Okie’s Identity in California
Federal governmental policies of crop curtailment also fostered the removal of tenants from the land in the cotton-growing areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri (Stein 1973). Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act introduced in 1933, landowners received cash from the federal government in exchange for removing their acreage from production. Faced with additional problems of drought, periodic flooding, boll weevil infestation and falling cotton prices, farmers eagerly signed up with the AAA Administration and in turn evicted the tenants from their land. With tenant farmers losing their means of subsistence and community businesses suffering as a result, by 1937 the local farm economy faced regional unemployment rates of 22% across the entire Western South.
Despite levels of unemployment in California that were only slightly lower than those in the Okie states, the prospect of finding unskilled work in California cotton fields was attractive. In addition, the state’s vegetable and fruit crops demanded large pools of seasonal manual labor that Okie migrants could more than adequately supply (Gregory 1989, see also Mitchell 1996). According to Gregory (1989), the feature that distinguished the Depression-era migrants from earlier arrivals was their purpose and social composition. Whereas earlier groups could afford to relocate and thus were perceived to have been expanding westward with the rest of the country, the Okies of the 1930s were often characterized by Californians as poor whites who were pushed by economic desperation from their home states.1 Unwanted, they were then duly subject to the abuses of a large-scale commercialized agricultural system in a state that preyed upon a vulnerable pool of migrant labor (McWilliams 1939; US Congress, House, 1941; Fisher 1945; Taylor 1983; Limerick 1987). Popular media depictions, such as those of the Farm Security Administration photos of Dorothea Lange, John Steinbeck’s novel and John Ford’s movie adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, and the ‘Dust Bowl Ballads’ of Woodie Guthrie, greatly contributed to the image of destitute white masses fleeing the Dust Bowl only to become victimized again in the agricultural fields of California (McWilliams 1939; Shindo 1997).
Despite the seemingly contradictory origins of Okie migrants, the vivid images of the Dust Bowl and California, both real and imagined, still evoke the most common remembrance of this migration and the people who took part in it, and likewise draw attention to contemporary constructions of Okie identity in California (Shindo 1997). As the following examples will show, such an interpretation of the past has become engrained within California society at scales ranging from the individual migrants and their descendents to representatives of the state of California who have been authorized to document the diversity of migrant experience. First, there is a discussion about attempts by national and California state agencies to preserve individual Okie memories and to incorporate the universal themes of those Okie stories and of popular media into the contemporary
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