Introduction about California
It took nine years for Manies to gain the support of local businessmen and to be admitted into the local Chamber of Commerce. Eventually, he also ‘dropped in’ to college with less than a high school education and went on to earn a master’s degree that would allow him to teach vocational studies as Tulare High School. He used his own life story of his transition from an outsider in California and the San Joaquin Valley to a successful member of the community when teaching minority students.3 He explained: “They [the students] had this give up attitude. I’d say, ‘Well, look, don’t tell me that because if you really try hard enough I know by first-hand experience you can accomplish some of these goals'” (Manies 1981, p. 39).
Manies was not the only migrant to notice the transition of Okies from outsiders to insiders in the San Joaquin Valley. Ernest Martin (1981) explained in his Odyssey interview that education and years spent living abroad had given him perspective on the issue of Okie identity and its impact on the Valley. Arriving as a child in 1936, Martin reached adulthood during what he saw as the transition of Okies from being regarded as a ‘group apart’ to a community that has come to define the San Joaquin Valley. He described the region as “western Oklahoma” and noted that when he returns to visit as an adult, he feels that he is just as well in Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Texas. He described this change in terms of the success of the migrants. I think we won. We were the outcasts in a certain sense at first. But now the people living in the San Joaquin Valley inside the cities, inside the city limits and the people in Visalia even in Fresno and Bakersfield are now descendents of those people and it’s changed the whole environment of the central San Joaquin Valley… This is why you don’t really hear so much of Okies anymore in the area you might but it’s only a nostalgic term it’s something that’s not really derogatory anymore. (Martin 1981, pp. 32-33) Martin’s individual impression that Okies have come to occupy a nostalgic place in California suggests a changing conceptualization of Californian identity that incorporates the Okie story into a common heritage characterized by “success, stability, and progress” (Lowenthal 1994, p. 44). Such trends are further reflected in recent institutionalized commemorations at a broader geographic scale. In 2002, the California Council for the Humanities launched its ‘California Stories’ program. According to the Council, the statewide initiative was “designed to strengthen communities and connect Californians by uncovering personal and community stories that, once gathered and woven together, tell the story of today’s California” (California Council for the Humanities 2002a). Led by the First Lady of California, Sharon Davis, the three-year initiative was based upon three grant programs that would document the cultural diversity of California’s residents as well as a statewide reading drive that would create a common literary community across the entire state by selecting and encouraging local discussion about a single novel. Often regarded by Californians as one of the state’s greatest literary sons, a novel by John Steinbeck seemed the obvious choice.
But which of his works best encapsulated what it meant to be a Californian The choice: The Grapes of Wrath, a book which only 60 years prior created uproar and was banned in parts of the San Joaquin Valley (Haslam 1989, 1994). According to the Council, a statewide reading and discussion of the novel would allow residents to “discover parallels between the book and the contemporary California experience” (California Council for the Humanities 2002a). Jim Quay, Executive Director of the Council was quoted in the Salinas (hometown of John Steinbeck) newspaper, the Californian, describing the novel as “an archetypal California story” (Rivera 2002).
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