Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist, by Linda Gordon

Teaching the Article
Exercise 2

Conditions of migrant farm workers

In the large-scale corporate farms in California, several hundred thousand workers were used to harvest crops, but outside the harvest season, they had little work. So they followed the crops, becoming migrant workers, camping out in “squatters’ camps” on patches of uncultivated land or staying at very rudimentary campgrounds supplied by employers. A squatters’ camp consisted of an irrigation ditch or riverbank around which several hundred people were crowded. Sanitation was nonexistent and disease was epidemic. In either type of camp, the migrants were tolerated only until the crop was harvested, then urged to move on, sometimes forcibly.

In 1928 farm workers could get 35 cents an hour or $3 a day, but by the early 1930s the rate dropped to 14 or 15 cents an hour, and by 1936, it had climbed only to a maximum of 25 cents an hour. Wage rates do not capture the full “cheapness” of this labor, because the workers were paid only for hours actually worked, weather permitting, during short seasons. Without permanent residence, they had no access to schools for their children, many of whom had to work in the fields alongside their parents. Making this worse for farm workers was the subcontracting system. On most large farms, managers did not hire their own labor, but relied on subcontractors. Managers would contract to get a specified acreage weeded, or harvested and packed. In 1936, one contractor was getting 35 to 45 cents a bucket for cherries, and paying his workers 20 to 30 cents a bucket; his only expense was probably that of running a truck to get workers to the right fields.1 Two layers of management were thus extracting profits, leaving a smaller fraction for workers’ wages.

Living conditions in the workers’ camps were appalling, and families suffered in dangerous and unhealthy conditions that created serious child neglect. The progressive economist Paul Schuster Taylor and his wife, the photographer Dorothea Lange set out to document those conditions—in words and pictures— in an attempt to persuade the California and federal government to provide minimally decent camping facilities for the workers.2

Questions

Sources

Documents

A. Excerpts from Taylor report to California Emergency Relief Administration (1935)

B. Report, Davis Auto Camp, Brentwood, Calif. (1936)

C. Report, E.L. Baker Camp, Madera, Calif. (1936)

Images

Pea Picker's Home, Nipomo, Calif. (1936)
Pea Picker's Home,
Nipomo, Calif. (1936)

Migrant pea pickers camp,
Calif. (1936)

Privy in cotton camp,
Calif. (1936)

Squatter camp,
Calif. (1936)

Children of migratory Mexican field workers,
Coachella Valley, Calif. (1937)

Irrigation ditch,
Calipatria, Calif. (1937)

1This example was used by Louis Adamic, “Cherries Are Red in San Joaquin,” Nation June 27, 1936.

2 For more information regarding Lange's husband, see Paul Schuster Taylor, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Schuster_Taylor.