Migrant workers

Goodness knows, I've never been a migrant worker.  But I've seen a famous Dorothea Lange photograph of a 1930s migrant worker with her children living in some shack.  On the mother's face you can see her worry about the uncertain prospects of providing for her kids as well as herself.  There are few responsibilities greater than motherhood!

I've also read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, both about California migrant workers in that period.  Those workers got treated pretty badly back then (and still do today, what with their exposure to dangerous pesticides and such). Californians wanted their labor, but were also afraid of them, and the police were often ruthless.

Steinbeck's a writer I like.  The Grapes of Wrath has vivid chapters about drought coming to Oklahoma and a turtle crossing a highway.  His melodrama can be a bit much, as in the Gorkyesque ending, but he's masterful at small details.  In Of Mice and Men he mentions that the farm owner and his son wore cowboy boots with heels so they'd look different from the hired men.  And in describing the contents of the workers' quarters, he mentions the magazines of cowboy stories "that they read and scoffed at and secretly believed."

I've seen John Ford's movie of The Grapes of Wrath, a superbly realistic adaptation.  Henry Fonda has a funny dancing scene in it.  Another good movie about the California migrant workers is Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory, with David Carradine as songwriter Woody Guthrie. (His migrant worker song that goes "I ain't got no home in this world any more" is a true classic.)