Cat. 2. Pea Pickers, Nipomo, California

This print, made in Washington, D.C, darkroom of the resettlement Administration and sent to the New York Times for publication in August 1936, has pencil inscriptions in several different hands on the verso. Among them are various captions (“Pea pickers in Calif. ‘Mam [sic], I’ve picked pea from Calipatria to Ukiah’” and “Members of the roving army of fruit pickers”); date stamps; the RA stamp (“Kindly use the following credit line: RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION PHOTOGRAPH by Lange”); and the picture editor’s directions (“single x 2 col, 4 x 3 ¾, tonight”). The Times art department worked on the picture itself, applying white, gray, and black pigment to make the figures appear more three-dimensional and to set them off from their auto/home and the grassy foreground. Crop marks provide further aids to the printers responsible for making zinc printing plates and laying out the feature.

The truck or car modified to act as a home for migrants traveling from job to job was a common sight on California highways and at roadside camps in the 1930s. In this case, a truck has been adapted to provide sleeping quarters—complete with sunroof—and other household requirements. The couple has obviously covered a lot of miles, as the man is quoted as saying, picking peas from the Imperial Valley of Southern California to northern Ukiah Valley of Mendocino County. Lange found them in Nipomo, midway up the coast and midway through another season that would cause them to traverse the length of the huge state.

John Steinbeck describes the important of the truck to the Oklahoma farmer of The Grapes of Wrath (1939) as they load theirs to begin migrant life:

The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen,…this was the new hearth, the living center of the family.