anouk jurgens's List: Migrant workers

• Arrival in California did not put an end to the migrants' travels.  Their lives were characterized by transience. In an attempt to maintain a steady income, workers had to follow the harvest around the state.  When potatoes were ready to be picked, the migrants needed to be where the potatoes were. The same principle applied to harvesting cotton, lemons, oranges, peas, and other crops. For this reason, migrant populations were most dense in agricultural centers. The territory covered by Todd and Sonkin in this project ranged from as far south as El Rio, just north of Oxnard, to as far north as Yuba City, north of Sacramento. Much of the documentation was concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley.
• The migrants represented in Voices from the Dust Bowl came primarily from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Most were of Anglo-American descent with family and cultural roots in the poor rural South. In the homes they left, few had been accustomed to living with modern conveniences such as electricity and indoor plumbing.
• the migrants were generically known as "Okies," referring to the approximately 20 percent who were from Oklahoma
• Soil conservation practices were not widely employed by farmers during this era, so when a seven-year drought began in 1931, followed by the coming of dust storms in 1932, many of the farms literally dried up and blew away creating what became known as the "Dust Bowl." Driven by the Great Depression, drought, and dust storms, thousands of farmers packed up their families and made the difficult journey to California where they hoped to find work
• A complex set of interacting forces both economic and ecological brought the migrant workers documented in this ethnographic collection to California.
• A complex set of interacting forces both economic and ecological brought the migrant workers documented in this ethnographic collection to California.  Following World War I, a recession led to a drop in the market price of farm crops and caused Great Plains farmers to increase their productivity through mechanization and the cultivation of more land.  This increase in farming activity required an increase in spending that caused many farmers to become financially overextended. The stock market crash in 1929 only served to exacerbate this already tenuous economic situation. Many independent farmers lost their farms when banks came to collect on their notes, while tenant farmers were turned out when economic pressure was brought to bear on large landholders.  The attempts of these displaced agricultural workers to find other work were met with frustration due to a 30 percent unemployment rate.

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• Between 315,000 and 400,000 residents of Oklahoma and other Plains states moved west during the 1930s due to the Great Depression and a severe regional drought. These crises caused a temporary acceleration of a steadier, larger population shift.
• fewer then 16000 people came from the actual dust bowl region, most came from other places in drought but the huge dust storms gave the migration a name
• Between 1910 and 1950, nearly four million who were born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri lived outside that region: 1,367,720 of them lived in California, and concentrations also went to Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and New Mexico. The vast majority of Dust Bowl migrants stayed on the West Coast permanently.
• Fewer than 16,000 farmers from that region went to California during the 1930s, but its huge dust storms gave the mass migration a name.  
    

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  The vast majority of Dust Bowl migrants stayed on the West Coast permanently.

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• The   Dust Bowl migration  of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in   the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in   their country. For almost seventy years the story of white families from   Oklahoma and neighboring states making their way to California in the midst   of the Great Depression

• Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas.

   

                   Those states had suffered greatly in the early 1930s, both from   escalating joblessness and a severe drought that for several years denied   much of the Great Plains sufficient rain to produce its usual complement of   wheat and cotton. The drought had also produced a spectacular ecological   disaster. Wind driven dust storms had arisen in a broad swath of counties in   western Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles on several occasions   between 1933 and 1935, each time filling the air with millions of tons of   finely plowed top soil and blackening skies for a thousand miles as the   clouds moved east. The dust storms brought press attention and later   government intervention to the affected area, soon known as the "Dust Bowl." 
• Numbers are elusive but it is safe to say that   300-400,000 Oklahomans, Texans, Arkansans, and Missourians moved to   California and settled there during the 1930s
• Whites comprised roughly 95 percent of those moving. African   Americans were well represented in the populations of Oklahoma, Arkansas,   and Texas and some left during the 1930s, but usually for the cities of the   North.

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