Moving to California was a difficult but necessary choice for my family. We fought long years of drought on our farm in Nebraska, as did many in the Midwest from Oklahoma and Kansas, to West Texas. Ultimately, we could not stay and tend to the small farm that brought us food and wage, for we suffered devastating losses that put us in debt and impoverished. Our lands were utterly destroyed by the drought and I could no longer afford to stay—I also knew that returning would be impossible. My family traveled along with thousands of others to take refuge in California. I had hoped to acquire new land and begin to make an honest wage to feed and care for my family.
Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985, photographer.
What I found on our departure was hardship and toil. The trip was long and difficult, and full of unexpected trials that pushed us to our physical and spiritual limits, but we always endured. We set out in our old farm car and we left much behind, nearly everything as I recall. We sold many of our remaining possessions in order to propel our journey West. I was forced to work as a migratory field worker, as there seemed to be no other jobs available to people outside of the communities we encountered. Sometimes I would work for twelve, fourteen hours in a day, to come home with cracked and bleeding hands with a wage that could feed a dog. I have seen the dividends paid for organized dissent as well; you are either arrested or deported for your woes, without representation or the means to climb out of poverty’s clutches. My family and I were casted as outsiders by those in many Western communities we encountered while searching for a place to hang a hat, including the corporate farm owners who relied on our labor. I am a capable farmer who thrived only a short while before; now I am treated as if I were soiled and ignorant.
Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985, photographer.
My family continues to hold out hope that the words of president Franklin D. Roosevelt will stand true, and this war on want, destitution, and economic demoralization will lift my family out of poverty and oppression. President Roosevelt has identified the ill will and intolerance that we experience here in California, and has rightly called out the new royalists of big business, which presently force our families to work as serfs bound to their corporate fiefdoms. We hope that the words of our president will turn to our own advantage, and that the New Deal will create an environment protective of our collective American homes and families.
A migrant shack during the Dust Bowl.