"A Question of Pigment?" The Representation of Mexicans in the Depression Art of Dorothea Lange

Abstract

Dorothea Lange was a US documentary photographer who earned national recognition during the Depression era. Her picture of Florence Thompson and her children known as Migrant Mother (1936) has become an iconic depiction of the age, of the distressed reality of a sacred relationship that represented not only the devastating present of the farm workers during the 1930s but also the threat of a hopeless future for these people—and the whole nation. The essay investigates how she managed to divulge personal realities beyond the surface of pigmentation, even if this meant that she did not fully comply with the expectations of the FSA. Lange’s art portrayed the human condition of migranthood, homelessness, unemployment, poverty, hunger, deprivation, despair, loneliness, and bleakness she had encountered in the American landscape as universal and ubiquitous, a condition that causes immense sadness, pain and desolation in the human soul, irrespective of one’s racial background.