Locating Okie Sites of Memory
Commemorations of Okie identity in California’s San Joaquin Valley serve to return common memories to particular locales – once again tethering identity premised upon the past to present place (Gough 2004). One significant celebration of Okie heritage is the annual ‘Dust Bowl Days’ Festival held in the grounds of Sunset School in the Kern County community of Lamont. The site of the festival is particularly significant as it sits adjacent to the contemporary Sunset Labor camp, formerly known as the Farm Security Administration Arvin Migratory Labor Camp. More popularly known as the ‘Weedpatch Camp,’ the location was not only a source of inspiration for John Steinbeck’s writing The Grapes of Wrath, but also served as the film set for director John Ford’s interpretation of the novel.
Held each year since 1990, the festival developed in response to a call to preserve Okie collective memory in terms of both communicative and cultural memory:
John Steinbeck wrote a book about it, Dorothea Lange recorded it with a camera, and Woodie Guthrie wrote songs about it to tear at your heart, and it all happened in this area. (Dust Bowl Committee 2007) Organized by the Dust Bowl Committee, the one-day annual festival has been “a chance to share memories with old friends, and make new memories with your children, and your grandchildren” and thus seeks to ensure the continuity of Okie migrant heritage in Kern County (Dust Bowl Committee 2007a). While attending the event in 2003, I observed sign-in sheets near the front entrance to the school grounds that served as reminders to the past, asking visitors to sign on the list that properly denotes their state of origin: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Other. In this place and time, the geographic Okies reversed their marginalized place in society and played the role of insiders with the Oklahoma list requiring two spiral notebooks to keep up with the growing list of names. Reminders of past places, times and experiences were the norm at the Dust Bowl Days Festival in 2003 (Figure 3). Near the sign-in tables in the school courtyard, students from the Sunset School displayed yearbooks from decades gone by as well as recent classes. While the names listed in contemporary yearbooks are more typically recognized as Hispanic, living in the labor camp still ties them to those Okie visitors like Jim Harris, who spent his childhood living in an agricultural camp near the well-known Tagus Ranch in Tulare County (J. Harris 2003, pers. comm.).4 During the day-long festival, the school cafeteria served as an exhibition hall, drawing a variety of vendors and displays. One corner of the room was arranged to resemble what might be interpreted as an Oklahoma homestead or a Weedpatch Camp cabin. The objects included in the display, for instance a butter-churn, lantern, quilts and a burlap sack once filled with pinto beans, were not explicitly Okie in origin or time period, but still served as enough of a reminder of the past, that older visitors paused to examine the items and share stories of their former days in past places (Figure 4). While some scholars might question the historical accuracy of the items presented in the scene, the authenticity of the scene is indisputable – the items serve their intended purpose of reinforcing a generalized collective sense of the past as well as individual memories (Lowenthal 1975; Bruner 1994; Livingstone 1998; DeLyser 1999).
Separately, the objects in the display were drawn from a variety of sources and time periods, but when arranged together, they contribute to the overall sense of the Okie migrant experience. Geographer Nuala Johnson explains that when attempting to unify history into collective memory, temporal elements may become less important than the creation of a spatial spectacle noting that unlike formal academic histories, in which an account of the past is conventionally structured around the linking together of episodes into a narrative, public memory may be more suitably articulated as a spatial arrangement of objects of a spectacle. (Johnson 2000, p. 254) The creation of spectacle is inherently visual and serves as a tangible link to experiences and places that are interwoven together, although at times non-continuously, to generate a shared sense of the past.
Commemorations of Okie identity in California’s San Joaquin Valley serve to return common memories to particular locales – once again tethering identity premised upon the past to present place (Gough 2004). One significant celebration of Okie heritage is the annual ‘Dust Bowl Days’ Festival held in the grounds of Sunset School in the Kern County community of Lamont. The site of the festival is particularly significant as it sits adjacent to the contemporary Sunset Labor camp, formerly known as the Farm Security Administration Arvin Migratory Labor Camp. More popularly known as the ‘Weedpatch Camp,’ the location was not only a source of inspiration for John Steinbeck’s writing The Grapes of Wrath, but also served as the film set for director John Ford’s interpretation of the novel.
Held each year since 1990, the festival developed in response to a call to preserve Okie collective memory in terms of both communicative and cultural memory:
John Steinbeck wrote a book about it, Dorothea Lange recorded it with a camera, and Woodie Guthrie wrote songs about it to tear at your heart, and it all happened in this area. (Dust Bowl Committee 2007) Organized by the Dust Bowl Committee, the one-day annual festival has been “a chance to share memories with old friends, and make new memories with your children, and your grandchildren” and thus seeks to ensure the continuity of Okie migrant heritage in Kern County (Dust Bowl Committee 2007a). While attending the event in 2003, I observed sign-in sheets near the front entrance to the school grounds that served as reminders to the past, asking visitors to sign on the list that properly denotes their state of origin: Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Other. In this place and time, the geographic Okies reversed their marginalized place in society and played the role of insiders with the Oklahoma list requiring two spiral notebooks to keep up with the growing list of names. Reminders of past places, times and experiences were the norm at the Dust Bowl Days Festival in 2003 (Figure 3). Near the sign-in tables in the school courtyard, students from the Sunset School displayed yearbooks from decades gone by as well as recent classes. While the names listed in contemporary yearbooks are more typically recognized as Hispanic, living in the labor camp still ties them to those Okie visitors like Jim Harris, who spent his childhood living in an agricultural camp near the well-known Tagus Ranch in Tulare County (J. Harris 2003, pers. comm.).4 During the day-long festival, the school cafeteria served as an exhibition hall, drawing a variety of vendors and displays. One corner of the room was arranged to resemble what might be interpreted as an Oklahoma homestead or a Weedpatch Camp cabin. The objects included in the display, for instance a butter-churn, lantern, quilts and a burlap sack once filled with pinto beans, were not explicitly Okie in origin or time period, but still served as enough of a reminder of the past, that older visitors paused to examine the items and share stories of their former days in past places (Figure 4). While some scholars might question the historical accuracy of the items presented in the scene, the authenticity of the scene is indisputable – the items serve their intended purpose of reinforcing a generalized collective sense of the past as well as individual memories (Lowenthal 1975; Bruner 1994; Livingstone 1998; DeLyser 1999).
Separately, the objects in the display were drawn from a variety of sources and time periods, but when arranged together, they contribute to the overall sense of the Okie migrant experience. Geographer Nuala Johnson explains that when attempting to unify history into collective memory, temporal elements may become less important than the creation of a spatial spectacle noting that unlike formal academic histories, in which an account of the past is conventionally structured around the linking together of episodes into a narrative, public memory may be more suitably articulated as a spatial arrangement of objects of a spectacle. (Johnson 2000, p. 254) The creation of spectacle is inherently visual and serves as a tangible link to experiences and places that are interwoven together, although at times non-continuously, to generate a shared sense of the past.
Breitling Navitimer Replica watches are high quality but at a lower price. So why not take action immediately, just rush to purchase Replica Breitling Navitimer ChronoMatic All Stainless Steel White Dial online now!
Processing your request, Please wait....
