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1. What does repatriation mean?
2. How did the Okie narrative about Mexican migrants differ from reality?
3. What was motivating Mexicans to cross between the borders? Did Mexicans see borders as an inhibitor?

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1. Compare the pictures of the migrant mothers. How are they the same?
2. Migrant workers regardless of skin color lived in poor conditions for low wages. What would have happened if they worked together, the Okies and the Mexicans?
3. Why didn't the two communities work together?

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1. What year do think this picture was taken in?
2. Have you ever seen this picture before? Do you know who took it?
3. Why do you think this picture became the image of the Great Depression?

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-Importance of oral storytelling in rural America.
- The illiteracy rate in 1930 was 4.3%.

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-Indoor bathroom was invented in 1596 by Sir John Harrington.
-Plumbing became available to all Americans by the end of the 1940's.

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1. How does the white migrant camp differ from the Mexican migrant camp? Why is there a difference?
2. What kind of housing do the migrants have?
3. How do you take a bath, cook food, or get lights at night? Ho did the migrants living in the FSA camps get those things?

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1. How does Jose Flores feel about the Okies?
2. What does Jose think needs to happen for Mexicans to get better working conditions?
3. Have you ever interviewed someone about a topic they are an expert in?
4. What questions would you ask them?

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1. In 1941, why were FSA (Farm Security Administration) camps segregated by race?
2. What do you see in the picture? Do you think it accurately portrays what it was like to live in an FSA camp?
3. Think about Esperanza's experience. Did the children have the same opportunities as you?

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1. This is another song written during the dust bowl. How are the lyrics different then "Sunny California" by Mary Sullivan?
2. Guthrie uses adjectives like dusty, hot, cold, dry, and green to describe the migrant experiance. What are some adjectives you might use to describe the place you live?
3.  How does Guthrie capture the plight of the migrant worker through his lyrics?

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1. What is an auction? Do the owners have a choice on whether their belongings get sold?
2. How does it make you feel to see all of this family's belongings listed on a piece of paper?
3.What if those were your family's belongings?

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1. Have you ever gone to a city meeting?
2. There are many questions listed on the flier. What kind of solutions will be found to help citizens?
3. In the flier it says "This is your meeting, you are expected to be present with all your friends and neighbors." Why is it important to solve the community's problems together?

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1. Does your family sing songs?
2. What are some stories that you hear in your family?
3. Why do you think the woman sang the song instead of writing it down? Did she have paper, or know how to write?
4. If you wrote a song, what story would you want to tell?

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1. Why did some people call the Okies an “invasion” rather than a “migration”?
2. Should the government have intervened? Done more? Done less?
3. How does this article relate to Esperanza Rising?        4. Compare the difficulties that Okies and Mexican migrants faced.

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1. Have you ever traveled a long distance with your family?
2. How is Esperanza's life in California different than in Mexico?
3. How would you feel if you had to leave your home to live in another country?

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Migrant Mother in Nipomo, California 1936

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Migrant Mother in Nipomo, California 1936

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Migratory Mexican field workers home 1936

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Migratory Mexican field workers home 1936

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Camp of Migratory fruit pickers Farmington, CA 1935

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Camp of Migratory fruit pickers Farmington, CA 1935

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Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty (1941) 

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Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty (1941) 

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It’s a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed          My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road                    Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled                And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes              I slept on the ground in the light of the moon              On the edge of the city you’ll see us and then              We come with the dust and we go with the wind

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops                  Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops              Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground            From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been            We’ll work in this fight and we’ll fight till we win

It’s always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I’ll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free

Woody Guthrie, Pastures of Plenty (1941)

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The “Okies” Search for a Lost Frontier                                                     By Charles L. Todd                                                                            The New	York Times Magazine, August 27, 1939

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The “Okies” Search for a Lost Frontier                                                     By Charles L. Todd                                                                            The New	York Times Magazine, August 27, 1939

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Interview about FSA camp governance, camp work, non-FSA migrant camps, labor issues, attitude toward "Okies."|Flores, Jose     El Rio, 1941

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Interview about FSA camp governance, camp work, non-FSA migrant camps, labor issues, attitude toward "Okies."|Flores, Jose     El Rio, 1941

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The “Okies” Search for a Lost Frontier                                                     By Charles L. Todd                                                                            The New	York Times Magazine, August 27, 1939

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The “Okies” Search for a Lost Frontier                                                     By Charles L. Todd                                                                            The New	York Times Magazine, August 27, 1939

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The “Okies” Search for a Lost Frontier Charles L. Todd The New York Times Magazine, August 27, 1939 “They told me this was the land o’ milk an’ honey, but Ah guess the cow’s gone dry and the tumblebugs has got in the beehive.” That, in his own language, is the way the average Dust Bowl migrant feels toward California today. And how does California react to the migrant? As one West Coast grower puts it, “This isn’t a migration – it’s an invasion! They’re worse than a plague of locusts!” The situation might not be so tragic if there were an end in sight somewhere. But the “covered wagons” are still rumbling across the border – there were 20,000 new arrivals during the first five months of 1939, making a total of nearly 300,000 migrants now living in California. “What shall we do with them? How can we feed them? What about housing, medical care, relief?” These are the questions California is asking today, and no one, not even the Federal Government, seems to know the ultimate answers. Once California wanted, or thought she wanted, all the migratory labor the drought states could supply. A twenty-acre hop farm, for instance, adds as many as 500 pickers during the harvest, and “peak” labor was sometimes difficult to find. Today, however, there are thousands clamoring for jobs like that, and the “Okie,” the migrant from the Dust Bowl, has all the advantage of desperation. Native pickers, pruners, grape-girdlers and cotton-choppers are hopelessly out-generaled. Mexicans, who formerly held a monopoly on “stoop” labor in the potato patches of Kern County and the lettuce fields of Imperial, have been routed by these work-hungry folk from the drought States – 20% of them are from Oklahoma; hence the generic name, Okie. Growers, faced with uncertainties in their market, and besieged with propaganda aimed at bettering living conditions among their tenants and laborers, are searching desperately for a way out. Finally, the nation-wide publicity brought to a head by John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” has brought the whole situation in California close to the boiling point. Meanwhile, what of the “Okies”? It has been said that the Dust Bowl is staging a recovery; that the wheat crop there is “the richest on many farms since predrought days.” Why don’t they go back? Why are they still coming? An automobile, vintage 1926, drawing a home-made trailer loaded with tattered mattresses Maraline Ellis Salem-Keizer School District 2013-2014 ragged children in the rear seat, a man and a woman in the front. The woman is hatless and is wearing a loose dress of uncertain age and color. Her neck and arms are almost as red as her husband’s. The man, wearing overalls but no shirt, climbs out of the car and walks over to the caretaker’s office. If he is fortunate, there will be lodging for him and his family until he can organize his wits and get started again. This particular newcomer was “tractored off” a farm in a Southern State. The landowner bought two dozen tractors and let go nearly a hundred share-cropper families. He has been in California nearly two months – “mostly cotton-choppin’ up near Bakersfield, me an’ my wife at 75 cents an acre . . . we manage about an acre an’ a half a day between us.” This migrant doesn’t blame California for “bein’ scared about all us folk bargin’ in,” but occasionally he thinks they rub it in a little. Somewhere he recently read an article which states that there are “a goodly number of Communists among the migrants.” “If Ah evah kaitch the feller that wrote that stuff,” he says ominously, “Ahm gonna give him a whuppin’.” Asked if he would like to go back to his native State, he removes his big, black, “Okie” hat, smiles in a slow, superior fashion, and comes back with: “Waal, son, things is pickin’ up back there . . . Jest befoah Ah left, Ah seen two jack rabbits runnin’ across a field, an’ nobody was chasin’ ‘em!” By no means all of them began as sharecroppers, however. One man, working in the fields near Shafter, carries a record of a $10,000 Texas bank account, membership cards in several national fraternal organizations, and faded pictures of a neat little farmhouse. His wife, a former school teacher, is filling a notebook with poetry written on days when there is no work to be found. There are former preachers, veterinaries, men with knowledge of the law, young people with credits from their State universities. Californians sometimes accuse them of being migrants “for the love of it”; others refer to them as “those modern pioneers.” But whatever the answer may be, it is not so simple as that. Sensible men and women don’t pick peas for 20 cents an hour just “for the love of it.” But the plight of the migratory worker is not quite so bad in 1939 as it was in 1936, thanks chiefly to the efforts of the Federal Government. Working through the Farm Security Administration set up under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of 1937, the government has constructed thirteen camps from Gridley in the North to Brawley in the South, capable of housing for a stated length of time some 2,500 families. At best, these camps are a drop in the bucket, but the example they set has been far-reaching. Something like this had to be done. The old ditchbank communities, where irrigating ditches provided drinking water, bathing, and sewage, took their toll not only among the migrants, but also in nearby towns. These Federal amps are models of good sanitation. In fact, for the first time in years the “Okie” is being recognized as a human being, although the government is making no long term promises. Pioneer among the Federal camps in California is the Arvin Camp Maraline Ellis Salem-Keizer School District 2013-2014 in Kern County, about twenty miles from Bakersfield. Once each year, during the slow California Spring, the blue lupine and desert poppies blaze along the road to Arvin, and service stations add to their trade with advertisements of “Free Wildflower Information.” Here, in the midst of oil derricks and desert sage, lie patches of the most fertile land in California, where one finds those familiar white signboards carrying the terse message, “Cotton Pickers Wanted.” Just outside of Arvin, a smaller sign lettered “F. S. A.” points toward a distant flagpole and a gleaming water tower. This is the Arvin Migratory Labor Camp. To the right, as one enters the gate, stands the Administration Building, flanked by the “library” in which Steinbeck worked on his “Grapes of Wrath.” A walk through the well-laid main street brings one to the “residential section” of nearly a hundred low, serviceable tents erected on wooden platforms. Pulled up beside the tents are those inevitable “Covered Wagons of 1939,” brave and battered hulks of metal and rubber in various stages of decay. A khaki-shirted camp assistant guides one through the many utility buildings, including the hospital with all its modern, shiny equipment; the well-scrubbed sanitary units, the child nursery, the laundry, the tool shed. In the distance, beyond the last row of tents, lies a large plot of plowed earth, of which three-fifths of an acre is parceled out to each family head. Beyond the garden stands a row of “Labor Homes,” permanent, low-cost cottages for those who have found some form of long-term employment. The significance of what is happening here is difficult to comprehend until one ahs partaken intimately of the life these more fortunate migrants know. Join the “Okies” in their Friday night boxing matches, their “smokers,” or their weekly old-fashioned dances. Gossip with the women as they plumb the mysteries of an electric washing machine. Above all, watch them as they make their first entry into the camp, and notice their gradual relief and thawing out as the camp manager explains what is expected of camp residents. “Keep the place clean? Sure, we’ll keep it clean! Have ya got any extra blankets for the kids?”

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This song was written by a woman displaced by the dust bowl. she traveled from Texas to California, in search of a better life.

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During the Great Depression, there where two conflicting narratives between migrant workers in California. One of white farmers, displaced by the dust bowl, and one of Mexican immigrants,looking for work and a better life. These two groups of people competed against each other to work the fields. Often, Mexican migrants were hired for less money and bad working conditions. The resulting emotions were complicated. Displaced white farmers, known as "Okies", felt the field jobs should be given to them. They felt that Mexican migrants were taking the jobs that belonged to them as American citizens. Mexicans felt taken advantage of because they had to work in terrible conditions for little pay or the job would be given to another migrant willing to work in those conditions. Mexicans used migration, mutualistas, strikes, and repatriation as strategies for economic survival. Esperanza Rising portrays these two narratives through the perspective of a young Mexican migrant.

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Children of Mexican migrant workers posing at entrance to El Rio FSA Camp, El Rio, California, 1941. Photo by Robert Hemmig

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Children of Mexican migrant workers posing at entrance to El Rio FSA Camp, El Rio, California, 1941. Photo by Robert Hemmig

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Children of Mexican migrant workers posing at entrance to El Rio FSA Camp, El Rio, California, 1941. Photo by Robert Hemmig.gif

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Esperanza and her mother travel to California for a better life. They compete against white migrant workers displaced by the dust bowl for work.

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Left from Aguascalientes, Mexico to Zacatecas, Mexico in a wagon with guavas for 2 days. Boarded a train from Zacatecas to Mexicali, Mexico. On train for at least 4 days and nights. Mexicali - went through immigration station into the United States. Boarded another train from Mexicali to Los Angeles, California.

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Aguascalientes, Mexico to Arvin, California

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Sunny California|Mary Sullivan(performer)

Shafter FSA Camp, August 9, 1941

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sunny california song about dust bowl migration.mp3