It’s the early 1930’s, and a violent wind is blowing through the southern midwest, drying the land, picking up dust, knocking over crops, and driving farm families west. More than a third of a million people have picked up their possessions and left for California in the hopes of finding one of those fruit picking jobs that are so widely advertised - just until they earn enough money to buy new farms and settle down again. It’s quickly becoming clear that those dreams won’t be coming to fruition. In California, migrants are unwelcome in towns, live in dirty, illegal roadside camps, and earn wages that are hardly enough to feed a family, when they can get jobs at all. Migrant families are getting hungry and desperate, but the Great Depression is going on - everyone feels hungry and desperate, and the government - state and national - has been slow to act. The flow of new workers isn’t slowing, and tensions between workers and California’s corporate farms are rising. Fear of strikes and the abysmal living conditions for migrants - as revealed by muckraking photographers and journalists - mean that the national government can ignore this issue no longer. Issues run deeper than just the surface - there are deep structural issues in the relationship between farm workers and land owners, the bank and the people. Delegates to this committee will advise the government on the best course of action for balancing the tensions in California and creating a system of agricultural labor in which workers are able to hope for a better future.
| dreams_turned_to_dust-grapes_of_wrath.pdf |