Dust Bowl Migration to California

During the 1930s, prolonged drought and destructive farming practices helped produce severe dust storms across the southern Great Plains. At the same time, debt, falling crop prices, bank foreclosures and farm mechanisation displaced families who could no longer remain on their land.

Many migrants travelled west along routes such as US Highway 66 after hearing that California required agricultural labour. Once there, they often encountered overcrowded camps, low wages, hostility and an employment system in which a surplus of workers enabled growers and labour contractors to suppress pay.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath follows the fictional Joad family from Oklahoma to California and places their experience within the wider movement of displaced people.