Commemorating the ‘California Story’
In 1979, faculty at California State College, Bakersfield2 were awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for an initial planning project entitled ‘Rural Americans in the Depression: A California Odyssey.’ Only a year later the NEH endorsed the research project agenda (via additional funding) to create an oral history collection of Depression-era migrant experiences. That federal funding was secured for the project served to legitimize and institutionalize the Okie migrant experience, thereby creating what geographer John Opie (1998) terms a ‘moral geography’ in which social values are reinforced by public policies that in turn impact the landscape.
Located at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley in Kern County, Bakersfield and the surrounding communities were common destinations for Okie agricultural migrants seeking work in the cotton fields during the first-half of the twentieth century and remain home to many of those former migrants today (California State College Bakers-field 1981, p. 1). Among the explicit objectives of the Odyssey Project was the desire to avoid the ‘”rags to riches’ stories of selected individuals” and rather focus upon “people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to relate their experiences.” In light of this goal, an initial list of interviewees was compiled by either self-identification or referral by personal contacts after articles announcing the study appeared in two major regional newspapers, The Bakersfield Californian and The Fresno Bee, as well as in local newspapers from smaller surrounding communities. The list was then shortened after potential interviewees submitted two-page questionnaires. According to the Odyssey Project Guide, as the emphasis of the oral history project was upon Depression-era migrants originating from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, those people who were exceptionally young children and had few memories of the migration westward itself were excluded from the final roster. Thus, the Odyssey interview list was primarily comprised of first-generation migrants (California State College, Bakersfield 1981, pp. 5-6).
The primary value of the Odyssey Project lay in its desire to describe the breadth of migrant experiences in their own voices. The individual backgrounds of the migrants in their home states varied from those whose primary subsistence was as sharecropping farmers to those who worked as small merchants and government employees. Nonetheless, throughout most of the interview transcripts underlying themes of self-identification emerged as the migrants described themselves and their lives. The interviewees typically characterized themselves as simply down on their luck but hardworking, and having aspired to and attained better lives and acceptance in their California communities.
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