Dust Bowl Migrants
Dorothea Lange, Migrant agricultural worker's family in Nipomo, California, 1936; gelatin silver print; courtesy the Library of Congress. Lange's field notes include the following caption for this photograph: "Seven hungry children and their mother, aged 32. The father is a native Californian."
Revealing the Migrants' Struggles and Hardships
Although many Californians resented the migrant workers, others sought to humanize their struggles. Famed country band leader Bob Wills penned a number of migration-themed songs such as “Take Me Back to Tulsa.” His lyrics reflected the class struggles of the time: “Poor man picks the cotton, rich man gets the money.” Folk music legend Woody Guthrie, himself born to Oklahoma farmers, traveled with the migrants and was inspired by their struggles to write the anthem “This Land is Your Land” and many other songs of migrant life and struggle. Other sympathetic portrayals of migrant life and poverty included a famous collection of photographs by Dorothea Lange, produced throughout the 1930s as a commission by the Farm Security Administration; and John Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath, which was published in 1939 and adapted as a movie the following year.
Settlement in California
Throughout the 1930s, almost half of the Great Plains migrants settled in rural areas of California. Later, in the early 1940s, after a decade of struggling to find work in agriculture, many more moved to Los Angeles to find work in the new defense industry that sprang up during World War II.