8/6/2023 0 Comments Okie penochi swamp song![]() Short-lived and embarrassing to Los Angeles, it nonetheless hinted at the harsher reception for those better-remembered migrants who settled in the San Joaquin Valley. In 1936 the Los Angeles Police established a Bum Blockade at all the major entrances to the state. ![]() Almost 100,000 of the 252,000 migrants to California followed Highway 66 to its western terminus in Los Angeles where they largely blended in and quickly lost any identity as Okies. Not all of the migrants were farmers (a Farm Security Administration survey indicated that unemployment more than drought caused the migrants to relocate), and a substantial number of the Okies made their way to the cities. They packed up what belongings they could get into the family truck or car and began the three-day (or more) trip to California along Route 66. But as the weather got worse and their personal economic situations became desperate, the Okies took action. The essential optimism of the people, always hoping for better weather and a better crop next year, probably kept them from moving earlier. The migration started in earnest in 1935, peaking in 19. Both jobs and relief seemed to be paying more in California, and the migrants' friends and relatives who had moved to the Golden State in large numbers in the 1920s invited them to enjoy a better life. The Okies were drawn to California by a vision of the West as a land of greater opportunity, especially the chance to own a small plot of fertile soil. Finally, at least in southeastern Oklahoma, farmers possessed a migratory habit of mind and simply continued their pattern of moving west. Moreover, when the Agricultural Adjustment Administration paid farmers not to grow crops, it was often the tenants who would be left landless. Mechanization of farming, especially the introduction of tractors, pushed people off the land. A large number of these farmers were tenants-60 percent of Oklahoma farmers rented their farms-and consequently were less rooted. In drought conditions the topsoil blew away and the land became even less likely to support crops. Many of the migrants from the Plains and Southwest farmed marginal land. But a larger number of Oklahoma migrants, for example, came from the more humid, though drought-stricken, southeastern part of the state than from the Dust Bowl region of the northwest and panhandle. Drought conditions on the Plains, starting in the early 1930s and intensifying in mid-decade, were surely a cause for leaving. Though this migration was commonly associated with the Dust Bowl (vividly portrayed in Pare Lorentz's 1936 documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains), the impelling forces were complex. Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and the Dakotas all contributed heavily to the numbers trekking west, not only to California, but also to Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. This pattern became associated with Oklahoma because that state provided a plurality of migrants from 1935 to 1940, the peak of the phenomenon. ![]() Far from his home in Chicago, Jonathan adapts to life in a small town on the edge of the Louisiana wilderness where he dodges the advances of overly-hospitable Southern belles, learns that the best music comes from the heart, and wonders if the songs he plays in the bayou will be his last as he confronts his late uncle's arch nemesis-a monstrous alligator known to the locals as Vaurien de Lafourche.Okies is a term applied generally to people from the American Southwest who migrated to the Pacific Coast, particularly to California, during the Great Depression. Greater mysteries follow as Jonathan's trip to lay his uncle to rest turns into an extended stay. Jonathan just wanted to know where his uncle learned to play-not the violin like him-but that jangly old fiddle. The townsfolk of Lockport, Louisiana wondered which the scarier monster was: the scaly, cold-blooded kind that wound up in their kiddy pools every summer, or the misshapen, warm-blooded one they called to fish them out. His unique anatomy left doctors scratching their heads as Perry grew into adulthood, using his differences to his advantage against the nasty creatures in the bayou. Jonathan Preen's uncle Perry came into this world a mystery.
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