Rainy Day in Camp of Migrant Pea Pickers, Nipomo, California

Nipomo, California, was a town of 750 citizens in the late 1930s. It is located near the Pacific coast, north of Santa Maria, just east of U.S. 101 in San Luis Obispo County. The WPA Guide to California reported in 1939 that the Santa Maria Valley raised grain, beans, and seed; in fact, it stated that "for miles the countryside along US 101 is planted with beans." In the winter of 1936, during the pea harvest, Dorothea Lange worked in the area, documenting conditions at migrant camps for the Resettlement Administration. The captions now attached to her RA pictures from this picking season in California include such comments as "Pea Picker's home. The condition of these people warrants Resettlement camps for migrant agricultural workers." Her intent was always to make a difference, to bring about improvements in the lives of the desperate people she encountered.

Here, Lange makes a broad view to document as much of the environment as possible: the large tents (one incorporating a working stove), the essential automobile (also needed in running order), the roadside row of eucalyptus trees offering some protection from the elements, and the ubiquitous water and mud resulting from days of rain. Included in this cold, wet scene typical of the then-pervasive poverty in California are two very willing group portraits: one in the center of the picture of three boys, probably brothers; the other, perhaps representing members of the same family, of two young women and two children. The photographer directs them from across the huge puddle. The subjects are all smiling as they watch and listen and stand perfectly still, this in spite of conditions that John Steinbeck recreates in his story of the Joads in the Grapes of Wrath (1939): "And when the puddles formed, the men went out in the rain with shovels and built little dikes around the tents. The beating rain worked at the canvas until it penetrated and sent streams down. And then the little dikes washed out and the water came inside, and the streams wet the beds and the blankets."

Judith Keller, Dorothea Lange, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 28. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.