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News & ArtsTuesday, November 3, 2009
Visual Art Jonathan Raban on Dorothea Lange
Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:07 PM
This is painfully evident in Washington state, where I live. Were Lange to return here with her camera seventy years on, it would not be a Rip Van Winkle experience so much as a numbing sense of déjà vu. The cities and suburbs would be unrecognizable to her, but the poverty in the countryside created by the corporate agricultural system would yield material for photographs identical to those she took in 1939. There are small, Spanish-speaking farm towns on the Columbia plateau where the average per capita income is still in the middling four figures.In summer, migrant fruit pickers pile into the Columbia and Yakima valleys, living in camps little different, and hardly more affluent, than the one where Lange found Florence Thompson. And inventive new ways of being poor continue to emerge. In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by "brushpickers," mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.
Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow. Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity. The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.
1
Boy he hits the nail right on the head. As a Spanish interpreter, I often meet these folks at the doctor's office after they've fallen off a ladder picking apples/had a finger taken off by the potato conveyor belt/inhaled pesticides in the peach orchard. Agricultural work is very dangerous, and I meet many of them at a crossroads in their lives where they may no longer be able to work again. You can bet L&I will spend thousands on doctors who are pressured to close their cases, but L&I won't give the worker shit or shinola in terms of disability pay.
One thing that's always struck me about the people I meet, though, is most of them don't complain about their poverty. I met several members of a family of 11 once who lived in a two bedroom house, and they were grateful to be here, to have a chance to work hard, to "salir adelante" (get ahead) in this country. Compared to what they'd come from, those dangerous, poorly-paid, shitty jobs on the Columbia Plateau were a step up.
Those of us on the other side of the language and citizenship divide have no idea how lucky we are.
One thing that's always struck me about the people I meet, though, is most of them don't complain about their poverty. I met several members of a family of 11 once who lived in a two bedroom house, and they were grateful to be here, to have a chance to work hard, to "salir adelante" (get ahead) in this country. Compared to what they'd come from, those dangerous, poorly-paid, shitty jobs on the Columbia Plateau were a step up.
Those of us on the other side of the language and citizenship divide have no idea how lucky we are.
2
The thing that's different today is that there's a broad consensus among ordinary society that these people aren't Americans and thus are supposed to live this way, and live silently. In the Great Depression, photographic evidence of this kind of poverty created a public outrage; today, it would only generate some little flurries of anti-immigration heat from the far right. Nobody else gives a shit.
Of course, migrant farm labor has always been invisible. But now, in places like Washington State, it has dark skin and a foreign tongue (frequently not even Spanish, but indigenous languages). But hey, apples are 88 cents a pound!
Of course, migrant farm labor has always been invisible. But now, in places like Washington State, it has dark skin and a foreign tongue (frequently not even Spanish, but indigenous languages). But hey, apples are 88 cents a pound!
3
i assume "towns on the Columbia Plateau" refers to Othello - the grocery store (The Leprechaun) there had no idea how to make a turkey sandwich - but all the tortillas and chili-covered peanuts were friggin delicious.
4
Woody, 1948:
My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
6
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
Woody from deportee
( sorry @4 i(woody) had to some more)
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
Woody from deportee
( sorry @4 i(woody) had to some more)
7
I think Raban is also hinting on an enduring poverty that seems almost inherent in geography itself. Think of the dying family-owned farms, decaying old mill towns, meth-ravaged trailer parks. Raban's concept of "poverty of the rural West" does not imply a race or a color, and is instead shared among many.
8
A few weeks back I posted some photos that Dorothea Lange took in Washington State. I think to say that she would find a sense of déjà vu today kind of overstates it – poverty is poverty and there are definitely parallels, but the Depression was a specific economic situation that was far more widespread and severe.
12
We ignore and dehumanize these people while enjoying the fruits of their labors - a cheap status quo.
13
We ignore and dehumanize these people while enjoying the fruits of their labors - a cheap status quo.
14
Re Max Solomon (post 3), Othello is actually a good deal richer than some of these barrio-like towns, with a p.c. income of just short of $13,000. Compare that with Mattawa, on the extreme western edge of the plateau and close to the river, which has a p.c. income of $7,500. Both figures are drawn from a useful site, Sperling's Best Places, but I wouldn't vouch for their accuracy. Since both towns nearly double in population during the picking season, when migrant laborers pile in, I suspect that the real figures may be rather lower than those quoted.
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