It was March 1936. The Great Depression still ravaged the land, and in the Midwest, dust storms swept across the plains, part of a decade-long devastation that would ultimately force 2.5 million people from their homes in search of refuge wherever they could find it. Some piled their few belongings into rusted-out cars and battered pickup trucks, others took to the trains, and still others wandered along the highways with their thumbs up, looking for a ride. Most drifted westward in a desperate search for anything to grow or earn to buy food. They knew nothing but the soil, and many of them came to California, believing the fertile fields might save them.

When they arrived in California, they quickly learned that the reality was harsher than their dreams. Stability was nowhere to be found. They moved from one county to the next, chasing harvests like migrating birds but finding only meager pay for back-breaking work picking various fruit and cotton. Their homes were makeshift, often nothing more than ragged tents, cardboard shacks, and scraps of tin that barely kept the elements at bay. They washed themselves in the same stagnant ditches where they drew their water. Life was little more than survival.

It was amidst this despair that Dorothea Lange had been working for the past month as a government photojournalist, traveling from camp to camp across California and photographing the people she met. She worked their hours, sixteen a day.

Now, she gripped the steering wheel as rain drummed relentlessly on the windshield as she drove home, worn out and tired. Then, she noticed a sign for a pea picker’s camp in Nipomo.

She drove past the camp at first. But Dorothea, who believed in following her intuition, felt something compelling. After debating for nearly 20 miles, she turned around and drove back. “I was following instinct, not reason; I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon,” Dorothea later said.

At the camp, Dorothea met thirty-two-year-old Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker and mother of seven children. As Dorothea described years later,

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions…She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Then Dorothea did what she knew best. She began taking photographs of Florence with the children. One image in particular, depicting Florence with several of her children huddled around her, became one of the most enduring images of the Great Depression, symbolizing the plight of struggling families during that era. That photograph became known as “Migrant Mother.”

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