Schooling Migrant Children: California, 1920–1940

Abstract

The story of migrant children in California in the period 1920-1940 has become framed in the images of the Dust Bowl migration of the Depression. The plight of these 'Okie' migrants who came to California during the 1930s has become an American myth, representing the strength of the common people, the greed of the rich, the bigotry of small town America. In the late 1930s, the work of writers like John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, and Paul Taylor, with the photography of Dorothea Lange, revealed the oppression and poverty of the migrants and created the images that still define an historical era.1 When the education of these migrant children is touched upon in these accounts, both their oppression and the strength of these migrants is highlighted. In Carey McWilliams' Factories in the Fields, for example, the responses of the state and 'natives' of California to the conditions of the children of migrant workers were presented as examples of callousness and class prejudice. McWilliams presents images of brutal working conditions, desolate labour camps, exhausted children, and cold and unfeeling officials. He cites a pamphlet by George Mangold and Lillian Hill describing the conditions of education for migratory children: