Runner-up, National Council on Public History Book Award, 2008 The
1930s exodus of "Okies" dispossessed by repeated droughts and
failed crop prices was a relatively brief interlude in the history
of migrant agricultural labor. Yet it attracted wide attention
through the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) and the images of Farm Security Administration photographers
such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Ironically, their work
risked sublimating the subjects-real people and actual
experience-into aesthetic artifacts, icons of suffering,
deprivation, and despair. Working for the Farm Security
Administration in California's migrant labor camps in 1938-39,
Sanora Babb, a young journalist and short story writer, together
with her sister Dorothy, a gifted amateur photographer, entered the
intimacy of the dispossessed farmers' lives as insiders, evidenced
in the immediacy and accuracy of their writings and photos. Born in
Oklahoma and raised on a dryland farm, the Babb sisters had
unparalleled access to the day-by-day harsh reality of field labor
and family life. This book presents a vivid, firsthand account of
the Dust Bowl refugees, the migrant labor camps, and the growth of
labor activism among Anglo and Mexican farm workers in California's
agricultural valleys linked by the "Dirty Plate Trail" (Highway
99). It draws upon the detailed field notes that Sanora Babb wrote
while in the camps, as well as on published articles and short
stories about the migrant workers and an excerpt from her Dust Bowl
novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Like Sanora's writing, Dorothy's
photos reveal an unmediated, personal encounter with the migrants,
portraying the social and emotional realities of their actual
living and working conditions, together with their efforts to
organize and to seek temporary recreation. An authority in
working-class literature and history, volume editor Douglas Wixson
places the Babb sisters' work in relevant historical and
social-political contexts, examining their role in reconfiguring
the Dust Bowl exodus as a site of memory in the national
consciousness. Focusing on the material conditions of everyday
existence among the Dust Bowl refugees, the words and images of
these two perceptive young women clearly show that, contrary to
stereotype, the "Okies" were a widely diverse people, including not
only Steinbeck's sharecropper "Joads" but also literate,
independent farmers who, in the democracy of the FSA camps, found
effective ways to rebuild lives and create communities.
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