Mexican Migrants on the Road, 1936

Mexicans have a long history of farming in the U.S.  Some accounts suggest that Mexican farm laborers have been here since the land in our Southwest was taken from Mexico.

More than one million agricultural workers migrated to the U.S. in the early twentieth century.  The majority of them found work on small family farms in California because the white owners of these farms welcomed cheap labor.  Most migrant workers in California today are of Mexican descent.

The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Mexican immigrants especially hard.  Along with the job crisis and food shortages that affected all U.S. workers, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans had to face the additional threat of deportation. As unemployment swept the U.S., hostility to immigrant workers grew, and the government began a program of repatriating immigrants to Mexico. The farm workers who remained struggled to survive in desperate conditions. Bank foreclosures drove small farmers from their land, and large landholders cut back on their permanent workforce.  As with many Southwestern farm families, a great number of Mexican-American farmers discovered that they had to live a migratory existence and traveled the highways in search of work. This photograph, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936, is part of the Farm Security Administration collection that documents conditions of farm workers during the Great Depression.

In later years, the Bracero Program allowed Mexican immigrants to work on U.S. farms when the country had a shortage of laborers due to involvement in World War II and the Korean War.

 

Why do people migrate?
How does migration affect the migrants and the communities into which they migrate?

 

Describe the scene in the photograph and explain the impact of migration on this family.