The Invisible Wrath Victims

Mexican Migrant WorkerThe 1930’s were a time entrenched with racial prejudice. At various points in the Grapes of Wrath, racism (not just on a ethnic, but also on a class level) develops in minute yet potent statements. As the novel opens up, stories are told about how past generations of farmers fought to acquire the land from Native Americans, “Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away.” In chapter 18, violence and hatred directed towards minorities are exemplified once again when Tom Joad describes how his grandfather “an’ another fella whanged into a bunch a Navajo in the night. They was havin’ the time a their life, an’ same time you wouldn’ give a gopher for their chance.” Even police officers refered the Joad family in Chapter 18 as Okies; “Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s the way they say it.” As discussed in class, was the Grapes of Wrath truly representative of the people affected by the Dust Bowl at that time?

In Cunningham’s article Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of Wrath, he poses an interesting observation, “The novel scarcely mentions the Mexican and Filipino migrant workers who dominated the California fields and orchards into the late thirties, instead implying that Anglo-Saxon whites were the only subjects worthy of treatment.” Not all of the citizens affected by the Dust Bowl were Anglo-American. Mexican immigrants heavily occupied California and other areas of the West coast. Migrant farm workers of all races lived in temporary camps like this as they moved from farm to farm to follow the seasonal work. In the 1900s, the Mexican Revolution and the series of Mexican civil wars that followed pushed many Mexicans to flee to the United States. Many U.S. farm owners recruited Mexicans and Mexican Americans because they believed that these desperate workers would tolerate living conditions that workers of other races would not. Mexican and Mexican American workers often earned more in the United States than they could in Mexico's civil war economy, although California farmers paid Mexican and Mexican American workers significantly less than white American workers. By the 1920s, at least three quarters of California's farm workers were Mexican or Mexican American. As the Great Depression took a toll on California's economy during the 1930s, however, Mexicans and Mexican Americans became targets for discrimination and removal. White government officials claimed that Mexican immigrants made up the majority of the California unemployed and white trade unions claimed that Mexican immigrants were taking jobs that should go to white men. In reality, a new supply of white refugees desperate for jobs was flooding California from the Midwest due to the Dust Bowl crisis, making up the majority of the unemployed.