Preview

Comparing The Harvest Gypsies And The Migrant Mother

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
382 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Comparing The Harvest Gypsies And The Migrant Mother
In “The Harvest Gypsies” by John Steinbeck and “The Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange, the feeling of desperation is felt by many migrant farmers’ causing them to feel hopeless and helpless. Many small farmers’ from the United States lost everything of their lives because of the large drought. The farmers’ packed everything they had left and traveled with their families’ to California to find work. “The drought in the middle west has driven the agricultural populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska and parts of Kansas and Texas westward. Their lands destroyed and they can never go back to them. Thousands of them are crossing the borders in ancient rattling automobiles, destitute and hungry and homeless, ready to accept any pay so that they

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Recurring patterns of behavior are happening in the migrant workforce. As seen in Victor Huapilla’s story in The Harvest, all his family is becoming migrant workers. Some have started school, but from a young age most have to start in the laborious work of farming. These workers are working as much as they can to save money not only to stay afloat financially, but to also bring over other family members from Mexico. Even though they value an education and want to pursue certain dreams, because of their economic stature and low incomes they are stuck doing farm work. Through different generations of their family they are spending most of their time working, sometimes 12 to 14 hour days. In these families it is becoming tradition to go…

    • 301 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Grapes of Wrath, set during the Great Depression, shows how most of the government camp officials treated the migrant workers. When the Joad family arrived at the first camp, they were given the bare minimum that was necessary for them to live. The house was small and they were paid only what they had to have. Soon, because of the large amount of people that had come for work, their pay was cut even more. This time, however, the pay was so low that it was impossible for all of them to live off of. The government officials felt that they could do this because they were the workers only way to work and provide for their families. This created tension between the workers and the officials because they needed work, but they were not getting paid enough to survive. The camp officials were able to use the desperateness of the workers to have a large amount of…

    • 482 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Harvest Gypsies Analysis

    • 856 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In the early 1930’s, there were many difficulties in the Midwest. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl caused many problems. Midwest people lost their homes and had no source of income because of these difficulties. In Harvest Gypsies, government camps and speculative farms have different and similar ways on fulfilling the physical and emotional needs of migrants. Government camps fulfill the needs of migrants better than speculative farms.…

    • 856 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    8. Why does George say the migrant workers who travel from farm to farm are the…

    • 2444 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The novel, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, is a classic American novel about the Great Depression. The novel is written in incalerarly chapters and is about the struggles that migrant workers faced during this time. When Steinbeck was writing his novel, he did lots of research and the struggles he writes about are from real stories. As we look closely at the chapters individually, from the syntax and diction, we are able to conclude the overall purpose of the novel. Steinbeck’s use of parallelism and diction, in chapter 5, supports his message that the farmers were against something they could not take down alone.…

    • 1275 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless – restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do – to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut – anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." This, just a small excerpt from Steinbeck's novel, depicts the hardships and struggles that farmers faced during…

    • 1117 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The dust bowl was a tragic time in America for so many families and John Steinbeck does a great job at getting up-close and personal with one family to show these tragedies. In the novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck employed a variety of rhetorical devices, such as asyndeton, personification and simile, in order to persuade his readers to enact positive change from the turmoil of the Great Depression. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck tells the fictional narrative of Tom Joad and his family, while exploring social issues and the hardships of families who had to endure the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Steinbeck’s purpose was to challenge readers to look at the harsh realities around them for “the purpose of improvement”. The rhetorical strategies used in the “Grapes of Wrath” elicit a deeper understanding from its readers for the hardships these migrants faced and helped them to fight for a better way. (John Steinbeck, "Banquet Speech," Nobel Foundation, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-speech.html, Accessed 30 August 2013.)…

    • 1767 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Each and every one of us has a dream and we all encounter conflicts that stand in the way of our ability to achieve it. Some people can reach their dreams, but many find themselves unable to free themselves from the personal, social and economic chains that bind them. In Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lennie and George had a dream of owning a farm. These characters embarked on a journey to achieve their version of the American dream. “Well,” said George, “we’ll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens. And when it rains in the winter, we’ll just say the hell with goin’ to work, and we’ll build up a fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain comin’ down on the roof—Nuts!” Along the way, their personal, social and economic limitations put insurmountable hardships in their path.…

    • 1160 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Steinbeck portrays the Migrant farmers as a bath of misunderstood wanderers, while describing the local citizens as hostile assailants. The police always seem to…

    • 536 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Unemployment grew to a record proportions where 1 in 4 people were unable to find work. It also didn’t help when banks start going out of business and people wanted to get all of their saving out to have some money to help feed their families. So families wanted to move out west to California for some farm work and they were paid ok but during December and March they didn’t get paid because it was during winter season. Also in the book Steinbeck wrote "It is this refusal of the counties to consider anything but the immediate economy and profit of the locality that is the cause of a great deal of the unsolvable quality of the migrants' problem" (Chp 5 p.48)…

    • 894 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ is set during the 1930’s in the United States. The book is centred upon disadvantaged people who have suffered the effects of the catastrophic event: The Great Depression. During this period of time, the people of the United States faced many problems, including unemployment and homelessness. In addition to these problems, certain groups such as women, African Americans, and disabled people suffered from intense discrimination. At the beginning of the novel, we meet two migrant workers travelling to Soledad, Salinas in search for work (Soledad meaning lonely representing how people were during the great depression). The ranch that George and Lennie are working at is a microcosm representing the whole of America at the time where each person represents a different group. For example Lennie Curley’s wife representing women and crooks representing African Americans. George is a small and intelligent character who looks after Lennie. Lennie is not clever but he is physically strong and is a good worker. The novel ends where it starts (by…

    • 1319 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Dust Bowl Odyssey

    • 921 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Jobs and food were scarce, and the migrants faced prejudice and hostility from the Californians, who labeled them "Okies." These workers and their…

    • 921 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A migrant farm worker in the United States lives almost and invisible existence. One of the many reasons for this is that Americans never stop to think, or even consider how their food made it to the grocery store and table. Migrant farm workers tend to do the work that many American are not willing to do. The work is either to hard or does not pay enough. The average age of a farm worker is thirty-one years old and is majority male in gender. Many of these migrant farm workers do not have legal status in the United States. In fact the percentage is forty eight percent are legally able to work, while the other fifty two percent have come illegally to the United States. This fact leads to fear of Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS). Which causes them to hunker down and hide. They will avoid doing things in public that may put them in danger of being noticed. The reason they do this is because of the dream to make more money than they could in their home countries for their families.…

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    America, in the course of human history, has often become synonymous with “the land of immigrants.” In The Uprooted by Oscar Handlin, Handlin discusses the different experiences of the immigrant people in the early 1900’s. Within the discussion, came the idea that many immigrants had certain, specific visions in their mind about how differently their lives would be in America, but were harshly faced with the bitter reality. Those realities included the availability of jobs, housing, and…

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The author of this essay has such a grasp on the lives and senses of a lower class worker that he surely must have experienced it in his childhood. It doesn’t surprise me to find out that his father worked at a saw-mill. That type of gritty upbringing must leave an indelible mark on your psyche. This mark was clearly a reservoir from which to pull deep and meaningful prose that truly paints a picture in the mind of someone who lacks those same experiences.…

    • 367 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays