Santa Maria
November 13, 2024 at 07:30PMAs a kid, Myriam Gurba was obsessed with Dorothea Lange’s famous photo “Migrant Mother.” A copy of it hung on the wall of her dad’s office. Later in life, as Gurba researched the story behind the photo, she found that its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, wasn’t who so many Americans familiar with the picture assumed she was. This revelation demanded a reckoning:
Thompson was not a White Okie like so many of us had been led to believe. Instead, Florence was a Cherokee. Born in a tepee on September 3, 1903, in Indian Territory, she later appeared as “Mrs. Florence C. Owens” in a July 1915 edition of the newspaper Tulsa World. There, the twelve-year-old is listed as one of the “lady delegates” who attended the “semi-annual meeting of the county farm demonstration agents.” The 1920 census places the young wife and now mother in Paw Paw, an Indian settlement in Sequoyah County—the same settlement, incidentally, where Elias Cornelius Boudinot lived, the Cherokee journalist and politician who is credited with naming Oklahoma.
Mr. and Mrs. Owens left for California together, but by the time the Mrs. had turned 28, the only remnants of Mr. Owens were mouths left to feed. Mr. Owens died of tuberculosis, and Mrs. Owens, now a widow, had six children to care for. She picked cotton while lugging babies through woolly fields. The family slept beneath bridges. Car trouble determined their fate. While driving from the Imperial Valley to Watsonville, the timing chain broke. A kind stranger towed Mrs. Owens’s Hudson to a pea pickers camp, where she set up a tent. Soon a lady with a limp and Graflex camera approached.
“She didn’t ask my name,” the former migrant told Emmett Corrigan. “She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”
It bothered me that Lange had treated her subject with such disregard. It also bothered me that Lange’s photograph of an Indian woman had been turned into a symbol of White women’s destitution. “Migrant Mother” was not one of Steinbeck’s Joads. She had more in common with the migrant workers still working in the Santa Maria Valley than I’d assumed.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/13/santa-maria/
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