‘Grapes of Wrath’ legacy fades: California’s migrant farmworkers settle in, run their own farms

 

As a young woman in the late 1980s, María Inés Catalán joined a gushing stream of laborers from Mexico chasing seasonal crops in California, following the footsteps of her mother and thousands of other itinerant farm workers desperate for jobs.

Now, like an increasing number of other former migrant workers, she’s put down roots as sturdy as the tomatoes in her fields. Manager of the 55-acre, family-owned organic Catalán Farm in Hollister, Catalán is embedded in the community, living on the farm, shopping nearby and hiring local residents.

For more than a century, California agriculture has depended on transient labor, with migrants moving from the winter lettuce fields of the south to the autumnal walnut orchards of the north.

But that long and dusty tradition, immortalized in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” and the photos of Dorothea Lange, is fading. New research reveals a profound change in the nature of the nation’s agricultural workforce.

Since the late 1990s, the share of agricultural workers who migrate within the United States to follow the seasonal shift of crops has fallen by nearly 75%, according to an analysis of the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey data by the Bay Area News Group...more