What was an Okie referring to?

What was an Okie referring to?

“Okie”, in the most general sense, refers to a resident, native, or cultural descendant of Oklahoma, equating to Oklahoman. Beginning in the 1920s in California, the term came to refer to very poor migrants from Oklahoma and nearby states coming to California looking for employment.

What jobs did Okies have?

There was some work, especially in the new fields of cotton that were being planted in California – a crop that southern plains people knew a lot about. But there was not enough work for everyone who came. Instead of immediate riches, they often found squalor in roadside ditch encampments.

What were Okievilles like?

As time went on the migrants themselves were able to construct modest homes for themselves in Okievilles. The Okies were segregated by class and stereotyped as rigidly as any disdained racial or ethnic group.

What did Okies eat?

Physicians at the time blamed the Okies’ poor health on their traditional diet of pork, beans, biscuits, gravy, and potatoes- foods rich in salt and fat (Faverman, Dickie, Jones). In 1938, Dr.

Where did the Okies come from?

Although Oklahomans left for other states, they made the greatest impact on California and Arizona, where the term “Okie” denoted any poverty-stricken migrant from the Southwest (Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas). From 1935 to 1940 California received more than 250,000 migrants from the Southwest.

Who were the Okies why were they given this name?

Because they arrived impoverished and because wages were low, many lived in filth and squalor in tents and shantytowns along the irrigation ditches. Consequently, they were despised as “Okies,” a term of disdain, even hate, pinned on economically degraded farm laborers no matter their state of origin.

What happened to Okies in California?

In the end the Okie spirit and determination triumphed for the migrants who had arrived in California with nothing. “Many of them quickly moved out of farm work into better-paying jobs in the oil industry and, when World War II broke out, in the burgeoning Southern California defense plants.

What challenges did Okies face in their home states?

Families suffered drought, wind, dust, and death from dust pneumonia for half a decade before the horrific dust storms and heat of 1935-36 forced many to abandon their homes and search for a new life in the Golden State.

What did most Okies find in California?

Water, green grass, and swelling earth conjure the “promised land” described in John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath. Like the Joad family in Steinbeck’s novel, nearly 40 percent of migrants wound up in California’s San Joaquin Valley picking cotton and grapes.

How were the Okies treated in California?

Predominantly upland southerners, the half-million Okies met new hardships in California, where they were unwelcome aliens, forced to live in squatter camps and to compete for scarce jobs as agricultural migrant laborers.

Where did Okies settle?

Where did the Okies come from in the Great Depression?

“Okies,” as Californians labeled them, were refugee farm families from the Southern Plains who migrated to California in the 1930s to escape the ruin of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.

Who were the Okies?

“Okies,” as Californians labeled them, were refugee farm families from the Southern Plains who migrated to California in the 1930s to escape the ruin of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl .

What did Okie mean in the grapes of Wrath?

That image lasts in the regional meanings of “Okie”: a California insult and an endearing nickname in the Southern Great Plains. See also FILM: The Grapes of Wrath / MUSIC: Guthrie, Woody / PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT: Dust Bowl / TRANSPORTATION: Route 66.

What was life like for the Okies in Oklahoma?

Because they arrived impoverished and because wages were low, many lived in filth and squalor in tents and shantytowns along the irrigation ditches. Consequently, they were despised as “Okies,” a term of disdain, even hate, pinned on economically degraded farm laborers no matter their state of origin.