Car trouble on west side of Highway No. 33 in San Joaquin Valley. Formerly a California cowhand and roving laborer. Now with his wife, he follows the fruit. "My uncle homesteaded here sixty years ago. I'm lower on money than at any time." A veteran of the the AEF (American Expeditionary Forces) engineers. He searches his trunk and produces snapshots of the AEF, including Pershing reviewing the troops in Germany. San Joaquin Valley, California
Summary
Picryl description: Public domain image of industrial or agricultural worker, 1930s, 20th-century, free to use, no copyright restrictions. show less
The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history that happened during the Great Depression. Although overall three out of four farmers stayed on their land, the mass exodus depleted the population drastically in certain areas. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California. Arriving in California, the migrants were faced with a life almost as difficult as the one they had left. Like the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, some 40 percent of migrant farmers wound up in the San Joaquin Valley, picking grapes and cotton. They took up the work of Mexican migrant workers, 120,000 of whom were repatriated during the 1930s.
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