Thirty-two-year-old migrant farmworker Florence Owens Thompson and three of her children huddled together in a tent at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. Photograph by Dorothea Lange, 1936. Source: U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, Prints & Photographs Division.
During the Great Depression, anti-immigrant policies were widespread. Our downtown LA story, Ni de Aquí, ni de Allá, tells the story of how hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans were coerced into leaving California in the 1930s.
But what about the story of California’s American refugees? In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of families drove west, hoping to escape the grinding poverty of climate disaster in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas. Their stories were the source material not only for the folk songs of Woody Guthrie, but also John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange’s iconic portrait above, Migrant Mother.
These “Okies” were overwhelmingly poor, white Americans. But they were not Californians—and California didn’t want them. Through the 1930s, the state passed a series of anti-Okie laws, one of which made it a crime, punishable with prison time, to transport an out-of-state pauper across state lines. In 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department, to glowing review in the LA Times, sent officers to the California-Arizona border to enforce a “bum barricade,” forcibly turning back poor Americans seeking entry to the Golden State.
“California is a garden of Eden
A paradise to live in or see
But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot
If you ain't got the do re mi.”
– Woody Guthrie, Library of Congress Recordings, 1964
This was hugely controversial, asking questions about states’ rights with far-reaching implications. Could California really choose which American citizens to admit? The answer, delivered by the US Supreme Court in 1941, was no. In Edwards vs California, the Court delivered a stinging verdict, with the majority writing that “to allow such an exception to be engrafted on the rights of national citizenship would be to contravene every conception of national unity. It would also introduce a caste system utterly incompatible with the spirit of our system of government.”
The experience of the Okies in 1930s California—and the Court cases that restored their right to travel—are part of the reason why the freedom of American citizens to move across the US is something many Americans have always taken for granted. Yet in 2025, there are reasons to think that this fundamental right of citizens to move freely through their country is once more under threat. In particular, Vice President JD Vance is on record arguing that states with abortion bans should be able to ban women from traveling to seek care out of state.
The US has always been a composite nation: bound together by political rights as much as by any single culture. These days, it’s tough to see this country as anything other than dis-united—just drive from San Francisco to Bakersfield, where Dust Bowl migrants settled. Their descendants today are a dot of MAGA red in a deep blue sea. But when we reflect on the story of Okie migrants on their way to California, what do we have in common?
Today, we all have the right to move freely across the country as American citizens. If we lose that, what kind of equal citizenship will be left?
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