Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood

Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood PDF Author: Mark Torres
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467147842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
During World War II, a group of potato farmers opened the first migrant labor camp in Suffolk County to house farmworkers from Jamaica. Over the next twenty years, more than one hundred camps of various sizes would be built throughout the region. Thousands of migrant workers lured by promises of good wages and decent housing flocked to Eastern Long Island, where they were often cheated out of pay and housed in deadly slum-like conditions. Preyed on by corrupt camp operators and entrapped in a feudal system that left them mired in debt, laborers struggled and, in some cases, perished in the shadow of New York's affluence. Author Mark A. Torres reveals the dreadful history of Long Island's migrant labor camps from their inception to their peak in 1960 and their steady decline in the following decades.

Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood

Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood PDF Author: Mark Torres
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1467147842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
During World War II, a group of potato farmers opened the first migrant labor camp in Suffolk County to house farmworkers from Jamaica. Over the next twenty years, more than one hundred camps of various sizes would be built throughout the region. Thousands of migrant workers lured by promises of good wages and decent housing flocked to Eastern Long Island, where they were often cheated out of pay and housed in deadly slum-like conditions. Preyed on by corrupt camp operators and entrapped in a feudal system that left them mired in debt, laborers struggled and, in some cases, perished in the shadow of New York's affluence. Author Mark A. Torres reveals the dreadful history of Long Island's migrant labor camps from their inception to their peak in 1960 and their steady decline in the following decades.

Children of the Dust Bowl

Children of the Dust Bowl PDF Author: Jerry Stanley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780329097790
Category : Children of migrant laborers
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
This true story took place at the emergency farm-labor camp immortalized in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Ostracized as "dumb Okies," the children of Dust Bowl migrant laborers went without school--until Superintendent Leo Hart and 50 Okie kids built their own school in a nearby field.

On the Dirty Plate Trail

On the Dirty Plate Trail PDF Author: Sanora Babb
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292782837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Runner-up, National Council on Public History Book Award, 2008 The 1930s exodus of "Okies" dispossessed by repeated droughts and failed crop prices was a relatively brief interlude in the history of migrant agricultural labor. Yet it attracted wide attention through the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the images of Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Ironically, their work risked sublimating the subjects—real people and actual experience—into aesthetic artifacts, icons of suffering, deprivation, and despair. Working for the Farm Security Administration in California's migrant labor camps in 1938-39, Sanora Babb, a young journalist and short story writer, together with her sister Dorothy, a gifted amateur photographer, entered the intimacy of the dispossessed farmers' lives as insiders, evidenced in the immediacy and accuracy of their writings and photos. Born in Oklahoma and raised on a dryland farm, the Babb sisters had unparalleled access to the day-by-day harsh reality of field labor and family life. This book presents a vivid, firsthand account of the Dust Bowl refugees, the migrant labor camps, and the growth of labor activism among Anglo and Mexican farm workers in California's agricultural valleys linked by the "Dirty Plate Trail" (Highway 99). It draws upon the detailed field notes that Sanora Babb wrote while in the camps, as well as on published articles and short stories about the migrant workers and an excerpt from her Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. Like Sanora's writing, Dorothy's photos reveal an unmediated, personal encounter with the migrants, portraying the social and emotional realities of their actual living and working conditions, together with their efforts to organize and to seek temporary recreation. An authority in working-class literature and history, volume editor Douglas Wixson places the Babb sisters' work in relevant historical and social-political contexts, examining their role in reconfiguring the Dust Bowl exodus as a site of memory in the national consciousness. Focusing on the material conditions of everyday existence among the Dust Bowl refugees, the words and images of these two perceptive young women clearly show that, contrary to stereotype, the "Okies" were a widely diverse people, including not only Steinbeck's sharecropper "Joads" but also literate, independent farmers who, in the democracy of the FSA camps, found effective ways to rebuild lives and create communities.

Migrant Citizenship

Migrant Citizenship PDF Author: Verónica Martínez-Matsuda
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
An examination of the Farm Security Administration's migrant camp system and the people it served Today's concern for the quality of the produce on our plates has done little to guarantee U.S. farmworkers the necessary protections of sanitary housing, medical attention, and fair labor standards. The political discourse on farmworkers' rights is dominated by the view that migrant workers are not entitled to better protections because they are "noncitizens," as either immigrants or transients. Between 1935 and 1946, however, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) intervened dramatically on behalf of migrant families to expand the principles of American democracy, advance migrants' civil rights, and make farmworkers visible beyond their economic role as temporary laborers. In more than one hundred labor camps across the country, migrant families successfully worked with FSA officials to challenge their exclusion from the basic rights afforded by the New Deal. In Migrant Citizenship, Verónica Martínez-Matsuda examines the history of the FSA's Migratory Labor Camp Program and its role in the lives of diverse farmworker families across the United States, describing how the camps provided migrants sanitary housing, full on-site medical service, a nursery school program, primary education, home-demonstration instruction, food for a healthy diet, recreational programing, and lessons in participatory democracy through self-governing councils. In these ways, she argues, the camps functioned as more than just labor centers aimed at improving agribusiness efficiency. Instead, they represented a profound "experiment in democracy" seeking to secure migrant farmworkers' full political and social participation in the United States. In recounting this chapter in the FSA's history, Migrant Citizenship provides insights into public policy concerning migrant workers, federal intervention in poor people's lives, and workers' cross-racial movements for social justice and offers a precedent for those seeking to combat the precarity in farm labor relations today.

They Harvest Despair

They Harvest Despair PDF Author: Dale Wright
Publisher: Boston : Beacon Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Popular account of the economic implications and social conditions of rural migrant workers in USA. Rural workers. Illustrations.

Wandering Workers

Wandering Workers PDF Author: Willard A. Heaps
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Examines, chiefly through interviews with migrant workers, their problems of employment, housing, and child welfare and education.

Children of the Dust Bowl

Children of the Dust Bowl PDF Author: Jerry Stanley
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9780785716754
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Describes the plight of the migrant workers who traveled from the Dust Bowl to California during the Depression, how they were forced to live in a federal labor camp and the school that was built for their children.

Housing for Migrant Agricultural Workers

Housing for Migrant Agricultural Workers PDF Author: Pearl G. Spindler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor camps
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description


Report

Report PDF Author: Pennsylvania. Governor's Committee on Migratory Labor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Migrant labor
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description


Dark Harvest

Dark Harvest PDF Author: Brent K. Ashabranner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780208023919
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Provides an in-depth look at the arduous life of migrant agricultural workers, who travel across America to harvest the nation's fruits and vegetables.