Migrant Farm Workers Camp - Shafter CA "In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, more than 300,000 migrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas flocked to California, driven by poverty and the hope for new opportunities. This flood of migrants, collectively known as the Okies, included a wide cross-section of people—young and old, men and women, rural and urban...
In 1935, the Resettlement Administration (RA), and later the FSA, began to establish migratory labor camps to house the destitute migrants. Many migrants living in cars, tents, and shacks along “ditchbank” settlements (Figure 1) were attracted to the sanitary, newly constructed camps located along a 600-mile-long...