every forty miles, they came down through Cajon Pass and the San Bernardino Valley opened up below them: green, cultivated, irrigated, the smell of orange blossoms if they came in winter. The promised land, except that it was not promising them anything.

The Dust Bowl migration of the nineteen thirties brought somewhere between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand Oklahomans, Arkansans, Texans, and Kansans into California. They arrived at the rate of thousands per month. The California response was not charitable. The state of California passed a law in nineteen thirty-seven making it a misdemeanor to transport indigent non-residents into the state. San Bernardino County sheriffs erected roadblocks on the approaches to the Foothill Boulevard corridor. They were sometimes instructed to turn families back at the county line.

The law was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in nineteen forty-one, but it operated for four years. The Border Patrol, the so-called bum blockade, turned away thousands at the state line. Agricultural interests throughout the valley wanted the labor, picking citrus and cotton for wages below what any California resident would accept, but they did not want the people to stay. They wanted a floating labor pool, not a community.

Steinbeck wrote the novel in nineteen thirty-nine. The reality at this specific stretch of road preceded him. The Okies did not find what they were looking for when they came over the pass. They found the same arrangement they had left: a place that needed their backs and not their futures.