I watched the 1940 award-winning movie “Grapes of Wrath” recently. Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck wrote the book and legendary director John Ford turned it into a classic movie.
Most of us have no idea what it was like for the Joads, the family portrayed in the movie, to be displaced from sharecropping in Oklahoma. Most of us don’t know what 25% or more unemployment is like or what life after 65 is like without Social Security or Medicare. Most of us don’t know what it was like to only have ten cents budgeted for a loaf of bread when it cost 15 cents.
There are people who are experiencing relatively hard times today. Some lost their homes in the crash of 2008, or lost jobs, or dropped out of college because tuition was rising as a result of growing state budget deficits. But none of this matches the hardship of the Great Depression.
California, the 9th most productive agricultural county in the United States, remains the “land of milk and honey” that the displaced Oklahomans in the “Grapes of Wrath” fled to. But now it is migrants from around the world who are drawn to crops needing to be picked, streets needing to be swept and children needing to be cared for.
Reportedly there are more than a million farm and dairy workers, dishwashers, nannies, canners and construction workers in California illegally. Legal farm workers are used to sporadic work and traveling from county to county. Little has changed for these workers since the 1930s except they are not from Oklahoma and Arkansas now.
Most of these men and women know what it is like to be displaced from their land. Most know when ten pesos won’t buy enough tortillas. Most know when their children go to bed hungry, really hungry. Most know poverty, real poverty, the kind faced by so many Americans in the 1930s.
Like the Joads they come to California to work. They can make more than what the Joads made — 5 cents per box of picked peaches in the 1930s. Like the Joads they take what work they can get. And like the Joads they must constantly look over their shoulders because law enforcement stands ready in some places to harass and arrest anyone looking Mexican.
Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, endeared himself to all intelligent Americans when as a ranking appointee of President George W. Bush he stopped random street arrests of Mexican-looking people at bus stops in Escondido.
This was at a time when vigilante “Minutemen” patrolled the border and places where casual labor seeking Mexicans gathered. And 300 miles east, Sheriff Joe Arpaio — “America’s toughest sheriff” — ordered his men to illegally sweep streets in Maricopa County to look for Mexicans who had committed no crime but might be here illegally.
Throughout all this, like the Joads nearly a century ago, the migrants from Mexico and Guatemala and the political refugees from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela continue coming to California to pick our crops, sweep our streets and care for our children. People always have and they always will.
It’s simple. California remains the “land of milk and honey” in a troubled world.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant, prolific author and host of the Contreras Report on YouTube and Facebook.