Guide Sheet for WebQuest
With your partner, pick one of the pictures in your group, study it, then answer the following questions.
1. What do you already know about this picture (e.g. location, year, people in it)?
2. What do you think might be going on in this photograph?
3. What questions does this picture make you wonder about?
4. Why does this image "speak" to you?
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The facts below from the American Memory Collection provide further information about each of the five groups of pictures. You may want to use this information in your creative essay.
Group 1: Missouri and Oklahoma
The drought hit first in the eastern part of the country in 1930. In
1931, it moved toward the west. By 1934 it had turned the Great Plains into a
desert. "If you would like to have your heart broken, just come out here," wrote
Ernie Pyle, a roving reporter in Kansas, just north of the Oklahoma border, in
June of 1936. "This is the dust-storm country. It is the saddest land I have
ever seen."
Group 2: Arvin, California
As many as six thousand migrants arrived in California from the Midwest
every month, driven by unemployment, drought, and the loss of farm tenancy.
Many drifted to the Imperial Valley after the completion of Boulder (Hoover) Dam
in 1936, which guaranteed the valley a supply of water for irrigation. But the
migrants, who competed with Mexicans and other immigrants for work, were offered
"not land, but jobs on the land."4
The land was held by relatively few owners. In 1935 one-third of the farm
acreage in the six hundred square miles of the Imperial Valley consisted of
operations in excess of five hundred acres; seventy-four individuals and
companies controlled much of the cropland. (Federal Writers' Project,
California: A Guide to the Golden State (New York: Hastings House, 1939),
639-40.)
Group 3: El Rio, California
Photos from El Rio and interviews provide a glimpse into the lives and
culture of non-Anglo farm workers. This material illustrates that Mexican
immigrants had long been an integral part of agricultural production in the
United States and were not newcomers on the scene even in 1940. In fact, when
the Dust Bowl families arrived in California looking for work, the majority of
migrant farm laborers were either Latino or Asian, particularly of Mexican and
Filipino descent.
Group 4: Shafter, California
Arrival in California did not put an end to the migrants' travels. Their
lives were characterized by transience. In an attempt to maintain a steady
income, workers had to follow the harvest around the state. When potatoes were
ready to be picked, the migrants needed to be where the potatoes were. The same
principle applied to harvesting cotton, lemons, oranges, peas, and other crops.
For this reason, migrant populations were most dense in agricultural centers.
Much of the documentation was concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley, including
Shafter, Arvin, and El Rio. (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/expdtion.html)
Group 5: Nipomo, California
Dorothea Lange's poignant image of a mother and her children on the brink
of starvation is as moving today as when it first appeared in 1936. Lange made
six exposures of this striking woman, who lived in a makeshift shelter with her
husband and seven children in a Nipomo, California, pea-picker's camp. Within
twenty-four hours of making the photographs, Lange presented them to an editor
at the San Francisco News, who alerted the federal government to the
migrants' plight. The newspaper then printed two of Lange's images with a report
that the government was rushing in 20,000 pounds of food, to rescue the workers.
Lange says about her conversation with this hungry mother: " . . . She
told me her age, that she was thirty-two. . . . that they had been living on
frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children
killed." Lange made this photograph while working for the Resettlement
Administration, a government agency dedicated to documenting the devastating
effects of the Depression during the 1930s. Her image depicts the hardship
endured by migratory farm workers and provides evidence of the compelling power
of photographs to move people to action.
