Embedded Files
A New Deal for Some
Federal labor camps, like "Weedpatch" made famous by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), were created to provide safe and sanitary housing for migrant workers. As Columbia University historian Mae M. Ngai explains:
One small program of the AAA [Agricultural Adjustment Act, a New Deal farm program] the Resettlement Administration, and its successor, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), attempted to address the plight of migrant farmworkers by constructing labor camps for migratory workers. The camps aimed to provide "minimum facilities" for health and safety, hot and cold running water, laundry, recreational activities, democratically elected self-government, health care, and liaisons with local schools.[1]
However, these federal camps did little to help Filipino or Mexican workers. Ngai states:
Ironically, Mexicans and Filipinos, the foundational agricultural workforce with a compelling interest and desire to raise agricultural standards, remained virtually untouched by the FSA camp experiment. Mexican workers tended to live in rural colonias, and Filipinos lived almost entirely in labor camps operated by their co-ethnics.[2]
One might note that of the 18 federal camps established by 1941, none were in Monterey, San Luis Obispo, or Santa Barbara counties. For locations of the federal camps, see the map of Federal labor camps from USDA History Collection, Special Collections, National Agricultural Library.
For Further Reading:
Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.
"Farm Labor in the 1930s." Rural Migration News. Vol. 9, No. 4 (October 2003). http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=788_0_6_0.Â
Little Local Community Support for Dust Bowl Refugees
Ngai notes the absence of Mexican and Filipino residents at the federal camps by examining the weekly camp census reports.[3] As she further explains:
In the main, Dust Bowl refugees and transients populated the FSA camps. In some respects they were the neediest migrants because they had no local communities of their own. But they also had few stakes in the long-term prospects of agricultural wage-labor. Formerly independent farmers and tenants, they carried a conservative reputation and moved to urban areas when industrial war-production jobs became available in the late 1930s. In fact, the FSA chose white migrants for its social experiments in part because they presented a conservative, docile image to the public. Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph "Migrant Mother" delivered the FSA's preferred message that migratory workers were white, pathetically poor, singular, and passive.[4]
"Migrant Mother," Nipomo, California. 1936. Photographer: Dorothea Lange. From Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [Reproduction number: LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516 DLC]
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse