Teaching the Article
Exercise 4

Farm Secuirty Administration camps for migrant farm workers

The Farm Security Administration (fsa) camps were hardly luxurious. They typically consisted of tents and tent platforms; fresh running water available from pumps; shared toilets, showers, and laundry rooms. Some had rough wooden cabins or barracks. But they all included programs of great value: day care centers; health services; libraries and discussion groups; recreation and entertainment activities. Some of the facilities developed out of considerable ingenuity, such as mobile camps. The planners believed they were working toward a long-range solution to the housing and residence problems of migrant workers, by helping them get permanent homes and job security as well as stronger bargaining power with employers.

Those hopes were not to be fulfilled. By 1942, when fsa was finally abolished by the conservative opposition to the New Deal, it had built 95 camps with room for approximately 75,000 people—when over a million needed them.

The camps operated with extreme race discrimination. They were almost all segregated, and there were very few places for nonwhite people. The “Okie” farm workers, migrants from the dust bowl in the southern plains, did not learn from their own exploitation to make common cause with Mexican Americans or other nonwhite farm workers.

Questions:

• What do you imagine were among the most popular features of the fsa camps?
• What features might be present today that would not have been present in the 1930s?
• What do the photographs tell you about who were the members of the camp council?

Sources

Documents

A. Map of California, proposed camp locations

B. Proposed layout of Thornton camp

C. Report, “Amateur Night at Indio Camp”

D. Jonathan Garst letter and clipping to Paul Appleby, Assistant to Secretary of Agriculture, Sept. 10, 1937

Images

fsa migratory labor camp, Imperial Valley, Calif. (1939)	Portable laundry unit, Merrill, Oregon (1939)	Library, Arvin, Calif. (1938)
Meeting of mothers’ club, Arvin, Calif. (1938)	Halloween party, Shafter, Calif. (1938)	Meeting of camp council, Farmersville, Calif. (1939)