The Grapes of Wrath

New worlds New identities
The Grapes of Wrath and the dust bowl

When most people think of migration to another place and the struggle of having an identity crisis of who they are and why they are there, we most often times think of people that have moved to another country struggling to assimilate, but we often times don't think of migration in our own country and the concept of a new “world” as a place in our own country. I studied the film The Grapes of Wrath, which is a film based on a book by John Steinbeck which documents a family's migration from Oklahoma to California during the 1930's “dust bowl”.
The dust bowl period in the United States is the period during the depression when the farmlands of Oklahoma and the southwest where being over farmed. As a result, the land started drying up, and dust storms started destroying crops. Farmers could no longer support themselves, and got evicted off of their land. This sparked a massive migration of people out of the southwest to places like California, where they could work on a farm. As a result of this massive migration, there was too many people looking for work on the California farms, and the local people tried to drive them out by treating them less than human. Poverty and starvation often times ran rampant among the farmers that moved to California. Throughout the dust bowl era, roughly 116,000 people where displaced(1) from the southwest, and most of those people came from Oklahoma.
In the film, the main character Tom Jode gets paroled from prison for manslaughter. He comes back to his home town in Oklahoma, where he finds out that almost the entire town was displaced due to farms not being able to produce crops. Tom finds his family, who are moving to California the following day. The family moves to California and Tom begins to realize that even though he came from a community where people often times helped each other and stood united together, that now in order to survive you have to become selfish and think only about what's best for you and your family. His old neighbor Muely Graves quoted “what happens to other people I don't care about, I only care about myself”. Tom quickly learns this and shows it by working out in a farmers crops when some of his old friends and neighbors are outside of the farm protesting the low wages. Tom Jode and his family eventually find a government run camp where they live and try to find a legal form of employment. At the end of the movie, the police try to capture Tom Jode for striking a police officer, and Tom ends up leaving his family to avoid going back to prison.
One of the identity struggles that Tom and his family faced is the same situation that many migrant workers in the town of Elche, Spain face. Having the identity of being an illegal underpaid worker. Tom and his family cannot find a job legally and the people that he works for in the film refuse to sign a contract with him or any other displaced farmer so that they can pay them next to nothing for wages. One of the labor contractors in The Grapes of Wrath quotes “if you want the work take it, otherwise there are 200 other people that will”. Likewise, Vicentina Navarro also faces the same situation and quotes:
“It all stays in the hands of the contractors, of the distributors and manufacture is paid very little. They say: well, if you want to do it good! Otherwise... nothing. ”(2)
Unfortunately, for Navarro and for Tom Jode, this type of labor is often times not stopped because it drives the prices of goods down and boosts sales. In some cases, there are a few labor contracts given out to keep the business “legal” but the places that do this also keep the number of legal workers to a minimum so that they can still drive down the cost of labor far below average. Tom Jode and his family faced this issue of not being able to find legal employment multiple times in the film. Navarro also quotes:
“The authorities say that it will be legalized. But there are many workshops where the workers are employed completely illegally. In others they make contracts for some and others are employed illegally. That is all I know. It would be very good for me to have a contract or something like it.”(3)
The struggles that many illegal workers these days face of having the identity of an illegal undocumented worker with little to no job security is not that different from the struggles that Tom Jode and other people from the dust bowl era faced.


Citations

(1)Gregory, N. James. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. Oxford University Press. 1991

(2)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (155)

(3)Multiplicity. “House Factories: Elche Disseminations.” USE: Unceartain States of Europe Ed. Susan Wise. Milan: Skira Editore S.p.a., 2003 (156)