migrant mother narrative essay

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The Real Story Behind the ‘Migrant Mother’ in the Great Depression-Era Photo

By: Sarah Pruitt

Published: May 8, 2020

It’s one of the most iconic photos in American history. A woman in ragged clothing holds a baby as two more children huddle close, hiding their faces behind her shoulders. The mother squints into the distance, one hand lifted to her mouth and anxiety etched deep in the lines on her face.

From the moment it first appeared in the pages of a San Francisco newspaper in March 1936, the image known as “Migrant Mother” came to symbolize the hunger, poverty and hopelessness endured by so many Americans during the Great Depression . The photographer Dorothea Lange had taken the shot, along with a series of others, days earlier in a camp of migrant farm workers in Nipomo, California.

Lange was working for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration—later the Farm Security Administration (FSA)—the New Deal -era agency created to help struggling farm workers. She and other FSA photographers would take nearly 80,000 photographs for the organization between 1935 to 1944, helping wake up many Americans to the desperate plight of thousands of people displaced from the drought-ravaged region known as the Dust Bowl .

How the Photo Was Taken

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange told Popular Photography magazine in 1960 . She had spotted a sign for the migrant workers’ campsite driving north on Highway 101 through San Luis Obispo County, some 175 miles north of Los Angeles. Bad weather had destroyed the local pea crop, and the pickers were out of work, many of them on the brink of starvation.

Lange didn’t ask the woman’s name, or find out her history. She claimed the woman told her she was 32, that she and her children were living on frozen vegetables and birds the children had killed, and that she had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.

Soon after the photos were published in the San Francisco News , the U.S. government announced it was sending 20,000 pounds of food to the pea-pickers’ campsite. But by the time it arrived, the still-anonymous woman and her family had moved on. Even as her image was widely reprinted and reproduced on everything from magazine covers to postage stamps, the “Migrant Mother” herself appeared to have vanished.

The Real ‘Migrant Mother’

Then in 1978, a woman named Florence Owens Thompson wrote a letter to the editor of the Modesto Bee newspaper. She was the mother in the famous “Migrant Mother” photo, Thompson said—and she wanted to set the record straight.

In an Associated Press article that followed, titled “Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo,” Thompson told a reporter that she felt “exploited” by Lange’s portrait. As Geoffrey Dunn wrote in the San Luis Obispo New Times in 2002 , Thompson and her children disputed other details in Lange’s account and sought to dispel the image of themselves as stereotypical Dust Bowl refugees.

Born in Oklahoma, Thompson was actually a full-blooded Native American; both her parents were Cherokee. In the mid-1920s, she and her first husband, Cleo Owens, moved to California, where they found mill and farm work. Cleo died of tuberculosis in 1931, and Florence was left to support six children by picking cotton and other crops.

When Bill Ganzel, a photographer for Nebraska Public Television, interviewed and photographed Thompson in 1979, she told him that while a young mother, she typically picked around 450-500 pounds of cotton a day, leaving home before daylight and coming home after dark. “We just existed,” she said. “We survived, let’s put it that way.”

When Lange found her in Nipomo that day in March 1936, she had two more children and was living with a man named Jim Hill, the father of her infant daughter Norma. After their car broke down on the way to find work picking lettuce, the family had been forced to pull off into the pea-pickers’ camp.

Two of Florence’s older sons were in town when the iconic picture was taken, getting the car’s radiator fixed. One of them, Troy Owens, flatly denied that his mother had sold their tires to buy food, as Lange had claimed. “I don’t believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another,” Troy told Dunn . “Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn’t have."

Life After the Famous Photo

The family kept moving after Nipomo, following farm work from one place to another, and Florence would have three more children. After World War II , she settled in Modesto, California and married George Thompson, a hospital administrator.

By 1983, five years after claiming her identity as the “Migrant Mother,” Thompson was living alone in a trailer. She suffered from cancer and heart problems, and at one point her children had to solicit donations for her medical expenses. According to Dunn, thousands of letters poured in, along with more than $35,000 in contributions.

Florence Owens Thompson died in September 1983, just after her 80th birthday, ending a life marked by economic hardship, maternal sacrifice and human dignity. 

Even President Ronald Reagan offered his condolences , writing that “Mrs. Thompson's passing represents the loss of an American who symbolizes strength and determination in the midst of the Great Depression.”

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Migrant Mother: Histories and Mythologies

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Kimberly Schreiber, Migrant Mother: Histories and Mythologies, Oxford Art Journal , Volume 44, Issue 2, August 2021, Pages 346–350, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcab015

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While preparing for her 1966 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Dorothea Lange noticed the fortuitous absence of her most well-known photograph of a pea picker and her children, commonly known as Migrant Mother , from a draft checklist. ‘It’d be alright with me to leave her out of the show. She’s been shown enough in that museum’, Lange told John Szarkowski, the exhibition’s curator, who strongly urged her to reconsider. ‘That’s right, okay, of course’ Lange acquiesced, ‘she, that one picture, belongs to the public really … she’s really made an expedition that woman … but let’s put her in some unexpected place, in some relationship … in a context people don’t think of her, that people don’t expect, give her a new both interpretation and understanding’. 1 Spoken just one year before her death in 1965, Lange’s comments and, in particular, her Migrant Mother fatigue are best understood, not simply as a response to the photograph’s immediate popularity after it was taken in 1936, but rather as a reaction to the overwhelming circulation of Migrant Mother throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

During his tenure as the Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, Edward Steichen reintroduced Migrant Mother into public, visual culture, harnessing the photograph in order to reframe documentary as an essentially humanist or humanitarian endeavour. The photograph was featured in three exhibitions, including Steichen’s 1955 blockbuster show ‘The Family of Man’, which toured internationally for eight years and attracted over nine million visitors. So although, during the Great Depression, Lange’s photograph certainly reached a broad audience through mainstream newspapers and popular magazines, it was not until decades later that the photograph gained its almost universal recognisability, lending visual expression to, as Steichen wrote, ‘the endurance and fortitude that made the emergence from the Great Depression one of America’s most victorious hours’. 2 Alongside a massive boom in the post-war economy, Lange’s photograph of Florence Owen Thompson and her three daughters became steadily calcified within the popular American imagination as the ultimate signifier of ‘the Thirties’, ossifying her weather-beaten face and worried gaze into the visual–symbolic register of the Great Depression.

For Dorothea Lange in the mid-1960s, the saturation of the public sphere with countless reproductions and reinventions of Migrant Mother presented a methodological quagmire – one that turned around the gradual transformation of the photograph into an icon. Lange recognised that the vast celebrity of Migrant Mother threatened to eclipse the breadth of her oeuvre. In her quest to lead what she termed a ‘completely visual life’, Lange compiled tens of thousands of negatives and contact sheets: the notion that one image could contain her life’s work would have seemed absurd. However, in voicing her discomfort with the photograph, Lange does not simply reveal the way in which Migrant Mother posed a problem to her institutionalisation as an artist; rather, she suggests that the iconic photograph as a public, visual phenomenon conflicted with her conception of documentary. For Lange, meaning was never contained within the frame of a single or singular photograph; instead, it was produced within the series or on the page, always grounded through the use of extended captions or quotations from her subjects. Lange’s 1939 photobook An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion testifies to the tension that emerged between the increasingly singular Migrant Mother and her model of documentary, producing a conflict that Lange resolved by simply leaving the photograph out.

But although Lange and Szarkowski may have quickly settled the question of whether to include Migrant Mother in her 1966 retrospective, the problematic introduced by the photographic icon has not been so easily resolved. In the last several years, the issue has resurfaced in the work of numerous scholars, curators and photographers who have sought not only to reconsider Migrant Mother and its meanings, but also to re-evaluate Lange’s position within American photography and its histories. Several of these projects seek to circumvent Migrant Mother altogether, returning to Lange’s archive in order to broaden contemporary understandings of the photographer and her work. The 2018 exhibition at the Barbican Museum, for instance, endeavoured to correct disproportionate focus on Migrant Mother . ‘Her lifelong work’ the catalogue explains, ‘has been largely overshadowed by the iconic nature of her most famous image. The exhibition … seeks to redress this imbalance and reposition Lange as a critical voice in twentieth-century photography and a founding figure of documentary photographic practice’. 3 Similarly, in her book of photographs Day Sleeper , Sam Contis returned to the archive in order reframe dominant conceptions of Lange, tracing the leitmotif of the sleeping figure that recurs throughout her body of work. ‘The vast majority of images have never been publicly seen’. Contis recalls, ‘When I began visiting the archive in 2017, I came to realise that I had known only a small fraction of her work’ (p. 17).

While these interventions critically engage with Lange’s archive, recovering her more minor works in order to counterbalance the heightened visibility of Migrant Mother , two recent books – Sarah Meister’s Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother and Sally Stein’s Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender – have attempted to confront the iconic image more directly. These books suggest that in order to rethink Lange and her place within the history of photography, Migrant Mother can and should be re-read. A dialogue over why and how to return to Lange and, in particular, her most widely recognised photograph is born out in the references and footnotes of these two works, inviting a comparison between their disparate approaches and varying conclusions. What is revealed through the juxtaposition of these two texts is neither previously buried details about the creation of Migrant Mother nor formerly undisclosed elements of Lange’s biography – the books are roughly in agreement over the historical facts that surround the photograph and its maker. Instead, a comparison of these texts allows us to see the conflicting models through which the problems posed by the photographic icon can be unravelled. At stake in these books, therefore, is not simply a question of what the archive contains, but rather a debate over how the archive can read and whether a history of the icon can be written.

In her book Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother , Museum of Modern Art curator Sarah Meister returns to the photograph as part of the museum’s ‘One on One’ series, which offers extended meditations on single artworks from the collection. Although the book is framed as a reconsideration of Migrant Mother and promises ‘new insights’ into its history, the book nevertheless echoes the familiar beats that have given shape to many previous biographies of Lange’s early life, reproducing the photograph’s iconic status as an inevitable outcome of both Lange’s personal biography and the photograph’s exceptional formal qualities. While, in this account, Lange’s ‘natural sympathies’ and ‘evident compassion’ invariably led the photographer to create such a stirring portrait of a struggling mother, Migrant Mother ’s formal cohesion and balanced composition resulted in its inescapable singularity. With the snap of the shutter, Meister states, Lange ‘created an image that would become an icon, symbolising the Depression and the dire straits of agricultural workers … It is, rightfully, the most memorable and widely reproduced of the series. The superlatives that have been heaped upon it have done nothing to dilute its impact, nor have the passing decades diminished our inclination to empathise with the subject’s plight (pp. 18)’.

In order to strengthen this reading of Migrant Mother as a logical outgrowth of the historical record, Meister must flatten various interpretations of Lange and her work, articulated at several points throughout the middle of the twentieth century, into uniform evidence for the text’s arguments. A 1966 essay, for instance, written by American poet George P. Elliot for Lange’s posthumous retrospective, is quoted alongside a 1934 piece by Willard Van Dyke, who spent over a decade serving as the Director of the Department of Film at MoMA. This dizzying conflation between the 1930s and the 1960s obscures, rather than clarifies the ways in which our interpretations of Depression-era photography have been both coloured and curtailed by the institutionalisation of documentary in the post-war era. The person most responsible for shaping these dominant perceptions of the medium and its history is John Szarkowski, who served as MoMA’s Director of Photography from 1962 to 1991, and as Lange’s key interlocuter in the planning of her retrospective. In championing a rigidly formalist approach to understanding photography, Szarkowski divorced the single photograph from the printed page, essentialising the photograph as a unique product of the artist’s eye, as opposed to the result of an editorial hand.

Although certainly useful for the fine art museum, Szarowski’s frameworks have functioned to forestall a rigorously historical consideration of documentary and its function within the public sphere. These ghosts invariably haunt Meister’s related 2020 exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures , which creatively reframes the categories normally deployed to organise Lange’s work through a unifying focus on the role of text and its impact on the rhetorical meaning of photographic images. 4 By restoring the photograph to the magazine page and the photobook, the catalogue enriches our understanding of documentary as an inextricable part of public, visual culture, throwing into relief what is lost when photographs are displaced onto the gallery wall. But while the exhibition offers an important, if somewhat uneven, corrective to the long shadow of Szarkowski’s formalism, Meister’s consideration of Migrant Mother nevertheless remains in the thrall of both the icon and its creator, further naturalising its meaning as a Depression-era Madonna. In this way, Meister’s contributions to the discourse around Lange and Migrant Mother are afflicted by a central contradiction – one that stems from an unwillingness to examine the role MoMA has played in foreclosing the very same history of documentary that the institution seeks to recover today.

In her book, Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender , Sally Stein counters Meister’s approach, dislodging the many prevailing assumptions that continue to guide dominant interpretations of Lange’s photograph. Stein contends that the familiarity of Migrant Mother has paradoxically inured us to its contradictions and complexities, producing a discursive inertia that Stein convincingly upends. She demonstrates how existing understandings of the photograph have been undergirded by a blinding tautology; namely, as Stein puts it, ‘that this most famous Lange picture is ipso facto great chiefly because it has been so widely reproduced’. As a result, Stein argues, well-worn attributions of Migrant Mother ’s public resonance to its status as a secular ‘Madonna’ figure have been reflexively rehearsed, serving to obscure how and why the photograph has commanded such widespread attention. Stein refuses to allow the photograph’s now commonly accepted ‘iconic’ status to overdetermine her analysis. Unlike Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, who have sought to understand the enduring appeal of the iconic image and its role within liberal democracy, Stein gives Migrant Mother a history. 5

In doing so, Stein demystifies the aura of inevitability that clouds prevailing accounts of the photograph’s lasting popularity. While Stein agrees that the photograph is likely the last in the series of Nipomo exposures Lange captured, she rejects the notion that Migrant Mother constitutes the calculated refinement of Lange’s impulse towards Marian iconography. Stein problematises this linear narrative, challenging the prevailing assumption that photographic sequences inexorably build towards a formal and conceptual goal. She not only takes seriously a ‘blooper’ photograph in which one of Thompson’s children sabotages the photographic moment, but also decouples the physical proximity of the camera from notions of emotional intimacy. In paying close attention to Thompson’s strained left thumb, a detail that Lange later edited out of the composition in a ‘pictorialist gesture’, Stein argues that Migrant Mother captures ‘closeness as it tends to confine, sometimes unbearably (pp. 78)’. For Stein, the tightly-framed photograph speaks volumes, not of familial bonds, but of domestic bondage, offering insight into Lange’s vexed relationship to motherhood, as well as her desire to smooth over its blemishes.

Stein convincingly shores up this re-reading of Migrant Mother with a rigorous analysis of the immediate response to Lange’s Nipomo series. By attending to the wide variety of ways in which Lange’s negatives were put to work by the popular press, Stein reveals a considerable amount of ambivalence with regards to Migrant Mother and the broader series’ quality, as well as significant equivocation over the photographs’ many potential meanings. When several of Lange’s negatives were first published in The San Francisco News in March 1936, Migrant Mother was not included; and, in subsequent years, Migrant Mother often competed for public attention, vying with others from the series that created similar, if perhaps more conventional, juxtapositions between mother and child. Stein demonstrates how, far from understood as a ready-made image of domestic cohesion, Migrant Mother was made to take on a myriad rhetorical guises. In a September 1936 issue of Survey Graphic , for example, the photograph was featured alongside an article by Lange’s husband Paul Taylor, paired with the much more ambivalent title ‘Draggin' Around People’. By grounding her analysis in the visual and material culture of the 1930s, Stein throws into relief the contingency of history and the indeterminacy of meaning, providing a sharp antidote to the ideological miasma that often surrounds the Migrant Monther and renders its iconic status unavoidable.

Stein also deftly navigates the issue of Florence Thompson’s identity that has belaboured the discourse around Migrant Mother since the 1970s. Alongside many attempts to revisit the places and people enshrined by the Farm Security Administration, curiosity over the identity of Lange’s subject has motivated many writers and photographers to investigate the actual circumstances behind the photograph and to reconstruct the life story of its famous, yet nevertheless anonymous, subject. What often underpins these endeavours is not only the desire to rescue the individual from the generalising tendencies of representation, but also the compulsion to unmask the naïve, or even sinister, truth-claims of documentary. These aims crystallised most acutely in the work of freelance journalist and doctoral student Geoffrey Dunn who, in the 1990s, pieced together Thompson’s story through extensive interviews with her surviving relatives. The revelation of Thompson’s Cherokee heritage serves as Dunn’s smoking gun: the erasure of her genuine identity and blanket assumption of Thompson’s whiteness is laid entirely at Lange’s feet, supposedly testifying to the photographer’s ‘misleading’ practices and ‘colonialistic’ attitudes. 6

Stein not only rejects this argument, contending that Lange’s decision to ‘cast a Native American for the Euro-American role of the New Deal Madonna’ was probably not a conscious one, but also entirely reframes this line of inquiry. For Stein, what becomes legible in the unveiling of Thompson’s Cherokee heritage is not Lange’s personal beliefs or motivations, but rather the projected, cultural fantasies of Native American assimilation that, for many decades, sublimated Thompson into an idealised icon of white motherhood. ‘What better figure’ Stein asks, ‘with whom to create such a fantasy set of relations than a woman whose fair-haired child indicates that she has already entered the process of interracial union? (pp. 57)’ Stein reminds us that even, and perhaps especially, in their invisibility, private identities have public meanings. In doing so, she dramatically expands the terms through which Migrant Mother can be thought and read. In this way, Stein models a critical history of photography – one that does not simply seek to name the politics of an individual photograph or its maker, but historicises photography and its work within the complex networks in which images are circulated and take on their rhetorical value.

By refusing to engage in tired debates over the relative ethical merits of a photographer and their work, Stein offers a clear rebuke to those who have recently looked to Lange for a model of unimpeachable documentary ethics and, in doing so, ultimately reaffirmed postmodern critiques of the mode’s insufficient reflexivity. As the heavily mediatised crises of contemporary American political and economic life push questions of representation to the forefront of public discourse, the impulse to locate within the history of photography a set of ‘answers’ to the quagmires of representation has calcified in these attempts to recover Lange and her documentary practice. ‘More than anything else’, curator Drew Johnson opines, ‘it is this quality of collaboration and intimate connection that enabled Lange to avoid the exploitative tendencies of so much documentary photography’ (pp. 18). Here, Lange’s work is mined for evidence of alternative, implicitly female, documentary approach – one that, we are told, avoids the predatory, voyeuristic tendencies of her male counterparts. Similarly, for Sarah Meister, Lange’s use of direct quotes from her subjects, in contrast with her contemporaries, ‘reveals her particular commitment … to the authentic voices of the individuals represented in her photographs’. 7

So although many have vowed to offer a reconsideration of Lange and her work, by either going through or working against Migrant Mother , few have actually delivered on this promise. Through their inattention to historical difference, these efforts have not only further severed the icon from the material conditions in which it was created and circulated, but also reproduced a history of photography in which documentary is once again framed as dangerously uncritical and politically suspect. In anticipation of these charges, Meister, for instance, reassures us: ‘The fact that Lange was an employee of the federal government … had no impact on the character of her work’. By figuring Lange as exceptional, against, or outside documentary, these narratives reinforce, rather than unsettle the postmodern paradigms that have resulted in the repression of documentary from dominant histories of photography. To echo Sally Stein: What better figure with whom to create such a fantasy of ‘good’ representations than a photographer whose own marginality as a disabled woman indicates an ipso facto identification with her subjects? The spectres of humanism are still haunting the discourse around documentary and, as Stein suggests, the only way out is to write its history.

Dorothea Lange, Interview with KQED, Tape 42, Oakland Museum of California (1964).

Edward Steichen, The Bitter Years: 1935–1941, Rural America as seen by the Photographers of the Farm Security Administration (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1962), p. iii.

Jane Alison and Marta Gili, ‘Forward’, Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing , ed. by Alona Pardo (London: Prestel, 2018), p. 11.

Sarah Hermanson Meister, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2020).

Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Geoffrey Dunn, ‘Photographic License’, Santa Clara Metro 10:47 (19–25 January 1995), pp. 20–4.

Sarah Hermanson Meister, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2020), p. 18.

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Modernisms 1900-1980

Course: modernisms 1900-1980   >   unit 8.

• Shigemi Uyeda's Reflections on the Oil Ditch: Getty Conversations
• Evans, Subway Passengers, New York City
• Ansel Adams: Visualizing a Photograph
• Behind the icon, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother

• Lotte Jacobi, Albert Einstein
• Harold Edgerton, Milk-Drop Coronet Splash
• Esther Bubley, Waiting for the Bus at the Memphis Terminal

"I didn't want to stop, and didn’t. I didn’t want to remember that I had seen it, so I drove on and ignored the summons. … Having well convinced myself for twenty miles that I could continue on, I did the opposite. Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway." [3]

"I did not ask her name or her history. 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. The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen and there was no work for anybody. But I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment." [5]

The making of an iconic photograph

"When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture of Farm Security. The others were marvelous but that was special." [6]

Beyond iconicity: misrepresenting Migrant Mother ’s story

Living in the shadow of the photograph’s iconicity, want to join the conversation.

Migrant Mother

As was the custom among RA/FSA photographers who were trying to adhere to scientific method, her notes record no names but they do feature socioeconomic categories such as “destitute pea pickers” and “mother of seven children.” The picture itself needs no such help to draw on the prior decades of documentary photography. Direct exposure of ordinary, anonymous, working-class people engaged in the basic tasks of everyday life amidst degraded circumstances was the template of the social reform photography established by Lewis Hine and others in the early part of the twentieth century. The connection between photographic documentary and collective action was a well-established line of response, available as long as the photographer did not include the signs of other genres such as the focus on dramatic events of ordinary photojournalism or the obvious manipulation of art photography. Many other photos also met this standard, however, while the “Migrant Mother” quickly achieved critical acclaim as a model of documentary photography, becoming the preeminent photo among the hundreds of thousands of images being produced by RA/FSA photographers and used to promote New Deal policies. Roy Stryker, the head of the RA/FSA photography section, dubbed Lange’s photo the symbol for the whole project: “She has all the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal.” According to a manager at the Library of Congress, where the image remains one of the most requested items in the photography collection, “It’s the most striking image we have; it hits the heart.… an American icon.”

Taken within the context of the Great Depression, it is not difficult to see how the photograph captures simultaneously a sense of individual worth and class victimage. The close portraiture creates a moment of personal anxiety as this specific woman, without name, silently harbors her fears for her children, while the dirty, ragged clothes and bleak setting signify the hard work and limited prospects of the laboring classes. The disposition of her body—and above all, the involuntary gesture of her right arm reaching up to touch her chin—communicates related tensions. We see both physical strength and palpable worry: a hand capable of productive labor and an absent-minded motion that implies the futility of any action in such impoverished circumstances. The remainder of the composition communicates both a reflexive defensiveness, as the bodies of the two standing children are turned inward and away from the photographer (as if from an impending blow), and a sense of inescapable vulnerability, for her body and head are tilted slightly forward to allow each of the three children the comfort they need, her shirt is unbuttoned, and the sleeping baby is in a partially exposed position.

These features of the photograph are cues for emotional responses that the composition manages with great economy. At its most obvious, “Migrant Mother” communicates the pervasive and paralyzing fear that was widely acknowledged to be a defining characteristic of the depression and experienced by many Americans irrespective of income. Thus, the photograph embodies a limit condition for democracy identified by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” Roosevelt could not embody that emotion without bringing the country down with him, but perhaps this correspondence accounts in part for each being the most memorable text and image from the era. The shift from his oratory to her visual image has other consequences as well. Embodiment provides a dual function emotionally: it both represents and localizes feelings that can literally know no bounds. By depicting what was known to be a generalized anxiety within the specific form of a woman’s body, that emotion is both made real and constrained by conventional attributions of gender.

Class difference is a touchy subject in American political culture, and its presence is often carefully veiled. In “Migrant Mother” class is framed and subordinated in its allusion to religious imagery and its articulation of gender and family relations. The religious allusion may seem obvious, for the photograph follows the template of the Madonna and Child that has been reproduced thousands of times in Western painting, Roman Catholic artifacts for both church and home, and folk art. The primary relationship within the composition is between the mother and the serene baby lying beside her exposed breast, while the other children double as the cherubs or other heavenly figures that typically surround the Madonna. The center-margin relationship establishes the mother as the featured symbol in the composition, while the surrounding figures fill out its theme. Their poses, with eyes averted, give the scene its deep Christian pathos. Their dirty clothes are evocative of the stable in Bethlehem, while their averted eyes make it clear that all is not right in this scene. Instead of heavenly majesty, the transcription from sacred to secular art features vulnerability.

Rather than merely another instance of reproduction, it is more accurate to see the Lange image as a transitional moment in public art. The “Migrant Mother” provides two parallel transcriptions of the Madonna and Child: the image moves from painting to photography, and the Mother of Christ becomes an anonymous woman of the working class. These shifts demonstrate how iconic appeal can be carried over from religious art to increasingly secular, bourgeois representation, and from fine arts institutions to public media. Indeed, there is another, intermediate predecessor that, as far as we know, has not been noted before: William Adolphe Bougeureau’s painting, Charity (1865). [Offsite link: See an image of the painting on the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery website.] The painting recasts the portrait of the Madonna and Child as a poor woman with a baby and two other ragged children; her face appears tired and anxious, she is staring blankly into the distance, and the children are asleep or looking away from the viewer. We do not know whether Lange was aware of Bougeureau’s portrait, which had been long consigned to oblivion by the modernist artists and writers that she admired. The comparison does remind one that iconic photographs can exemplify what had been characteristic of the Salon painters, the combination of technical realism and moral sentimentalism.

As Wendy Kozol has documented, the use of impoverished women with children to represent poverty had been established as a convention of reformist photography by the 1930s. Lange’s photograph evokes this “iconography of liberal reform” by the association of the children with their mother in a world of want while leaving the male provider, who had been “rendered ineffectual by the Depression,” out of the picture. The analogy with the image of the Madonna strengthens the call to the absent father, whose obligation to care for this woman and her children assumes Biblical proportions (and the structure of patriarchal responsibility and control). The photograph follows the conventional lines of gender by associating paralyzing fear with feminine passivity and keeping maternal concern separate from economic resources. The mother gathers her children to her, protecting them with her body, yet she is unable to provide for their needs. She cannot act, but she (and her children) provide the most important call for action. More to the point, the question posed by the photo is, Who will be the father? The actual father is neither present nor mentioned. The captioning never says something like, “A migrant mother awaits the return of her husband.” As with the Madonna, a substitution has occurred. Another provider is called to step into the husband’s place.

Any iconic photo structures relationships between those in the picture and the public audience; indeed, that rhetorical relationship is the most important appeal in the composition and the primary reason that the images can function as templates for public life. In the case of the Migrant Mother, the photograph interpellates the viewer in the position of the absent father. The viewer, though out of the picture, has the capacity for action identified with the paternal role. This position outside the image also doubles as a place of public identity, for the viewer is always being defined as part of a public audience by the photograph’s placement in the public media, while the public itself never can be seen directly. Thus, the public is cast in the traditional role of family provider, while the viewer becomes capable of potentially great power as part of a collective response. The mother’s dread and distress call forth the patriarchal duty to provide the food, shelter, and work that is needed to sustain the family, while the scale of the response can far exceed individual action. In fact, the picture already has rendered individual action secondary to an organized collective response (a response such as Roosevelt had called for to combat the terror “which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”). Ironically, the “Migrant Mother” creates the greatest sense of deprivation in respect to one thing that the woman had: a husband who could provide for her. Yet by becoming the definitive representation of the Great Depression, the era is defined visually as Roosevelt proclaimed: a psychological condition and a failure of state action rather than a “failure of substance.”

One measure of the shift of responsibility from individual to collective action is that the woman’s husband is rarely if ever identified, and he remains a cipher throughout later narratives about the photograph and the woman and children in the frame. This marginal identity is marked in a poem dedicated to the photograph: “During bitter years, when fear and anger broke / Men without work or property to shadows.” The shadow father continues the Biblical allegory as well: just as Joseph is not the real father in the Christ myth, so the Migrant Mother’s husband is displaced by the higher power of the public (and its agency of the state). And like Joseph, he is kept offstage, mentioned only to fulfill the same role of providing social legitimacy for the woman and her children. By keeping the literal father offstage, actual economic relations are also subordinated to a dispensation of grace from a higher source of power that either has or acquires transcendental status. And just as identification with the religious icon makes the viewer an agent for continuing God’s work in the world, so does the secular icon make the public response of the viewer an impetus to state action.

By representing a common fear that transcends class and gender and by defining the viewer as one who can marshal collective resources to combat fear localized by class, gender, and family relations, “Migrant Mother” allows one to acknowledge paralyzing fear at the same time that it activates an impulse to do something about it. This formal design reveals an implicit movement from the aestheticization of poverty to a rhetorical engagement with the audience, from a compelling portrait to compelling action by the audience on behalf of the subject depicted. For those who initially encountered this photograph in the 1930s, the “Migrant Mother” captured a profound, generalized sense of vulnerability while simultaneously providing a localized means for breaking its spell. With the passage of time and for subsequent generations, the relationship between vulnerability and the need to act has been reversed somewhat, providing a localized sense of fear (by situating the subject of the photograph within a specific time, place, and class), and a generalized sense of action (by casting the viewing public, in whatever incarnation it might appear, in the position of acting on behalf of those in such circumstances). In short, the photograph compresses into a single image a rationale for the social welfare state. This rationale is not programmatic, of course, but emotional: the photograph works primarily to activate and manage feelings of both vulnerability and obligation that are endemic to our liberal-democratic culture.

The iconic power of Lange’s “Migrant Mother” is manifest in its continual and frequent reproduction since the 1930s as a symbolic representation of America’s communal faith in its capacity to confront and overcome despair and devastation. It is a visual commonplace that retains the aura of its original even as it is reproduced and divorced from its immediate cause and adapted to changing and different circumstances. More than just a representation of our past, it collapses past and present to create a structure of feeling. As Michael Denning notes, “its power lies largely in its iconic, non-narrative stasis, its sense of presence and being. The title seems an oxymoron, as if migrant and mother were contradictory; indeed, there is little sense of migration or movement in the photograph.” A fundamental property of still photography reinforces the idea that the image represents a condition rather than a moment in an unfolding story. The corresponding idea that completes the image dramatically is that any response to and change in that condition must come from outside the frame. Any subsequent narrative should be a story of how the condition was alleviated, not just for that woman, but for all those mired in poverty.

John Szarkowski once remarked that “one could do very interesting research about all of the ways that the Migrant Mother has been used; all of the ways that it has been doctored, painted over, made to look Spanish and Russian; and all the things it has been used to prove.” The photo’s legacy seems to have several, closely related articulations. The most obvious is its role as dominant image in collective memory of the Great Depression. This role is largely institutional: it is the issue of the school books, museum displays, postage stamps, didactic Web pages, and other media for organizing a national narrative for a popular audience. That story is buttressed by the second-order account of the photograph’s iconic status, as when the Art in America curricular package for teachers says “ Migrant Mother, a portrayal of a homeless working family, is an ICON of the Great Depression. ” Steady circulation of the photo and a recounting of its origin, nobility, effect, and stature not only keeps the image before the public but also maintains a structure of democratic representation. The relationships between the people in need, the people as a public, and the people as a state are mediated by the public practice of photojournalism, which in turn assists as it records the course of the nation through the vicissitudes of history.

Whether it is due more to the continued circulation of the photo or the implicit promise it offers about the political function of photojournalism, the icon seems to have become a template for images of want. In the 1970s, the image was appropriated by a Black Panther artist who rendered the photograph as a drawing that racialized the mother and her children, making them African American. The drawing emphasized race, an issue typically repressed in U.S. collective memory of the Great Depression, but the caption drew attention to the relationship between race and economic oppression, a problem that remained for African Americans after the initial successes of the civil rights movement began to fade into the background: “Poverty is a crime and our people are the victims.” The drawing thus conjured the structure of feeling that underscored the original photograph’s characterization of unwarranted victimage, albeit with regard to a different audience. This variation on the image extends across a range of ethnic groups and topics, as is evident from a Google search for “Migrant Mother.” The search turns up not only the original photo but also images of poor women with children who are struggling with poverty, addiction, and forced migration. The mothers range from Hispanic to Asian, sometimes their children are nursing (on the left breast, as the child in the iconic photo had done earlier) and sometimes they are just being held (as in the icon). The template also may be at work in a Time cover that places a woman carrying her child at the front of a migration of civilians during the war in Kosovo. [Offsite link: See this cover image on the Time website.] The relationship between an icon and a stock image may be hard to pin down, but as the captioning suggests, the lineage is there. It also may be reinforced by the circulation of a lesser known image taken during the same year (1936) of a nursing mother looking upward anxiously amidst a crowd in Estremadura, Spain. [Offsite link: See photo by David Seymour on the Corcoran Gallery website.] The single image of the iconic photograph both draws on older visual patterns and produces a logic of substitution and reinforcement, yet without losing its charismatic power.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the photograph was featured once again in a way that underscored its ideological significance, this time as a point of articulation between American liberal democracy and late capitalism. In 1978 the unnamed women in the photograph was identified in an Associated Press (AP) story published initially in the Los Angeles Times and then syndicated across the nation. She was Florence Thompson, a “75 year old Modesto woman.” The story, entitled “æCan’t Get a Penny’: Famed Photo’s Subject Feels She’s Exploited,” featured the original photograph, the cover of Roy Stryker’s edited volume In This Proud Land: America 1935û1943, and a picture of the now aging Thompson sitting in her trailer home adorned in glasses and what appears to be a polyester leisure suit. The story is not subtle in its contrast between the unnamed woman in the photograph and Thompson herself. The woman in the photograph is contemplative, apparently concerned about her children and family; Thompson is bitter, angry, alienated not so much by her past as a migrant worker but by the commodification of her image that completely divorced the woman in the photograph from the living Thompson. As she states in the story: “I didn’t get anything out of it. I wish she hadn’t of taken my picture.… She didn’t take ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.” Admitting some pride in being the subject of a famous photograph, she concluded, “But what good’s it doing me?”

Here, of course, we see what happens when the living, named subject of the photograph speaks back in a way that undermines the structure of feeling that the photograph has conventionally evoked. In the original photograph the viewer is invited to identify with and act upon the victimage and despair of an anonymous migrant mother as a duty of family and community. Had Florence Thompson later expressed gratitude or marveled at how far the country had progressed or even hoped aloud that no one should have to go through such want and worry again, her voice would have echoed the photograph’s alignment of generalized sympathy and state action to alleviate the symptoms rather than the causes of inequity. When she speaks back and demands compensation, the aura of the original—or at least the presumed authenticity of the original structure of feeling—is destroyed, and underneath is revealed a harsh (and corrupting) world of alienated labor and commercial exploitation. The expectation created by the iconic image is that one should feel concern and commitment, a willingness to help those worthy of public support; instead, the AP article portrays greed and ingratitude.

This article is particularly troubling because it cuts in two directions. On the one hand, it questions the motives of Lange and those who subsequently have profited financially and otherwise from the photograph. On the other hand, it indicts Thompson, also characterized in the article as a “full-blooded Cherokee Indian,” who fails to understand her place in “America’s” collective memory, and who is made to appear willing to trade it all in for a few pieces of silver. In either case, the self-interested pursuit of gain at others’ expense contradicts the iconic bonding of individual need and collective action within an ethos of democratic community. If this exposé were to stick to the photograph it would make it difficult to preserve the significance of the image in U.S. public culture. The closing line of the article is poignantly ironic in this regard. Contrary to Thompson’s effort to exercise her property right to stop publication of the photo, “lawyers advised her it was not possible.” It is not so much a question of what is possible, however, but rather of what is appropriate. Once framed by the iconic image of the “Migrant Mother,” Florence Thompson’s liberalism is unseemly.

The story, however, does not end here. Five years later Thompson, now a victim of cancer, suffered a stroke that rendered her speechless. Once again the “Migrant Mother” appeared. This time, however, Thompson could not say the wrong thing, and she returned to her original subject position as a voiceless victim of a “paralyzing fear” with which all could identify. Her grown children, now voiced, explained that their mother lived on Social Security and that she had no medical insurance; she was a victim of circumstances. They thus pleaded for funds to help cover her medical costs. Over a period of several weeks she received $30,000 in contributions. Florence Thompson died shortly thereafter, but not before experiencing the impact of her own disembodied iconicity on U.S. public culture.

The story continues to circulate but not as the full story. It has been neatly edited to feature only the shift from poverty then to prosperity now, a change illustrated by a picture of mom with her three daughters from the photo, who now are beaming, healthy adults. [Offsite link: See the photograph on photographer Bill Ganzel’s website.] “Florence and her family came through the Depression and worked their way into the middle class,” we are told. What more does one need to know? Dad is still absent—not in the picture, and never mentioned—and perhaps that erasure schools the viewer not to ask too many questions. Yet despite the journey to Happyville, the second photo still contains a haunting echo of the original. Thompson does not look happy. Indeed, she looks beaten, with downcast eyes and a sagging body that is tilting sideways as if she might fall. More tellingly, her hands again speak volumes. The right hand is, after all those years, still touching her cheek in a gesture of self-consciousness or anxiety. The left hand, which in the original had been removed in the darkroom, now is holding on to her daughter’s arm as if for emotional support. Whereas her daughters look directly at the viewer with snapshot smiles, Thompson still is being offered for view. She remains passive, dependent on others for help, intimately tied to her family but an object rather than agent of public opinion. The narrative explains away this possible dissonance by saying that she felt more at home in the trailer than in the suburban tract house her children had provided her. Still a migrant, Thompson remains trapped in her past, unable to participate fully in the new culture of consumption. Her daughters have no such handicaps, however, and in any case the contradiction between individual self-assertion and collective identity has been artfully erased. Although Thompson and each of her three daughters in the picture now are named, she can never achieve full individuality, while their individual lives stand as narrative fulfillment of and substitute for the political program that undergirded their lives and came to be symbolized by her image.

The photo’s circulation as an icon also generates additional uses. As with any icon, it has been altered for comic effect, although less so than some. Frankly, there is little to exploit in that regard, and perhaps it is significant that the most widely available instances treat gender ironically. Some might conclude that use of the photograph in the 1996 Clinton campaign film “A Place Called America” was close to parody. The film’s organizational scheme is that of paging through a family photo album. The “Migrant Mother” appears and goes quickly by, as if one is looking at a shot of distant relatives or another family from the neighborhood. Too strong a connection would have made little sense during the roaring 1990s, but the almost subliminal presence at once situated the Clinton presidency within the tradition (and accomplishments) of the New Deal, while it constituted a visual (and perhaps only a visual) commitment to the continuation of the Democratic party’s program of social welfare. It is worth noting also that the image appeared amidst shots of military action. What otherwise would be an incongruous association provides a leveling of the hierarchy of national service. If antipoverty programs are as important as the army, then perhaps there was less reason to fault Clinton for his lack of a military record.

And the beat goes on. For a particularly weird example of how the icon of poverty can be used to promote prosperity, we note the January 1997 advertisement for an Arts and Entertainment Network show, “California and the Dream Seekers.” As a blonde woman drives a 1950s red convertible down Rodeo Drive, we see amidst the palm trees three sepia-tinged photos: one of a few guys using old movie cameras, one of a gold prospector and his mule, and the “Migrant Mother.” Perhaps she is just there to provide gender balance, but the brush with irony seems not to have bothered the ad writers. The accompanying text claims that “here [in California] they could escape their past and invent a new life,” and apparently we are to assume that the migrant mother made it, just as did the gold diggers before her, as did the early Hollywood cinema, which now provides the overwhelming validation of the story being told. It’s a good thing to chase dreams, at least if you do so in California. (This use of the photograph reminds us of the remark that the film Gandhi was a hit in Hollywood because its subject embodied their deepest commitments: he was thin and tan.) Marked by sepia tones as events thoroughly interned in the past—there are apparently no starving pea pickers today—the good life now is to be one’s individual pursuit of happiness, a life lived without collective obligations toward others.

Despite these examples of how the iconic image can be simultaneously relied on and diminished in use, the “Migrant Mother” still can be used for powerful statements on behalf of democracy’s promise of social and economic justice. The January 3, 2005, cover of the Nation is a case in point. The feature story is titled “Down and Out in Discount America.” The mother’s dress has been colorized blue and the woman is wearing a Wal-Mart jacket to which a nametag has been added. The designer’s description of his work reveals a clear sense of political artistry:

I think the inspiration is obvious: Wal-Mart is, in many ways, just a new Dustbowl for the workers in it, as it inspires a steady downward spiral of both shoppers and workers. Socially regressive institutions and circumstances still abound; it’s just that this one has better parking. Using the well-known Depression-era symbol of people (and women especially) going as far down as they can go seemed like an [ sic ] simple way to say that. Putting her in a Wal-Mart jacket shows the reason why it’s happening. And everyone who sees it gets it right away.

The “Migrant Mother” is a single, vivid image, and also a complex representation that draws together the reformist tradition of documentary photography, the pictorial conventions of religious iconography, and the interpellation of the public audience in the place of an absent father. Subsequent appropriations reflect varied structural and strategic interests, while they work with and reinforce the defining features of the composition. The image provides a powerful pattern of definition that then can be transposed to other times, social locales, and issues. It articulates a familiar yet complex structure of representation, emotional response, and collective action. It provides a stock resource for both advocacy on behalf of the dispossessed and affirmation of the society capable of meeting those needs. Thus, it outlines a set of conventions for public appeal that can in turn go through successive transpositions, yet it does so without cost to the aura of the original.

The icon’s power comes no more from its plasticity than it does from having a fixed meaning. Instead, the iconic photograph outlines a set of civic relationships in respect to fundamental tensions within liberal-democratic society. This is a society that has to honor both the common good and the individual pursuit of happiness, both the public representation of social reality and the mystification of economic relationships, both sacred images of the common people and a process of commodification. The “Migrant Mother” is only our first and perhaps least complicated example, but identifying the photograph’s several transcriptions and its range of appropriations already begins to trace the borders of the genre. That outline becomes clearer when we turn to the next image in our visual archive of collective memory.

Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 53-67 of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.) Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy ©2007, 432 pages, 53 halftones Cloth $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-226-31606-2 (ISBN-10: 0-226-31606-8) For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for No Caption Needed . See also: Political Style: The Artistry of Power by Robert Hariman Our catalog of history titles Our catalog of rhetoric and communication titles Our catalog of media studies titles Other excerpts and online essays from University of Chicago Press titles Sign up for e-mail notification of new books in this and other subjects Read the Chicago Blog

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Article contents

Literary representations of migration.

• Marisel Moreno Marisel Moreno Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Notre Dame
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.371
• Published online: 23 May 2019

Migration has always been at the core of Latina/o literature. In fact, it would be difficult to find any work in this corpus that does not address migration to some extent. This is because, save some exceptions, the experience of migration is the unifying condition from which Latina/o identities have emerged. All Latinas/os trace their family origins to Latin America and/or the Hispanic Caribbean. That said, not all of them experience migration first-hand or in the same manner; there are many factors that determine why, how, when, and where migration takes place. Yet, despite all of these factors, it is safe to say that a crucial reason behind the mass movements of people from Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean to the United States has been direct or indirect US involvement in the countries of origin. This is evident, for instance, in the cases of Puerto Rico (invasion of 1898) and Central America (civil wars in the 1980s), where US intervention led to migration to the United States in the second half of the 20th century. Other factors that tend to affect the experience of migration include nationality, class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, language, citizenship status, age, ability, and the historical juncture at which migration takes place.

The heterogeneous ways in which migration is represented in Latina/o literature reflect the wide range of factors that influence and shape the experience of migration. Latina/o narrative, poetry, theatre, essay, and other forms of literary expressions capture the diversity of the migration experience. Some of the constant themes that emerge in these works include nostalgia, transculturation, discrimination, racism, uprootedness, hybridity, and survival. In addressing these issues, Latina/o literature brings visibility to the complexities surrounding migration and Latina/o identity, while undermining the one-dimensional and negative stereotypes that tend to dehumanize Latinas/os in US dominant society. Most importantly, it allows the public to see that while migration is complex and in constant flux, those who experience it are human beings in search for survival.

• Latina/o literature
• Latin America
• Hispanic Caribbean
• transculturation
• marginality
• displacement
• undocumented migration
• forced migration

Migration has always been a central theme in Latina/o literature because movement and displacement are at the core of the US Latina/o experience. The label “Latina/o” itself hints at the idea of movement because it is used to refer to people of Latin American or Hispanic Caribbean descent in the United States. 1 For some Latinas/os, the experience of migration is personal; it is something that they have lived through and recall. For others, it is more of a distant or inherited memory, sometimes passed down from generation to generation. Yet even in cases where there is significant temporal and physical distance from the country of origin, the Latina/o experience in the United States tends to be informed and shaped by the legacy of movement, albeit to different degrees. Migration in Latina/o literature refers not only to the actual process of moving but also to the emotional, psychological, and socioeconomic impact that that process has on individuals, families, and communities. Because of the different contexts in which migration tends to occur, as well as the multiplicity of variables that inform it—race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, education, political affiliation, citizenship status, culture, mode of transportation, nationality, generation, and ability—it is important to recognize its fluidity. There is not only one typical Latina/o migration experience, but rather there are multiple ones, and Latina/o literature offers a window into that diversity.

Broadly speaking, the representation of migration in Latina/o narrative, poetry, drama, essay, and other literary forms usually encompasses themes such as displacement (for political and economic reasons), nostalgia, uprootedness, transculturation, cultural hybridity, biculturalism, bilingualism, survival, the American Dream, adaptation, exclusion, discrimination, prejudice, and marginality. Yet the development of these themes varies significantly among writers and works. The extent to which migration is depicted as a positive or negative experience reflects how deeply personal it is. Migration does not occur in a vacuum; it is informed, influenced, and determined by economic, political, and social forces, structures, and circumstances that usually are beyond an individual’s control. As a result, literary texts often reveal the tensions that emerge between the personal and the systemic forces at play. A cursory review of Latina/o literature suffices to illustrate the plurality of experiences surrounding the theme of migration. Precisely because of the immeasurable breadth of the topic, this article does not seek to offer an exhaustive examination, but rather aims to provide a general overview of the representation of migration in Latina/o literary production. Likewise, it is not possible to mention or cover every Latina/o author, poet, or literary work that deals with this theme. The works discussed here have been selected because they illustrate some of the predominant tendencies regarding the representation of migration in this area. The reader should be aware, however, that they constitute a limited sample of the vast and rich literary production that addresses this theme.

Migration from Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean to the United States has been taking place for centuries. Shifting geopolitical borders, in addition to and informed by US economic, neocolonial, and neo-imperialist interests, are some of the reasons behind the mass displacements from these regions. Continuous US interventions, occupations, and invasions throughout the region for economic, political, or military reasons—informed by the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine—have resulted in significant migration from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States. 2

Although there has been a Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean presence in the United States since the 19th century , the first significant wave of Mexican migration took place as a result of the Mexican Revolution ( 1910–1920 ). Additional waves from other countries followed, and they significantly accelerated at about the middle of the 20th century , in part as a result of technological advances. Some of the reasons for this displacement include political exile, civil wars, dictatorial and authoritarian regimes, cartel and gang violence, ethno-racial prejudice and violence, the search for economic opportunities, family reunification, and persecution due to gender and sexual orientation. Some of these reasons are more urgent than others, but in the end they all have one thing in common: survival. When reflecting on the topic of migration, place of origin is of crucial importance given the specific political and socioeconomic circumstances that characterize each country’s migration history, as well as US policy toward them. This is evident, for instance, in the distinctions that emerge between the representations of migration in the works of US Puerto Ricans (who are US citizens and colonial subjects), Cuban Americans (who fled an authoritarian regime and extreme poverty), and Salvadoran Americans (who escaped the violence of civil war and drug cartels).

Although clear distinctions emerge between histories of migration by country of origin, differences can be found within countries, as well. It is possible for distinct waves of immigrants from the same country to have completely divergent experiences. This is evident in the contrast that emerges between the welcoming reception experienced by upper- and middle-class Cubans who fled after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the rejection felt by their compatriots, the underprivileged dark-skinned balseros (rafters) who escaped in makeshift vessels in the 1990s and who, unlike their predecessors, were not immediately allowed into the United States. 3 Another crucial factor in the way migration is represented in literature is generation. With some exceptions, the closer an author is to the actual experience of migration, the more pronounced are the themes of nostalgia, longing, anger, or sense of uprootedness. For Latinas/os who belong to the one-and-a-half and second generations, the themes of biculturalism, bilingualism, hybridity, and integration into US society tend to be at the forefront. Regardless of the generation, however, the success or (most often) the failure to attain the American Dream seems to loom large in Latina/o writing.

Mode of transportation is another variable that is tied to the conditions that inform migration and that also determines how this experience is perceived and conveyed in literature. Until the mid- 20th century most migrants arrived in the United States by train or ship, and later on commercial flights. Yet it is important to remember that the mode of transportation is determined by a range of factors that includes an individual’s status, capital, location, and US immigration policy toward the country of origin at that specific historical juncture. Since the late 20th century undocumented Mexican, Central American, and South American migrants have risked their lives walking and riding on top of trains in order to cross the Mexico-US border. Cuban migration through Mexico has increased since the early 21st century . Likewise, for decades unauthorized Dominicans and Cubans have attempted to cross the ocean using yolas and balsas (makeshift rafts) to reach Puerto Rico and the Florida Keys, many perishing in the process.

The way migration is understood has also shifted in recent times. Traditionally thought of as a permanent unidirectional displacement, migration has been transformed by technological advances and globalization, which allow short-term and circular migration to take place. The length of stay in the United States is often determined by push-pull factors including political and socioeconomic conditions in the United States and the country of origin. Since the late 20th century , return migration (to the home country) and circular (back-and-forth) migration have become common, and they contribute to the constant reinforcement and revitalization of transnational ties between populations in the countries of origin and their diasporas. Transmigration, in turn, has led to the interrogation and challenging of cultural, racial, and gender norms in the countries of origin. As migrants move between their home and host countries, their worldviews and perceptions—which travel with them—have led to the dismantling of static notions of identity. One example is the understanding of race: in the United States this is defined by the black-white paradigm, but it is much more nuanced in Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean. Many Latinos/as have embraced their African roots as a result of their experiences living or growing up in the diaspora. This attitude marks a shift in mentality regarding prevailing identity discourses in the countries of origin, given that blackness and the African heritage have tended to be minimized or denied across Latin America and the Hispanic Caribbean.

As must be evident by now, migration is a highly complex phenomenon that is experienced, understood, and conveyed in different ways by different people. Because the majority of Latina/o literature has been produced since the mid- 20th century , this article focuses on works published from the 1960s to the present. It is divided by country or region of origin in order to offer the reader a more cohesive overview of migration in Latina/o literature.

Mexican American Literature

A discussion of the Mexican presence in the United States must take into account the shifting geopolitical borders between the two nations. There has been a significant Mexican presence in the United States since 1848 , when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed to put an end to the Mexican-American War. As a result of the treaty and the definition of a new Mexico-US border, the United States absorbed expansive territories that once belonged to Mexico and the populations that had lived on those lands for generations. 4 The first significant wave of Mexican migration to the United States took place as a result of the Mexican Revolution, when thousands tried to escape the violence of war. Mexican and Mexican American workers became the backbone of the US economy during this period, but as a result of the Great Depression in 1929 , thousands were forcibly deported to Mexico. Throughout the 20th century , the push-pull factors that have influenced Mexican migration have mirrored the interdependency that has long existed between the Mexican and US economies. The Bracero Program, for instance, brought thousands of Mexicans to the United States as temporary workers from 1940s to the 1960s, a time when the country desperately needed an expendable workforce. 5 Although the vast majority of Mexicans in the United States have migrated to the country legally, many have done so without documents. Because the US economy and large corporations rely on a cheap labor force, Mexicans trying to escape extreme poverty and violence have been lured to the United States to work, even under conditions of exploitation. Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza ( 1987 ) is indispensable reading for anyone seeking to better understand the Mexico-US border, its borderlands, and migration through the lens of intersectionality.

Although Mexican American literary production is quite vast, migration has remained a major theme. Migration is at the heart of . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra ( 1971 ) by Tomás Rivera, also known as the “father of Chicano literature.” Within the narrative frame the reader does not observe the characters crossing the Mexico-US border, but nonetheless as migrant farmworkers they are in a constant state of displacement. Uprootedness and dislocation characterize the lives of the people in this tight-knit community as they travel the migrant circuit between Texas and Minnesota searching for work during the harvest season. The impact of this difficult lifestyle on the unnamed boy protagonist—who provides a sense of unity to a story told from multiple perspectives and in multiple voices—is evident as we observe him struggling at school. In this bildungsroman we not only see the protagonist dealing with the challenges of adolescence but also see how his life as a migrant farmworker leads to an early loss of innocence. Prejudice, racism, exploitation, and extreme poverty are the defining conditions of life in this community. From the death of his aunt and uncle to the heatstroke that almost kills his own father and little brother, abuse at the hands of a corrupt couple who takes advantage of his family, and his expulsion from school after being a victim of bullying, the protagonist faces countless hardships. Yet he does not conform to the role of victim, a position that the adults in the community seem resigned to accepting. On the contrary, he challenges authority by questioning the system that keeps the group oppressed and by questioning God for not protecting his people. Through a series of gestures, the boy makes clear that he is ready to fight for his dignity, thus heralding the rebellious youth spirit that coalesced during the Chicano movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like Rivera’s text, the production of playwright Luis Valdez’s theater company El Teatro Campesino was deeply influenced by the struggle of César Chávez’s and Dolores Huerta’s United Farm Workers (UFW), which began in the mid-1960s. Many of his earlier short plays defended the plight of the farmworkers and promoted their activism in the UFW by addressing relevant topics and using untrained farmworker actors who performed in the fields. In contrast, his masterpiece play Zoot Suit ( 1979 ) shifted attention to the Zoot Suit riots of 1943 in Los Angeles and gained him widespread recognition when the film version was released in 1981 .

Like Rivera’s protagonist, the main character in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus ( 1995 ), Estrella, faces the obstacles that come with being the oldest daughter in a family of migrant farmworkers. Viramontes’s text is also a coming-of-age novel that traces Estrella’s development in the midst of unimaginable hardship. Abandoned by the father, the family members are forced to move from an urban to a rural area, where they must survive by working the land. As migrant farmworkers they endure brutal working conditions, violence, hunger, thirst, heatstroke, lack of adequate housing, and pesticide poisoning. As is the case with the unnamed boy in Rivera’s text, living under such conditions shapes Estrella’s character and inspires her to rise above her situation. Yet Estrella’s agency and anger lead her to express herself physically and unequivocally against those whom she perceives as her oppressors. She shares with the boy a rebellious spirit, but hers is also molded by the intersectionality of her experiences as a woman and an ethnoracial minority. Informed by Third World feminism, Under the Feet of Jesus sheds light on the double oppression that Latinas usually confront. 6 Estrella’s strength and determination represent a beacon of hope for those who, like her, have been oppressed for too long. Rivera’s and Viramontes’s works seek to humanize and to bring visibility to a sector of the Latina/o population that has remained in the shadows despite the crucial role that it plays as the backbone of the US economy.

Luis J. Rodríguez’s poem “Running to America” ( Poems Across the Pavement , 1989 ) addresses the predicament of the undocumented migrant. The poem opens with the following description: “They are night shadows/violating borders” (1–2). 7 The darkness associated with the night mirrors the secretiveness of their movements. Whereas in these verses the poetic voice seems to be recycling the rhetoric of criminalization associated with the undocumented migrant, the rest of the poem challenges that perception. Those who are running to America include women and children; they are “[a] hungry people” who “have no country” (51–52). 8 In their dire situation, “[t]hey must run to America” (41). Yet, once there,

Their skin, color of earth, is a brand for all the great ranchers, for the killing floors on Soto street, and as slaughter for the garment row. Still they come. (42–50) 9

As the poetic voice points out, the migrants’ dark skin not only marks them as “Others” in US society but also facilitates their ill treatment. Whether in the service industry, slaughterhouses, garment factories, or the fields, these migrants have survived abuse and exploitation. They have also given birth to a new generation that is stronger because of their sacrifice: “Their babies are born/with a lion/in their hearts” (73–75). With these verses, the poem humanizes those who have been criminalized and objectified by society and announces a new dawn of hope.

Reyna Grande’s memoir, The Distance Between Us ( 2013 ), offers an important perspective that is often lacking in discussions about migration: that of the children who remain behind. In this work Grande recounts her experiences as a child left behind by her parents, who migrated to the United States in search of opportunities. Left under the care of her abusive grandmother, Grande and her siblings endure severe poverty and emotional mistreatment. Thinking that her life would be much better once her father brings them to the United States with him, she soon realizes that her alcoholic father is abusive and not capable of taking care of his children. Grande’s memoir is an invaluable addition to the Mexican American literary corpus because it provides a window into the experiences of thousands of children who are left behind by their undocumented parents in the country of origin and who later cross the border (also without documents) in order to reunite with them. Given the polarizing debate taking place in the United States about undocumented migration, Grande’s text puts a face to the statistics and sheds light on the suffering, abandonment, violence, poverty, and desperation that children of undocumented migrants are forced to endure. For anyone looking to arrive at a deeper understanding of the circumstances that lead to unauthorized migration—especially in the case of unaccompanied children crossing the border—this memoir offers a compelling perspective.

US Puerto Rican Literature

Puerto Rico’s colonial status as an unincorporated territory of the United States has had a profound impact on its migration history and has also marked a significant contrast to the histories, patterns, and conditions faced by other Latinas/os. Ceded by Spain to the United States after losing the Spanish-American War in 1898 , Puerto Rico has remained under US control for more than a century. Although US citizenship was imposed on Puerto Ricans by the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917 , this is considered to be a second-class citizenship given that Puerto Ricans on the island do not have the same benefits and rights as do citizens on the mainland. That said, whereas stateside Puerto Ricans have more privileges than their counterparts on the island—such as being able to vote in presidential elections—they still tend to feel like second-class citizens because they are often perceived as foreigners. 10 In other words, Puerto Ricans’ US citizenship has not led to this group’s incorporation into the US national imaginary. The paradoxical and conflictual condition of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora has been a central concern in their literary and cultural production. Many works question, challenge, and subvert the myth of Puerto Rican privilege by demonstrating how despite having US citizenship—which does confer them a degree of mobility across geopolitical borders that most foreign-born Latinas/os lack—US Puerto Ricans tend to experience conditions similar to those faced by other Latinas/os. These include racism, discrimination, poverty, unemployment, exploitation, and lack of adequate housing, schooling, and healthcare.

A significant Puerto Rican presence in the mainland—specifically in New York—can be traced back to the end of the 19th century , when Puerto Rican and Cuban exiles joined forces to fight for these islands’ independence from Spain. Cigar factory workers also established communities, known as colonias , and became politically and civically engaged in their societies. 11 The works of Jesús Colón, Bernardo Vega, Julia de Burgos, and Arturo Schomburg, among others, offer insight into this early chapter of the Puerto Rican migration experience. In the mid- 20th century , in part as a result of Operation Bootstrap, an initiative by Luis Muñoz Marín’s government to industrialize and modernize the island, migration augmented significantly. Attracted by the promise of employment and opportunities, about 650,000 Puerto Ricans went to the mainland between 1946 and 1964 in a wave known as the Great Migration. 12 It was not surpassed until after 2010 , with the Puerto Rican exodus that resulted from the economic crisis, and the devastation caused by the impact of Hurricane María ( September 20, 2017 ). 13 Most Puerto Ricans—usually low-skilled, uneducated, and from rural areas—who arrived during the Great Migration, faced difficult challenges in adapting to their new lives in the United States.

From the massive displacement of Puerto Ricans a new literature inspired by the experience of migration or adaptation to US society was born. Nuyorican literature, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, was profoundly informed by the civil rights and black power movements. The label “Nuyorican,” originally used as an insult to refer to Puerto Ricans outside the island—and which hinted at underlying racial, class, and linguistic prejudices—was reclaimed by Nuyorican poets and authors to distinguish themselves from insular Puerto Ricans and Anglo Americans. Piri Thomas’s autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets ( 1967 ), which follows the tradition of the bildungsroman, is considered a foundational work not only of Nuyorican literature but of Latina/o letters more broadly. The novel attracted national attention and instantly became a bestseller, in part because of its representation of the struggles, challenges, and prejudices faced by a young Afro–Puerto Rican in an urban setting. Thomas, born in New York in 1928 to a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father, offers a second-generation perspective that has been invaluable to the understanding of the repercussions of migration across generations from a literary standpoint.

In about the same period, Nuyorican poets Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero published their landmark collection Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings ( 1975 ), which opened the floodgates for many more publications by Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. 14 Pedro Pietri’s foundational poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” ( 1973 ) strongly denounces the conditions of oppression and exploitation that Puerto Rican colonial migrants have faced in the United States. The poem, which became a hymn of sorts among members of the Nuyorican community, seeks to dismantle the myth of the American Dream that leads this group not only to remain passive in the face of systemic violence (“They worked/ten days a week/and were only paid for five”), but to sacrifice their cultural identity (“Dead Puerto Ricans/Who never knew they were Puerto Ricans”) in order to attain the dream of upward mobility promoted by the media. 15 Although the poem decries the injustices that Puerto Ricans face in the United States, it also holds them responsible in a gesture that seeks to awaken their conscience in order to promote social change. Tato Laviera’s poetry collection La carreta Made a U-turn ( 1979 ) also addresses the theme of migration. This is evident from the title, an ironic play on René Marqués’s La carreta ( 1953 ), a landmark drama about the migration of a peasant Puerto Rican family that moves from the mountains to San Juan, and later to New York City, in search of survival during the Great Migration. His collection AmeRícan ( 1985 ) also explores migration as well as transculturation. In the poem “nuyorican,” the speaker reflects upon his return to the island after years of absence. In his apostrophe to Puerto Rico, he denounces the prejudice (linguistic, class, racial) that he has endured as a result of the differences that he, as a “Nuyorican,” or transcultural “other,” embodies. He declares:

yo soy tu hijo, de una migración, pecado forzado, me mandaste a nacer nativo en otras tierras (8–11) 16

In these verses migration is depicted not as a choice but rather as an experience that was imposed or forced on underprivileged and disenfranchised Puerto Ricans. Although Operation Bootstrap aimed to modernize the island, it was also supposed to curtail “overpopulation” by promoting migration to the mainland. Ironically, despite the government’s push to promote migration, it was looked down on and sometimes even articulated as a form of treason, the “pecado forzado” (“forced sin”) that Laviera alludes to in this poem. 17

Judith Ortíz Cofer’s Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood ( 1990 ) is one of the first works of US Puerto Rican literature to address el vaivén , or the back-and-forth pattern of circular migration that has characterized the lives of many Puerto Ricans. 18 In this hybrid text, one that combines memoir, short story, and poetry, the protagonist struggles to navigate the opposing cultural worlds of her homeland and the United States. As a “Navy brat,” she and her family are forced to migrate to the United States to accompany her father, but they also spend half of the year at her grandmother’s house in the mountains of Puerto Rico. Although the narrator-protagonist is aware of her privilege in relation to other Puerto Ricans that she knows—in terms of both her class and her light skin color—that privilege is not enough to offset the prejudice and discrimination that she faces growing up in New Jersey. In one of the most oft-cited passages of the text, she states,

As a Navy brat, shuttling between New Jersey and the pueblo, I was constantly made to feel like an oddball by my peers, who made fun of my two-way accent: a Spanish accent when I spoke English; and, when I spoke Spanish, I was told that I sounded like a “Gringa.” Being the outsiders had already turned my brother and me into cultural chameleons. 19

Here, the protagonist articulates her sense of otherness—based on her cultural hybridity and own process of transculturation—as she navigates the distinct cultural terrains of Puerto Rico and the United States. Not feeling that she fully belongs in either one, her sense of identity emerges from the condition of in-betweenness. 20

Esmeralda Santiago’s memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican ( 1993 ), helps shed light on the phenomenon of Puerto Rican migration to the mainland during the mid- 20th century . Unlike the depiction of migration as a vaivén observed in Ortíz Cofer’s Silent Dancing —a result of her privileged economic status—Santiago’s text portrays it as a one-way displacement. Her family’s position as poor jíbaros , or peasants, leads them on a path that was all too common among the rural population: migrating from the interior to San Juan and eventually to New York. As a result of her parents’ unstable relationship and the father’s constant abandonment, Negi’s mother moves the family to Santurce and later to New York. The fact that most of the action takes place in Puerto Rico—ten in thirteen chapters are set on the island—is significant because it emphasizes the extreme conditions that lead the family to migrate. The trauma that the protagonist faces as she is about to board the plane is palpable when she describes herself as “unwilling to face the metal bird that would whisk us to our new life.” 21 Negi understands the gravity of the situation and seems aware of the repercussions that the move could have for her identity. In a frequently cited passage, she states: “For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican jíbara who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting.” 22 With these words, the adult Negi reflects on the painful process of transculturation on which she was about to embark, which destabilized her sense of cultural identity as a Puerto Rican. Cultural hybridity emerges as a result of navigating two linguistic codes and distinct sociocultural mores as a Puerto Rican teenager recently arrived in the United States. The last three chapters of the book address her process of adaptation to her new urban environment. 23 The sequels Almost a Woman ( 1998 ) and The Turkish Lover ( 2004 ) provide greater insight into the process of transculturation that begins at the end of When I Was Puerto Rican .

Whereas most US Puerto Rican literature dealing with the theme of migration has focused on the experience of adaptation to urban environments—especially on the East Coast—few works have delved into the experiences of Puerto Ricans who settled in rural areas. This lack is in part a result of the fact that most Puerto Ricans settled in cities. But not all did; few people realize that thousands of Puerto Ricans were recruited to work as seasonal farmworkers between 1948 and 1990 all across the United States. 24 This is why Fred Arroyo’s literary production represents such an invaluable contribution. In his semiautobiographical collection Western Avenue and Other Fictions ( 2012 ), Arroyo offers a narrative that simultaneously continues and breaks away from the established East Coast–based and urban-centered body of US Puerto Rican letters. Like other works, Western Avenue denounces the poverty, abjection, racism, gender violence, substance abuse, and criminalization that have characterized the lives of many Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. The difference, however, is that these characters are depicted in a rural midwestern setting, whether working at the Green Giant cannery in Niles, Michigan, or digging potatoes and picking vegetables in southwestern Michigan. Because they are always migrating and in search of work, these Puerto Ricans’ lives seem closer to those of Mexican braceros and migrant farmworkers than to those of their compatriots on the East Coast. In fact, if something is clear after reading the text, it is that Puerto Rican farmworkers, despite having US citizenship, have been treated like foreigners and exploited in the fields. By depicting the rural experience of Puerto Rican farmworkers in the Midwest, Arroyo’s work challenges, enriches, and diversifies the dominant narrative about Puerto Rican migration to the United States. 25

And finally, Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Elliot Trilogy—consisting of the plays Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue ( 2007 ), Water by the Spoonful ( 2011 ), and The Happiest Song Plays Last ( 2014 )—also represents a unique contribution to the literary and cultural production of the Puerto Rican diaspora. The plays follow the life of Elliot, a Puerto Rican Iraq War veteran who grew up in North Philadelphia, as he confronts the impact of PTSD and addiction. Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue examines the effects of war across three generations of Puerto Rican soldiers. By its representation of Elliot’s grandfather’s participation in the Korean War, his father’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and his own service in Iraq, the play unveils the connections between Puerto Ricans’ colonial condition and the legacy of war. Water by the Spoonful , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012 , is a darker play that delves into the complexities of adapting to civilian life as a war veteran. The play addresses addiction, mother-son relationships, online group therapy, depression, suicide, and survival. The last of the installments, The Happiest Song Plays Last , follows Elliot as he returns to the Middle East (Jordan) to film a movie and his Philadelphia-based cousin Yaz, a music professor and activist in her community. With Yaz and Elliot’s reunification in the end, the play emphasizes the strong links that unite this Puerto Rican family, while it also offers an insightful reflection on the meaning, fluidity, and complexity of the concept of family.

Dominican American Literature

Although Dominicans have been present in the United States since the 19th century —and, some would argue, before that period—not until the 1960s did the confluence of political and economic forces lead to massive migration from the Dominican Republic to the United States. 26 The first significant wave occurred as a result of the assassination of the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in 1961 and the political upheaval that ensued, namely, the overthrow of the democratically elected President Juan Bosch by neo-Trujilloist factions. When pro-Bosch revolutionaries sought to restore him to power in 1965 , the US military invaded the Dominican Republic for the second time in the 20th century , crushing the rebellion. In the end, the US intervention facilitated the rise to power of Joaquín Balaguer, Trujillo’s right-hand man and the regime’s ideologue, who in turn launched a violent persecution campaign against his enemies. Seeking refuge from political oppression, thousands of Dominicans migrated to the East Coast and to Puerto Rico. A second wave followed in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the economic crisis, which led many Dominicans to seek survival and better opportunities outside their country. Although the majority of those who migrated did so legally, a significant number arrived in the United States and Puerto Rico without documents. 27 Ironically, the issue of citizenship has resurfaced since the passing of TC 168-13, also known as La Sentencia, a highly controversial law that has rendered stateless thousands of Haitian Dominicans. The Dominican Republic’s complex history and neocolonial relation to the United States have propelled migration, and its transnational character has been captured in the literature of its diaspora.

The literary production of Dominicans in the United States extends as far back as the nineteenth century , but most works produced until the 1990s were written in Spanish and therefore only reached a limited audience. 28 The more recent Spanish-language publications of US Dominican poets Marianela Medrano and Sussy Santana and authors Aurora Arias, Rita Indiana Hernández, and Rey Andújar, continue to enrich Dominican letters in the United States. 29 A watershed moment for this corpus occurred with the publication of Julia Alvarez’s widely acclaimed novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents ( 1991 ). The work depicts the life of the García family as it moves between the Dominican Republic and the United States for political reasons. It is the father’s participation in anti-Trujillo insurgent activities that forces them to flee their country in order to survive. Told from different perspectives and following a nonlineal development, it privileges the stories of the four García daughters as they each struggle to navigate the cultural expectations placed on them by their traditional parents (Old World) and by US society at large (New World). Trying to adapt to their new home, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia are forced to negotiate their processes of transculturation. Class also plays a key role given that the family also has to adapt to the loss of their privileged status as a result of their migration to the United States. The novel traces the search for identity that marks the lives of the members of the García family. As the daughters mature, they begin to understand what they have gained and what they have lost in the process of migration. They gain a significant degree of freedom, but they also lose—to varying degrees—their accents, homeland, and Dominican cultural identity. Focusing on issues of race, ethnicity, class, gender, transculturation, and transmigration, the novel is the first work of Dominican American literature to examine the complexity of Dominican migration from a feminist perspective while reaching a mainstream US audience.

Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee ( 2005 ) likewise centers on the experience of migration while it challenges some of the myths associated with it, such as the myth of the Dominican Dream. 30 The novel follows the lives of two main characters, Don Chan and Esperanza. Don Chan, who was brought from China to the Caribbean as part of the “coolie” trade, acquires a strong sense of Dominican identity that in political terms positions him against the Trujillo dictatorship. 31 He embodies patriotism to such a degree that migration to the United States—or the heartbreak caused by his forced move after the death of his wife—literally sends him to the grave. Esperanza, Don Chan’s daughter-in-law, represents the opposite posture. Not only does she descend from a family of Trujillo supporters, but she does not display any emotional attachment to the Dominican Republic. On the contrary, from rural Los Llanos, where she lives with her husband Santo (Don Chan’s son), she dreams of escaping to the United States and making a better life for herself. But unlike the majority of Dominicans, whose main destination has been New York, Esperanza’s obsession with the television show Dallas leads her to dream about settling there. Despite the unconventional choice of destination, her trajectory mirrors that of thousands of Dominicans who embark on the dangerous journey from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico in a yola , a precarious vessel. Esperanza arrives pregnant and undocumented in Puerto Rico, which becomes a stepping stone in her journey to the continental United States. Although she eventually ends up living and raising her two children in New York, her desire to achieve a luxurious lifestyle—like the one she was exposed to on television—remains a constant in her life that has a negative impact on all of her close relationships. A noteworthy aspect of the novel is the portrayal of return migration, an important theme that until the publication of this book had not garnered much literary attention. Esperanza’s return to the Dominican Republic, as well as her reception by her family, sheds light on the dynamics that often play out between the diaspora and the homeland. As a migrant, Esperanza is expected to succeed in the United States and to share her wealth with her family. Her return is tainted by the greed displayed by her family members and the pressure that they place on her for not having achieved a high level of financial success after leaving the country. Let It Rain Coffee questions the fictions that sustain the myth of the Dominican Dream by depicting the challenges and pressures associated with migration to the United States. 32

Migration to and from the Dominican Republic has also been a major concern in the works of Junot Díaz, possibly the most celebrated Dominican American author to date. Because Díaz’s popularity also extends to the realm of academic scholarship and his works have garnered significant critical attention, this discussion is limited in order to focus on works by less well-studied literary figures. In his short story collections Drown ( 1996 ) and This Is How You Lose Her ( 2012 ), as well as in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ( 2007 ), his main characters often have to negotiate their Dominican pasts and their American presents, which often bring to the fore issues of race and gender. His ever-present character (and alter ego), Yunior, is only a child when he first appears in Drown . Growing up black and underprivileged in the Dominican Republic, he and the rest of the family must endure the father’s subsequent move to the United States in search for a better life (in the story “Aguantando”). The father’s physical and emotional abandonment (he starts a new family in the United States) is shown to have a great impact on the family, though he later manages to bring them to New Jersey. The story “Fiesta, 1980” offers a multilayered reflection on the topics of migration, adaptation, masculinity, race, and ethnicity. In it, Yunior’s father is depicted as an authoritative and violent figure who controls his wife and children through fear and terror—symbolically representing the legacy of Trujillo’s dictatorship. The story’s overlapping of the family gathering (fiesta) and the father’s visits to his mistress coalesce in the depiction of Yunior’s sickness (revulsion) when he rides in his father’s new Volkswagen, which in turn is a symbol of the status he has achieved as an immigrant. Yunior, who knows very well the price that his family has had to pay for the luxury of having migrated to the United States, appears to be subconsciously rebelling against everything that his father represents. As Yunior’s life journey continues and he becomes a young adult, he must negotiate the challenges that he faces as an Afro-Dominican American man.

The emerging Afro-Dominican performance poet Elizabeth Acevedo has been carving a space within Dominican-American, Latina/o, and American letters more broadly, as illustrated by the fact that her first novel, The Poet X , won the 2018 National Book Award for young people’s literature. Born and raised in New York, Acevedo produces works that are informed by her Afro-Dominican identity and her family’s immigration story. Her poetry collection Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths ( 2016 ) addresses a number of thematic concerns such as migration, racism, sexism, classism, prejudice, writing, poverty, and living in the inner city, as well as Dominican myths, history, and identity. Her poem “Mami Came to This Country as a Nanny” explores the link between the poetic voice and her mother by addressing the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The title’s reference to the mother’s immigration story is illustrative of the conditions under which thousands of Dominican and other Latina women have arrived in the United States to be employed as maids and nannies. In the poem, the poetic voice reflects on her upbringing and coming-into-womanhood, symbolized by the skill—passed down from mother to daughter—of washing her underwear by hand. Mastering this domestic chore becomes a matter of pride: “no menstrual cycle ever made me more woman/in mami’s eyes than this learning how to wash my own ass” (11–12). 33 The mother’s work and sacrifice seem to pay off as the speaker attends college. But for the daughter, disconnecting from the past, from her roots, is impossible. As she states,

this memory tightens my fist that first week of freshman year when katie kerr’s mother, who has a throat made for real pearls, points her unsoftened mouth at me, you better take care of Katie, she’s always had help . (14–17) 34

The poem underscores how race, ethnicity, class, and gender intersect in the eyes of Katie Kerr’s mother, who from her privileged position reads the body of the poetic voice as help instead of her daughter’s fellow student. Her comment reveals the prejudice, classism, and racism that Afro-Latina women face in US society. Dehumanization and invisibility also emerge as conditions that oppress Latinas and women of color. The poem suggests that while the poetic voice can enjoy opportunities denied to her mother, the prejudice and discrimination that she has inherited as an immigrant and woman of color will continue to be challenges for the rest of her life.

Cuban American Literature

As with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, there have been Cubans in the United States since the 19th century , but it was not until the mid-to-late 20th century that mass migration from Cuba began in earnest. Given their distinct reasons, historical contexts, demographic profiles, and reception by US society, sociologists and anthropologists have often divided Cuban migration into various waves. According to Grenier and Pérez, these are the early exiles, the Airlift, the Mariel Exodus, and the rafter crisis. 35 The early exiles ( 1959–1962 ) constituted the first wave to leave the island as a result of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Most people in this group settled in Miami, were part of the Cuban elite, were mostly light-skinned, and received substantial help from the US government upon arrival because of their refugee status. The Airlift ( 1965–1973 ), or the “freedom flights,” at first brought mostly women and the elderly, but later on the group included small entrepreneurs and white-collar employees. The Mariel Exodus of 1980 followed the overtaking of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana by more than 10,000 Cuban nationals seeking to escape the country. When Fidel Castro announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so from the Port of Mariel, more than 125,000 left. This group included dark-skinned Cubans who belonged to the lower socioeconomic strata of the population, but it also included intellectuals, artists, and professionals. 36 The arrival of this particular group caused a shift in US public opinion about US migration policy toward Cuba. Compared to earlier waves, this group faced significant prejudice and racism from mainstream society and the Miami Cuban community. The balsero (rafter) crisis reached its peak in 1994 during the Special Period, the label given in Cuba to the decade of the 1990s, which was characterized by extreme poverty and government repression in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. 37 Desperate to leave, thousands of Cubans escaped in makeshift vessels; some made it to US soil, others where intercepted and sent to Guantánamo, and an unknown number perished on the journey. As a result of this wave, US policy toward Cuban migrants was forever altered.

Given these migration waves, Cuban literature in the United States is highly diverse. Because early exile literature such as Lino Novás Calvo’s Maneras de contar ( 1970 ) was typically written in Spanish, it had limited circulation. One exception is the play El Súper ( 1970 ) by Iván Acosta, about a Cuban exile family in New York trying to cope with displacement. The play was turned into a film directed by León Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal in 1979 . Without a doubt, Cristina García is recognized as one of the most important Cuban American authors. Her debut novel Dreaming in Cuban ( 1992 ) garnered national attention and became one of the works associated with the Latina literary boom of the 1990s. Dreaming in Cuban tells the story of three generations of a family that has been physically and emotionally divided as a result of the Cuban Revolution. The two opposing political views are reflected in the characters of Celia, the matriarch of the family, and Lourdes, her daughter. As an ardent follower of Fidel Castro, Celia remains in Cuba with her daughter Felicia and her grandchildren and does whatever she can to defend the Revolution. Lourdes, in contrast, goes into exile and settles in New York City, where she lives with her husband and daughter Pilar. As a staunch anti-communist, Lourdes thrives in her new homeland. She spends her life trying to achieve the American Dream, first as a guard and later as the proud owner of Yankee Doodle Bakery. Her teenage daughter Pilar finds herself at a crossroads in her search for her identity as the daughter of Cuban parents in the United States. Despite the distance that separates them, Pilar and her grandmother Celia develop a deep bond that leads Pilar and Lourdes to return to Cuba for a visit. Through the characters’ relationships, the novel offers a polyphonic exploration of the effects of Cuban history on the family by privileging female voices.

The theme of Cuban migration is also central in Ana Menéndez’s short story collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd ( 2001 ). The title story centers on the life of Máximo, a Cuban exile who left as a result of the revolution. An older widower, Máximo struggles to survive in the midst of his losses. The story takes place in Miami, and more specifically Domino Park, where he often joins friends to play dominoes. Intermingled with poignant commentary regarding the demographic changes faced by Little Havana in recent decades (from Cuban to pan-Latino enclave) and its exoticization at the hands of the tourism industry is the story of a man who is trying to make sense of who he has become after years of exile. Present-day Miami is contrasted to the Miami of the past, as well as to the Cuba of yesterday (la Cuba de ayer), that is, Cuba before Castro. We learn that Máximo had been a professor at the university who left abruptly (“he said good-bye to no one”) two years after the triumph of the Revolution. In Miami, he first drove a taxi and then convinced his wife to open a small restaurant in Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, where “a generation of former professors served black beans and rice to the nostalgic.” 38 The loss of social capital and status as a result of exile is highlighted as one of the most impactful repercussions of migration. After losing his wife, Máximo spends his days reminiscing about the Cuba that he left behind. One way to channel the feelings of loss and nostalgia is by telling jokes, which he tends to do while playing dominoes. In these moments, through his performance and his friends’ reactions, Máximo is forced to confront the anguish that lies underneath. In “In Cuba I was a German Shepherd,” Menéndez offers a critical yet compassionate portrayal of a Cuban generation also known as the “Golden Exile.” More important, the story challenges the perception that the members of this particular wave made an effortless transition into US society given all of the support they received from the US government. As the story shows, uprooting and exile are always painful.

The theme of Cuban exile is rendered even more complex in Speaking Wiri Wiri , a poetry collection by Dan Vera ( 2013 ). Vera’s experience as a Cuban American born and raised in southern Texas, thus growing up outside a Cuban enclave and, more specifically, along the Mexico-US border, has informed his writing in unique ways. In contrast to the vast majority of literary works by Cuban Americans—which often deal with exile while privileging the geographical location of Miami—Vera’s poems shift the location to the Texas border. His poem “Lago de Mil Ojos,” for instance, describes the drive that the poetic voice used to take with his father between Laredo and Freer. Stopped by agents at a checkpoint, the father would hand “proof of identification” while the child (the poetic voice) translated:

How old was I when I recognized the interrogation or understood the importance of my answers? To be born here and never belong. To fear the suspicion of authorities Who might question the presence of a Cuban in the middle of this desert, who didn’t speak the language, who depended on a boy to tell his story. (9–16) 39

Linguistic barriers and the experience of child translators is commonplace in Latina/o immigrant literature, but what makes this poem stand out is the sense of dislocation that it highlights by focusing on an experience more commonly associated with migrants of Mexican and Central American descent along the Mexico-US border. Suspicion, racial profiling, and criminalization of these migrants are widespread in a region where surveillance has increased over the years. In contrast, until relatively recently, Cubans have enjoyed an unparalleled degree of protection and support from the US government. The poem challenges the privilege associated with Cuban exiles by showing how the highly politicized border region becomes a great equalizer: any migrant who does not speak English will always be regarded with suspicion. By shedding light on the unique circumstances of growing up Cuban along the Texas border, Vera’s poetry not only adds to the richness of Cuban American cultural production, but it bridges the distance between Latina/o groups that are considered to be symbolically and culturally distant from one another.

US Central American Literature

Central American migration to the United States dates back to the 19th and early 20th centuries . However, mass migration grew substantially during the last decades of the 20th century as a result of the civil wars that plagued the region. Violence, persecution, terror, extreme poverty, and genocide led thousands of people to flee their homelands. Most of the migrants hailed from the countries consumed by the chaos of civil war—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—though others in the region were also affected. That said, the experience of migration as a survival mechanism differed among the citizens of each country based on US migration policy toward them. For instance, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were routinely denied refugee status, and therefore did not enjoy the government support that comes with that designation, because they were migrating from US-backed regimes. 40 Nicaraguans, on the other hand, obtained significant support as they fled the Sandinista government, which the United States was fighting. In the 21st century , the surge in Central American migration to the United States has originated from the Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—mostly as a result of extreme poverty, organized crime, narco-trafficking, gang violence, and corruption. For those who study the region, the roots of the present violence can be clearly traced back to the civil wars that plagued the region decades earlier. In order to understand the literature produced by US Central Americans, it is not only important to be cognizant of the specific histories of each country, but also to recognize the additional level of trauma that many in the diaspora share as a result of that violent past.

Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier ( 1998 ) is one of the first novels written in English by a Guatemalan American to address the impact of the Guatemalan civil war in the diaspora. The text tells the story of Antonio and Guillermo, enemies whose paths cross during the Los Angeles riots of 1992 . Through the use of flashbacks, the reader learns the history behind Antonio’s and Guillermo’s migration to the United States and how they represent opposing sides during the war. The narrative does not shy away from depicting graphic details of the ethnic cleansing campaigns that killed more than 200,000 people, most of whom were Mayans. By developing Antonio and Guillermo’s conflict on US soil, the novel not only emphasizes that migration does not erase the trauma of war, but perhaps more important, serves to highlight the central role that the United States played in the war through the training and financial support of the government, that is, the side doing most of the killing. Some of the themes that the novel challenges and questions are warfare, violence, impunity, the perception of the United States as a champion of justice and freedom, the fine line between victim and victimizer, and poverty.

Sylvia Sellers-García’s novel When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep ( 2007 ) also examines the impact of the Guatemalan civil war, in this case through the story of Nítido Amán. Born of Guatemalan parents, Nítido is raised in the United States but returns to Guatemala to learn more about his family’s past. Through a series of turns of events, such as the fact that he is mistaken for a priest, he begins to unearth some of the reasons for the silences surrounding a nearby town affected by the trauma of war. Sellers-García’s and Tobar’s novels have enriched the Latina/o literary corpus by examining a chapter of Latina/o history that has not received enough attention to date.

William Archila’s poetry collection The Art of Exile ( 2009 ) also represents an important addition to Latina/o literature that illuminates the struggle of US Central Americans as victims of vicious civil wars. Born in El Salvador, Archila fled the country in 1980 with his mother and siblings at the age of twelve. The poems in the collection delve into the past (civil war), the moment of migration, and the return to the homeland. 41 The poem “Immigration Blues, 1980 ” reflects on the condition of the speaker, who positions himself by claiming, “I’m a war away from home” (8). 42 As he states,

I think of torn bodies, cramped, unburied in a ditch, covered in weeds or dust. They become items for the evening news, documents from another small-foot country, another Lebanon, a mile from God. (20–25) 43

The speaker’s description of himself hints at the different layers of his feeling of being a “foreigner.” From his physical appearance (“black hair”), he moves inward to address the linguistic barriers (“raw accent”) that mark him as an “Other” in US society. But beyond this, hiding under the surface, is the trauma of war. Despite living in another country, the memory of the tortured and the dead continues to haunt him. Not only that, but despite having witnessed unspeakable violence, he is forced to confront the fact that the suffering of his people is minimized—relegated to “items for the evening news”—by the very country (United States) that financially backed the civil war that forced him to flee. As this poem illustrates, Central American migration to the United States occurred under conditions of extreme violence during the civil wars. Unfortunately, violence continues to be the driving force behind migration today, so trauma remains a central concern in the literary production of this group.

Javier Zamora’s incursion into the Latina/o literary landscape represents a welcome and necessary addition to this corpus. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied ( 2017 ), offers a much-needed reflection on Central American migration from the perspective of an unaccompanied immigrant child. He was born in El Salvador and migrated at the age of nine in order to reunite with his parents in the United States. The poems in the collection deal with the memory of the process of migration. This process is marked by the unexpected, evident in the poem “Second Attempt Crossing,” when he was protected by an MS-13 gang member:

     So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you, you pushed me under your chest,      and I’ve never thanked you Beautiful Chino (14–17).

El Salvador and its civil war loom large in these poems, especially in “El Salvador”:

               Tonight, how I wish you made it easier to love you, Salvador. Make it easier      to never have to risk our lives (16–18).

Fear, terror, trauma, hope, and nostalgia all combine in raw verses that unveil the suffering behind what has been lost:

Abuelita, I can’t go back and return. There’s no path to papers. I’ve got nothing left but dreams [. . .] (“To Abuelita Neli,” 6–7) Other contributions to this growing corpus include Guatemalan American Maya Chincilla’s poetry collection. 44

Southern Cone

Although migration from South America to the United States has an extended history that dates back to the 19th century , this diverse subgroup among Latinas/os has received limited attention in comparison to others. This is explained in part by the fact that these are smaller, more dispersed, and more recently established immigrant communities. In addition, the literary and cultural production of US South Americans has been slower to emerge. Given the diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, politics, and country of origin—not to mention each country’s unique relationship with the United States—it is difficult to generalize. Owing to the widely shared experiences of living under dictatorial regimes, state- and nonstate-sponsored terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and civil war, South American literary production in the United States tends to address these themes. The literature of Peruvian-American author Daniel Alarcón is a case in point. His works War by Candlelight ( 2005 ), Lost City Radio ( 2007 ), At Night We Walk in Circles ( 2013 ), and the graphic novel Ciudad de payasos ( 2010 ) are works that, to different degrees, address internal (rural to urban) and external migration (from Peru to the United States) as a result of political instability and poverty. Alarcón’s talent and tendency to focus on the Peruvian sociopolitical and cultural landscape has earned him a level of recognition and prestige in his country of origin that is rarely reached by Latina/o writers. Other South American Latina/o authors include Marie Arana (Peruvian), Marjorie Agosín (Chilean), Ariel Dorfman (Chilean), Ernesto Quiñonez (Ecuadoran–Puerto Rican), and Sergio de la Pava (Colombian).

Discussion of the Literature

Given that the theme of migration is such a central concern in Latina/o literature, most of the criticism that has developed over the decades addresses this topic. Because Mexican and Puerto Rican letters in the United States saw significant growth during the 1960s and 1970s, the literary criticism produced during those decades focused on these specific groups. As Cubans, Dominicans, and Central Americans began to settle in the United States their literary production slowly came into existence. Until relatively recently, the critical literature about Latina/o literary production followed a pattern determined by nationality. But in recent years, the tendency to publish scholarship based on a particular group has given way to more inclusive critical works that seek to connect—from a pan-Latina/o perspective—the production of distinct subgroups.

Relevant scholarship concerning Chicano/a and Mexican American literature includes Limón’s Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry ( 1992 ), Calderón and Saldívar’s Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology ( 1991 ), Aldama’s Brown on Brown: Chicana/o Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity ( 2005 ), Guidotti-Hernández’s Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican Imaginaries ( 2011 ), and Román’s Race and Upward Mobility: Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America ( 2017 ). The emergence of Third World feminism in the 1970s and 1980s also entailed critical works by Chicana feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. The need to consider the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality is evinced in the foundational anthology This Bridge Called My Back ( 1981 ) by Anzaldúa and Moraga, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza ( 1987 ), Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature ( 2000 ), Brady’s Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space ( 2002 ), and Rincón’s Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture ( 2017 ). More recently, Arias’s Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America ( 2007 ), Rodríguez’s Dividing the Isthmus : Central American Transnational Histories, Cultures, and Literatures ( 2009 ), Padilla’s Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives ( 2012 ), and Vigil’s War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production ( 2014 ) are important additions to the growing criticism regarding US Central American literary production.

Latina/o Caribbean literature has a robust critical scholarship. Early interventions focused on US Puerto Rican letters, but as the Cuban and Dominican populations came of age in the diaspora, so did their literatures and the critical scholarship about them. Barradas’s Partes de un todo: Ensayos y notas sobre literatura puertorriqueña en los Estados Unidos ( 1999 ) and Flores’s Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity ( 1992 ) and From Bomba to Hip Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity ( 2000 ) are considered foundational works of US Puerto Rican cultural criticism. Other works dealing with Puerto Rican migration in literature are Sánchez González’s Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora ( 2001 ), Negrón-Muntaner’s Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture ( 2004 ), Moreno’s Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland ( 2012 ), and Noel’s In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry From the Sixties to Slam ( 2014 ). Relevant scholarship concerning Dominican American literature includes Suárez’s The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Diaspora Memory ( 2006 ), Méndez’s Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature ( 2012 ), and García-Peña’s The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction ( 2016 ). In the field of Cuban American literary studies, the following critical works are central: Pérez Firmat’s Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way ( 1994 ), Álvarez-Borland’s Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona ( 1998 ), and López’s Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora Cultures of Afro-Cuban America ( 2012 ).

Along with the increase in critical studies about the literary production of specific Latina/o groups, recent decades have been marked by what could be called a pan-Latina/o turn. One of the early contributions to this growing body of scholarship was Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman’s Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of “Latinidad” ( 1997 ). Works that followed include Martínez–San Miguel’s Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico ( 2003 ), Dalleo and Machado Sáez’s The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature ( 2007 ), Caminero-Santangelo’s On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity ( 2007 ), Falconi and Mazzotti’s The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States ( 2008 ), Pérez Rosario’s Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration ( 2010 ), Socolovsky’s Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature ( 2013 ), and Irizarry’s Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad ( 2016 ). Flores’s The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning ( 2008 ) offers a pan-Latina/o approach to the topic of return migration in the Caribbean, a theme that has become more relevant over the years but which remains understudied.

The study of Latina/o literature from the viewpoint of race and ethnicity represents a relatively recent direction in this scholarship and provides crucial avenues of intellectual inquiry for future investigation. Flores and Jiménez-Román’s The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States ( 2010 ) and Rivera-Rideau et al.’s Afro-Latin@s in Movement ( 2016 ) are two important contributions in the field of Afro-Latina/o studies. Saldaña-Portillo’s Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States ( 2016 ) blends Mexican American and indigenous studies. Queer and LGBTQ Latina/o literary production has also expanded significantly in recent decades, and so has the criticism about it. Important critical works include J. M. Rodríguez’s Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces ( 2003 ), La Fountain–Stokes’s Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora ( 2009 ), and Ortíz’s Cultural Erotics in Cuban America ( 2007 ). Other key identity issues are at the center of Minich’s Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico ( 2013 ), in which she explores the intersection between disability and Latina/o literary studies. Just as the corpus of Latina/o literature continues to grow and diversify, so does the critical scholarship concerning it. Latina/o literature is an ever-expanding field that will continue to enrich the US literary corpus for decades to come.

Links to Digital Materials

• Border and la frontera in the US-Mexico Borderlands .
• Central American–American feminisms .
• Contemporary Latina/o literature in the Midwest .
• Currents in Dominican American literature .
• Decoloniality and identity in Central American Latina/o literature .
• Dominican ethnic identities, national borders, and literature .
• La Bloga, the world’s longest-established Chicana/o, Latina/o literary blog .
• Latino Book Review .
• LatinoStories.com .
• Latinx Talk, research, commentary, and creativity that fosters critical dialogue .
• Letras Latinas Blog, a blog produced by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame .
• Librotraficante, a website created by Tony Díaz in response to the ban on Mexican American Studies in Arizona (HB 2281) .
• The Latino fiction of Piri Thomas .
• Nuestra palabra .
• Nuyorican and diasporican literature and culture .
• Pat Mora, author, presenter, and literacy advocate .
• Puerto Rican nationhood, ethnicity, and literature .
• 50 Playwrights Project, a digital space for Latina/o theater .

Further Reading

• Álvarez-Borland, Isabel . Cuban American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria . Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
• Aparicio, Frances , and Susana Chávez-Silverman , eds. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad . Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997.
• Bost, Suzanne , and Frances Aparicio , eds. The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature . London: Routledge, 2015.
• Caminero-Santangelo, Marta . On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity . Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007.
• Dalleo, Raphael , and Elena Machado Sáez . The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
• Flores, Juan . From Bomba to Hip Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity . New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
• García-Peña, Lorgia . The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
• González, Juan . Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America . New York: Penguin, 2011.
• Jiménez-Román, Miriam , and Juan Flores . The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
• Latina Feminist Group . Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
• Martínez–San Miguel, Yolanda . Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico . San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2003.
• Méndez, Danny . Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature . New York: Routledge, 2012.
• Moreno, Marisel . Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
• Noel, Urayoán . In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry From the Sixties to Slam . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.
• Ortíz, Ricardo . Cultural Erotics in Cuban America . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
• Pérez Rosario, Vanessa , ed. Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Rodríguez, Ana Patricia . Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Cultures, and Literatures . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
• Saldívar, José David . Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality , and the Cultures of Greater Mexico . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
• Saldívar-Hull, Sonia . Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
• Torres-Padilla, José , and Carmen Haydée Rivera , eds. Writing off the Hyphen: New Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

1. See Suzanne Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

2. See Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin, 2011) .

3. For a more detailed analysis of patterns of Cuban migration to the United States, see Guillermo Grenier and Lisandro Pérez, The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003), and Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration Between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

4. González, Harvest of Empire , 99.

5. González, Harvest of Empire , 103. See also Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

6. For a definition of Third World Feminism, see Paul Allatson, Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).

7. Luis J. Rodríguez, Poems Across the Pavement , 1. (Chicago: Tia Chucha, 1989)

8. Rodríguez, Poems Across the Pavement , 2.

9. Rodríguez, Poems Across the Pavement , 2.

10. See Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

11. See Virginia Sánchez Korrol, From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

12. Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration Between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 51.

13. See Arelis Hernández, “ Exodus from Puerto Rico Grows as Island Struggles to Rebound from Hurricane Maria ,” Washington Post , March 6, 2018.

14. For a detailed analysis of Nuyorican poetry, see Urayoán Noel, In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry From the Sixties to Slam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014) .

15. Pedro Pietri, Puerto Rican Obituary/Obituario Puertorriqueño (San Juan: Isla Negra, 2000).

16. “I’m your son / of a migration, / forced sin, / you sent me to be born in other lands” (my translation). Tato Laviera, AmeRícan (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985), 53.

17. Laviera, AmeRícan , 53.

18. See Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move , 52–53.

19. Judith Ortíz Cofer, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990), 17.

20. See Marisel Moreno, Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012) .

21. Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 209.

22. Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican , 209.

23. See Moreno, Family Matters .

24. See Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move , 88.

25. See Marisel Moreno, “The Untold Midwestern Puerto Rican Story: Fred Arroyo’s Western Avenue and Other Fictions ,” Studies in American Fiction 42, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 269–289.

26. See Ernesto Sagás and Sintia Molina, eds., Dominican Migration: Transnational Perspectives (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Duany, Blurred Borders , 55–60.

27. For a detailed study of unauthorized migration from the Dominican Republic, see Frank Graziano, Undocumented Dominican Migration (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).

28. Hispanophone Dominicans in the United States include the poet Marianela Medrano (“El ombligo negro de un bongó” in Regando Esencias/The Secret of Waiting , New York, Ediciones Alcance, 1998), the performance poet Sussy Santana ( Pelo bueno y otros poemas , United States, Atento a mi Publishing, 2009), Rey Andújar ( Candela , Santo Domingo, Santillana, 2008), and Daisy Cocco de Filippis, who has written extensively on Dominican literature in the United States. See Silvio Torres-Saillant, “La literatura dominicana en los Estados Unidos y la periferia del márgen,” Cuadernos de poética 21 (1993): 7–26.

29. See Marisel Moreno, “‘Burlando la raza:’ La poesía de escritoras afrodominicanas en la diaspora,” Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas 3, no. 4 (2011): 169–192.

30. See Patricia Pessar, A Visa for a Dream: Dominicans in the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995).

31. See Andrew Wilson, The Chinese in the Caribbean (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2004).

32. See Marisel Moreno, “Dominican Dreams: Diasporic Identity in Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee ,” Sargasso no. 2 (2008–2009): 101–116.

33. Elizabeth Acevedo, Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths (Portland, OR: Yesyes Books, 2016), 13.

34. Acevedo, Beastgirl and Other Origin Myths , 13.

35. Guillermo Grenier and Lisandro Pérez, The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003).

36. Grenier and Pérez, Legacy of Exile , 24.

37. See Duany, Blurred Borders , 46–47.

38. Ana Menéndez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (New York: Dove Press, 2001), 7.

39. Dan Vera, Speaking Wiri Wiri (Pasadena: Red Hen Press, 2013), 29.

40. See González, Harvest of Empire , 129.

41. For a study of Archila’s poetry see Marisel Moreno, “ The ‘Art of Witness’ in US Central American Cultural Production: An Analysis of William Archila’s The Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s Celdas ,” Latino Studies 15, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 287–308.

42. William Archila, The Art of Exile (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2009), 25.

43. Archila, The Art of Exile , 25–26.

44. Guatemalan American Maya Chincilla’s, The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (San Francisco, Kórima Press, 2014); Salvadoran American Leticia Hernández-Linares’s Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl: Poems (San Fernando, CA, Tia Chucha Press, 2015); and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States , edited by Tobar et al. (San Fernando, Tia Chucha Press, 2017).

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The Story Behind the Iconic “Migrant Mother” Photograph and How Dorothea Lange Almost Didn’t Take It

By maria popova.

Among the biographical sketches is also the story of Lange’s best-known, infinitely expressive, most iconic photograph of all — Migrant Mother , depicting an agricultural worker named Florence Owens Thompson with her children — which came to capture the harrowing realities of the Great Depression not merely as an economic phenomenon but as a human tragedy.

In 1935, Lange and her second husband, the Berkeley economics professor and self-taught photographer Paul Taylor, were transferred to the Resettlement Administration (RA), one of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs designed to help the country recover from the depression. Lange began working as a Field Investigator and Photographer under Roy Stryker, head of the Information Division.

In early February of 1936, while living in a small two-bedroom house in California with Taylor and her two step-children, Lange received an assignment to photograph California’s rural and urban slums and farmworkers. She was supposed to spend a month on the road, but severe weather along the coast delayed her departure. When she finally set out for Los Angeles, the first destination on her route, she wrote in a letter to Stryker:

Tried to work in the pea camps in heavy rain from the back of the station wagon. I doubt that I got anything. . . . Made other mistakes too. . . . I make the most mistakes on subject matter that I get excited about and enthusiastic. In other words, the worse the work, the richer the material was.

It was in the pea camps that she captured her most iconic image less than two weeks later — an image that, due to its unshakable grip of empathy, would transcend the status of mere visual icon and effect critical cultural awareness on both a social and political level. Partridge writes:

Two weeks of sleet and steady rain had caused a rust blight, destroying the pea crop. There was no work, no money to buy food. Dorothea approached “the hungry and desperate mother,” huddled under a torn canvas tent with her children. The family had been living on frozen vegetables they’d gleaned from the fields and birds the children killed. Working quickly, Dorothea made just a few exposures, climbed back in her car, and drove home. Dorothea knew the starving pea pickers couldn’t wait for someone in Washington, DC to act. They needed help immediately. She developed the negatives of the stranded family, and rushed several photographs to the San Francisco News . Two of her images accompanied an article on March 10th as the federal government rushed twenty thousand pounds of food to the migrants.

The most remarkable part of the story, however, is that this was an image Lange almost didn’t take: At the end of that cold and wretched winter, she had been on the road for almost a month, with only the insufficient protection of her camera lens between her and the desperate, soul-stirringly dejected living and working conditions of California’s migratory farm workers. Downhearted and weary, both physically and psychologically, she decided she had seen and captured enough, packed up her clunky camera equipment, and headed north on Highway 101, bickering with herself in her notebook: “Haven’t you plenty of negatives already on the subject? Isn’t this just one more of the same?” But then something happened — a fleeting glance, one of those pivotal chance encounters that shape lives . Partridge transports us to that fateful March day:

The cold, wet conditions of Northern California gave way to sweltering heat in Los Angeles, a “vile town,” Dorothea wrote. By the beginning of March she was headed home, exhausted, her camera bags packed on the front seat beside her. Hours later, the hand-lettered “Pea pickers camp” sign flashed by her. Did she have it in her to try one more time? She did. The long, hard rains that had delayed Dorothea at the outset of her journey had deluged the Nipomo pea pickers. And even as Dorothea drove north and homeward, the camp was still floundering in water and mud. Not long before Dorothea arrived, Florence Thompson and four of her six children, along with some of the other stranded migrants, had moved to a higher, sandy location nearby. Thompson left word at the first camp for her partner, Jim Hill, on where to find them. Earlier in the day he’d set off walking with Thompson’s two sons to find parts for their broken-down car. The sandy camp in front of a windbreak of eucalyptus trees is where Dorothea pulled in and found Florence Thompson and her children. They were waiting for Hill and the boys to show up, for the ground to dry, for crops to ripen for harvesting. They were waiting for their luck to change. In minutes, Dorothea took the photograph that would become the definitive icon of the Great Depression, intuitively conveying the migrants’ perilous predicament in the frame of her camera.

Complement Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning , illuminating in its entirety, with this excellent short film on the power of photojournalism and Susan Sontag on the violence of photography .

Images courtesy of Chronicle Books

— Published November 6, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/11/06/dorothea-lange-migrant-mother-elizabeth-partridge/ —

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Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo California , 1936, printed later, gelatin silver print, 35.24 x 27.78 cm (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, PG.1997.2). Speakers: Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Steven Zucker

Florence Owens’s grandson, Roger Sprague, identified the subjects, from left to right, as: “Katherine Owens age 4, Florence Owens (later known as Thompson) age 32, Ruby Owens age 5. Baby on mother’s lap is Norma age 1 year.” [1] Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother / Destitute Pea Pickers in California, Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California , 1936, digital reproduction from retouched negative ( Library of Congress , Washington, D.C.)

I didn’t want to stop, and didn’t. I didn’t want to remember that I had seen it, so I drove on and ignored the summons. … Having well convinced myself for twenty miles that I could continue on, I did the opposite. Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway. [3]

She eventually did turn around, and toward the camp of 2,500 out-of-work migratory agriculture workers. At that moment, Lange noticed what she  described as a “hungry and desperate mother” surrounded by her children and crowded under a makeshift tent. She took seven photographs—only five were deemed by Lange to be good enough to send to Washington, D.C., after she retouched the negative to make a thumb at the right edge of the picture plane of the Migrant Mother  less apparent to viewers. [4]

Dorothea Lange, four other frames from the Migrant Mother shoot, 1936 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: upper left ; upper right ; lower left ; lower right )

In an account written in 1960, Lange describes her interaction with the central figure of the photograph (originally titled Destitute Pea Pickers in California. Mother of Seven Children. Age Thirty-Two. Nipomo, California ), a newly widowed, Cherokee woman, Florence Owens, who shortly would become known as “Migrant Mother”:

I did not ask her name or her history. 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. The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen and there was no work for anybody. But I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment. [5]

The making of an iconic photograph

The essence of Lange’s assignment—and the mission of all Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration photographers’ work—was to capture iconic, memorable images of agricultural workers that roused support for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal relief programs. Migrant Mother —which reveals an anxious mother holding a baby as two of her other children bury their heads on her shoulders—draws on the familiar trope of the Madonna and Child in Christian art as it evokes sympathy and, ideally, a spirit of humanitarian generosity toward its subjects.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother , digital file of black-and-white film copy negative of unretouched file print showing thumb holding a tent pole in the lower right corner ( Library of Congress , Washington, D.C.)

Lange’s supervisor, Roy Stryker, believed this image encapsulated the goals of RA/FSA most succinctly:

When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture of Farm Security. The others were marvelous but that was special. [6]

As an icon, the photograph Migrant Mother is larger than one woman’s story. Instead, the pictured mother stands for the plight of suffering, poverty, and uncertainty among rural laborers during the Great Depression. Migrant Mother immediately was (and still is) circulated by the U.S. government, free of charge, to the press and the public. [7]

This was among the first publications of photographs from Lange’s Migrant Mother series, which were taken in late February or early March of 1936.  The San Francisco News , March 10, 1936

Beyond iconicity: misrepresenting Migrant Mother’s story

Migrant Mother provided such a persuasive, straightforward, and iconic image of a destitute, worried mother concerned about providing for her children that a sympathetic public and government sent a total of $200,000 in aid and free medical care to the pea-picker’s camp three days later. [8] Sadly, by that time, Owens and her children already had moved on to find other work. She never got to take advantage of the “help” Lange promised the photograph would bring.

Despite caption information provided by Lange, Owens’s family did have a car, which her soon-to-be future husband (Jim Hill) had taken to buy parts and repair. [9] That car had all of its tires, and Hill would return in it to retrieve Owens and her 6 (not 7) children, so they could leave the 2,500-person pea-picker’s camp, which would shortly be raided by locals who arrested and beat its remaining inhabitants. [10]

As historian Milton Meltzer noted, Lange’s caption-writing and note-taking habits were lax, and tracking the details of her subjects and their circumstances frequently took a backseat to photographing. [11] Lange acknowledged these allegations of misrepresenting Owens, and claimed that the image did more good than harm.

Living in the shadow of the photograph’s iconicity

Although Owens and her children were not abandoned to starve to death, and would survive the Great Depression, she resented being associated with the Migrant Mother photograph for the rest of her life, her daughter attests: “She was a very strong woman. She was a leader. I think that’s one of the reasons she resented the photo — because it didn’t show her in that light.” [12] Rather, the iconic image transcended Owens’s actual story and became a part of a U.S. macro-narrative of suffering and motherly fortitude during the Great Depression.

Owens—a woman of color—felt forever stereotyped as the destitute, suffering mother, trapped in poverty by the repeated reproductions of her image that appeared in newspapers, magazines, art exhibitions, on the pages of our history books, and on postage stamps, t-shirts, parodic magazine illustrations, and trinkets. In 1958, after Migrant Mother was included in exhibitions and published widely for two decades, Owens wrote a letter to one publication, U.S. Camera , and insisted on being consulted about future plans to publish the image. She asked for all copies of that issue of U.S. Camera to be recalled. [13] Because neither Lange nor any of the publications made money from the photograph, they did not offer Owens compensation. Instead, Lange apologized and offered sympathy to the woman whose individual story and likeness were co-opted to fulfill a political program’s narrative.

[1] Roger Sprague, “ Migrant Mother: The Story as Told By Her Grandson .”

[2] Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), p. 184. In this essay, Rosler suggests that Migrant Mother was the most widely reproduced photograph in the world.

[3] Dorothea Lange, “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget,” Popular Photography (Feb. 1960), pp. 42–43, 128. Reprinted in Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present , edited by Liz Heron and Val Williams (New York: I.B. Taurus, 1996), pp. 151–52.

[4] Sarah Meister, “ Piecing Together Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother ,” Museum of Modern Art (Feb. 6, 2020).

[5] Lange, “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget” (1960), in Illuminations (1996) pp. 151–52. In many accounts, Florence Owens is identified as Florence Owens Thompson. However, she would not marry George Basil Thompson until 1949, and kept the name Owens after the death of her first husband, Cleo Owens, in 1931: “Florence Owens Hills,” April 16, 1940, Census Records, Kern County, California, Sheet 8B, S.D. No.10, E.D. Nos. 15–44, Line 75. Department of Commerce—Bureau of the Census.

[6] Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978), p. 133. Italics are Meltzer’s emphasis.

[7] See “ Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ Photographs in the Farm Security Administration Collection ,” Library of Congress.

[8] Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), p. 237. The photograph was first published in The San Francisco News on March 10, 1936.

[9] Sprague, “ Migrant Mother .”

[10] Gordon (2009), pp. 236–37.

[11] Meltzer (1978), p. 131.

[12] Owens’s unnamed daughter is quoted in: Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” San Jose Metro (January 19–25, 1995), p. 22.

[13] Gordon (2009), p. 241.

Additional resources

This photograph at LACMA

This photograph at the Library of Congress

Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).

Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 53–67 (excerpt here ).

Sarah Meister, Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2019).

Sally Stein, Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender (London: MACK Books, 2020).

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Dorothea Lange and the Making of Migrant Mother

Follow the rich history of Dorothea Lange, as she captured the iconic and lasting portrait of Florence Thompson, more famously known as Migrant Mother .

Recently, a community in Nipomo, California, came together to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Dorothea Lange’s now-iconic photograph known as Migrant Mother . In the 1930s, Lange was a photographer working for the Farm Securities Administration (FSA), one of the governmental agencies President Franklin Roosevelt helped to establish in order to address the country’s large-scale unemployment. Lange and her colleagues were charged with documenting and humanizing the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Much has been written about Dorothea Lange’s impressive oeuvre of photographs from this time. She put faces, names, and stories to the Depression years and prompted many to sympathize with people they wouldn’t otherwise, while also bringing attention to governmental agencies, pointing out where their action and help was needed.

The Migrant Mother image is now so familiar to us, however, that it’s difficult to fully grasp how significant it was at the time. Carole Henry has created informative lesson plans that teach readers and students alike to analyze the image based on its formal components and historical background. James C. Curtis provides a deeper historical analysis of both Lange and the famed Migrant Mother , which he sees as essential to understanding the greater history of the “culture of the Great Depression.”

Both Henry and Curtis explain the story behind the image—Lange was working in Central California and at the end of a long rainy day, she was driving home and saw a sign that said “Pea Picker’s Camp.” She drove past it, but kept thinking about it and twenty minutes later, she turned around to return to the camp as if compelled to go, “following instinct, not reason” as Lange herself later explained. Immediately upon entering the camp, Lange saw Florence Thompson and her children and began shooting and shaping what would become one of America’s most iconic photographs.

James C. Curtis calls Migrant Mother a “vital reflection of the time,” and provides readers with a rich analysis of the cultural history surrounding the image. He explains how the stars aligned for Lange’s portrait—ranging from Lange’s instinctual return to the pea picking camp in Nipomo, to the compositional arrangement at play, to Lange’s own biographical history which ultimately helped shape her images.

Curtis also explores the tough nature of Lange’s job as an FSA photographer. “In the field, she often recoiled from the desperate poverty arrayed before her camera. How could she justify an art that literally fed on the starvation of the poor?” Before working for the FSA, Lange was “an investigator for the juvenile court system.” As Curtis notes, “this early form of social work served as an important role model for Dorothea’s later career development.” He also points out that Lange was “partially crippled in one leg,” the aftermath of a childhood bout with polio, and “while never pronounced, her limp was a constant reminder that she was different.” These life experiences deeply impacted Lange and her photography, ultimately driving her to create compassionate compositions that were both deeply humanizing and motivating.

But what specifically makes the image of  Migrant Mother  so powerful and lasting? Henry notes that Roy Stryker, the former director of FSA during Lange’s years, “described the photograph [ Migrant Mother ] as one that had the potential to both excite and disturb the viewer.” And ultimately it did just that. The photograph brought immediate attention to Nipomo, and because Lange captured and circulated the image of a then-anonymous Florence Thompson, the government became aware of the devastating effects of the freeze and sent relief rations to the area. Just five years later in 1941, the photograph was already recognized as a “documentary masterpiece and was enshrined in the Museum of Modern Art.”

Curtis argues that Lange and her colleagues “fought constantly to overcome the discomforts of their subjects, to present them as dignified human beings whose plight would elicit sympathy, not ridicule.” In documenting the effects of the Great Depression, these photographers preserved a large piece of US history, allowing viewers and students to experience visually the depths and despair that words cannot always articulate.

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Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange – a Picture Worth a Thousand Words

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Published: Jul 15, 2020

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Can Chicago Manage Its Migrant Crisis?

By Geraldo Cadava

The first buses of migrants arrived in the South Side neighborhood of Woodlawn in February, 2023, carrying a hundred men and women who took up residence at the old Wadsworth Elementary School. Wadsworth had sat largely empty since 2013, when the then mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, closed it and roughly fifty other schools in the city. Two residents of Woodlawn, Luis Cardona and Andre Smith—who at the time was campaigning to become the alderman of the Twentieth Ward—stood in front of the buses and tried to stop the passengers from disembarking. Smith eventually stepped to the side, when police officers threatened him with arrest. He told reporters that he had said to the migrants, “It’s nothing against you. The city officials did not come to us to work something out earlier, and we’re not working nothing out now.”

The migrants’ presence created “a pretty hot situation” in Woodlawn, Kenneth Phelps, the senior pastor at Concord Missionary Baptist Church, told me. Phelps, whose mother was a founding member of the church, was practically raised there and has been behind the pulpit for the past twenty-nine years. For much of this past year, he has welcomed migrants to the community, often despite the protests of Woodlawn’s Black residents. In addition to weekly services for the church’s hundred or so regular attendees, Phelps now holds a bilingual service twice a month for about sixty migrants who, for the moment, call Woodlawn home. Phelps is looking to hire a permanent minister and a minister of music, both bilingual, so he can make the biweekly service a weekly gathering.

Phelps now has two churches in one: the church he has pastored for most of his adult life and the migrant-serving church he calls the “home away from home center.” Migrants can access the Internet there. They can learn English, thanks to a partnership Phelps formed with Kennedy-King, a community college. Phelps told me that he has tried to bring African Americans from Woodlawn together with Latin American migrants by hosting meals where they share food prepared by members of both communities—and through “peace circles” in which, with the help of translators and social workers, Phelps asks each group to name “the ten things that you and your community need.” They both say jobs, health care, housing, safety, and food. The next question he asks is “You know, why don’t we work together to fight for these basic needs? Because we all want them.”

Phelps told me that he’s trying to “change the narrative that’s being sown” both by and about Black and Latin American migrant communities in Chicago. He calls it a “discord narrative” that pits them against each other as competitors for jobs, housing, and other community resources. “I just think it’s a very, very dangerous thing to nurture the narrative of discord,” he said, because it makes community members feel like “we’re all fighting over crumbs.”

Since August, 2022, more than thirty-eight thousand migrants have arrived in Chicago. The majority of them have been sent by Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, on more than eight hundred buses; they have formed a migrant caravan that departs from border cities like El Paso, Del Rio, McAllen, Laredo, and Brownsville. For the residents of Woodlawn and other predominantly Black neighborhoods, the arrival of migrants hasn’t created a new crisis so much as it has aggravated long-standing ones. During the past several decades, the Black population of Chicago, like the Black population in almost all of America’s biggest cities, has declined significantly . As reasons for Black Chicagoans’ departure, former residents have cited the closing of factories that employed them, better job opportunities elsewhere, the rise of gun violence, the overpolicing of their communities, increasing home costs, and the funding disparities among Chicago’s public schools. In 2012, just two years before Emanuel closed the old South Shore High School, the city opened a selective-enrollment high school right across the street, called South Shore International College Preparatory High School. Now the only traditional neighborhood high schools that South Shore families can send their children to are outside of South Shore.

And then the migrants came. In May, 2023, when South Shore residents learned that the city, without seeking meaningful input from the community, planned to use the South Shore High School building as a shelter, some residents filed a complaint against the City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools to prevent it from happening. The lead plaintiffs were two local activists, J. Darnell Jones and Natasha Dunn, who described the complaint as part of an effort to “ save the old South Shore High School Building .” According to Dunn, the city had used South Shore for a brief period as a police training academy but had promised to return the school to the community afterward, to be used as its members saw fit. Jones and Dunn won a restraining order against the city, which, for now, is not attempting to use the school as a shelter. But Jones and Dunn’s long-term goal, Jones told me, is reopening South Shore High School: “We want our kids in our community to be able to go to school in our community.”

Then in October, 2023, the city, again without community input, announced tentative plans to move two hundred migrants into the Amundsen Park field house, in the West Side neighborhood of Austin—which is predominantly Black. The field house had already stopped offering classes and other activities for community members in order to prepare for the migrants’ arrival. New porta-potties were brought to the park, and local football teams and cheer squads were told they couldn’t practice there. When a handful of local residents learned of the city’s plans, they, too, filed a complaint against the city and won a temporary restraining order. At the end of November, the city announced that it no longer planned to use Amundsen Park as a migrant shelter. Programming at the field house has resumed.

Howard Ray, a community activist, has lived in Austin for almost three decades. He told me that, twenty years ago, almost all of his neighbors were Black, but now many families fly the flags of Latin American countries over their front porches. The influx of new migrants, he believes, will make those migrants who arrived a couple of decades earlier the new “Godfathers” of the neighborhood. “I don’t mean they’re like the Mafia,” he told me, “but they’ll benefit from the new arrivals from Bolivia, Ecuador, or Venezuela shopping in their stores, eating at their restaurants, and seeking out their advice because they share the same language and culture.” He resents that the city has used tax money to help migrants—money that could have gone to Austin and other Black communities instead. “They’re using our taxes to support and advocate for the illegal immigrants,” Ray said on Chicago morning radio earlier this year. “And in the meantime we’re getting pushed out.”

Many Black residents in Austin, South Shore, and Woodlawn say they have nothing against the migrants. Instead, they direct their ire toward Governor Abbott; Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson; and the federal government, for failing to come up with a solution. Roman Morrow, an Austin resident who was one of the plaintiffs in the case against the city to prevent it from using the Amundsen Park field house, calls the Republicans sending migrants to liberal cities “racist DeSantis and his homeboy Governor Abbott.” He told me, “It’s not like the Black community doesn’t want the migrants. The Black community is saying, ‘Don’t jeopardize our resources for something we never agreed to.’ ”

Aimee Hilado, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, and chair of the Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health, has worked with frontline staff on helping migrants feel settled in communities, including Austin, South Shore, and Woodlawn. Before they arrived in the United States, these migrants had already endured a hard journey, Hilado told me. “They witnessed so much loss of life. They take pictures of people that are floating in the rivers, and they see people that can’t make it or who will die by suicide on the path to come to the United States.” When they arrived in the U.S., she continued, “some were told that, if you come to Chicago, you’re going to get immigration status, you’re going to get a job and housing. And then they realize they don’t have a clear pathway to citizenship. They don’t have a clear pathway to employer authorization. And then they’re told in the shelters that there’s a sixty-day stay limit.”

After months of delaying eviction, Mayor Johnson’s administration recently began removing migrants from shelters. Johnson said in a statement that he was “committed to compassion” and noted that the city would hear requests for exemptions on a case-by-case basis that could allow some migrants to stay. But the over-all goal, he said, was to encourage resettlement and a “pathway to stability and self-sufficiency.” The result, Hilado said, is an extremely tough situation that could become worse. She said migrants have told her, “ ‘It was already such a hard decision to leave my home country and my support system. I witnessed and experienced what I did en route, and then I come here, and what I thought was going to be a safe refuge is not.’ And that is a hard, heavy weight to carry.” This and other compounding factors have led to a severe mental-health crisis, instances of domestic abuse, and harsh parenting, she told me. “When you can’t get angry at a government,” Hilado said, “you’re going to hit the targets that are easiest and closest to you.”

Still, according to Hilado, many migrants tell her that “there is less of an environment of welcome in Latinx communities, where you’d think it would be the opposite.” She said there has been a lot of attention paid to Black communities in Woodlawn and South Shore saying, “We don’t want this in our back yard.” “And yet,” she told me, “when you talk to some of the migrants, they will talk about how the African American communities are more welcoming.”

Dairí Liliana Granadillo, a migrant from Colombia, had a difficult time getting to the city—and a hard time settling in. Granadillo is an Indigenous Wayuu woman who said she experienced discrimination in Colombia, and got kicked out of school because her parents couldn’t afford to buy her a uniform or books. Before she made it to Chicago, she spent several years in Panama and Venezuela, working in restaurants, factories, and in family homes as a domestic. She does similar work in Chicago, though her employment has been insecure. Still, she has managed to leave a shelter and is now renting an apartment on the South Side. She has started taking English classes at Pastor Phelps’s church and hopes that someday her children, who remain in Colombia with her ex-husband, can join her in the U.S.

The residents of Woodlawn haven’t filed lawsuits against the city like the residents of Austin and South Shore did. But, Phelps told me, “I don’t think we’re at a ‘kumbaya’ moment, either. I also don’t think that all is well. Some people are still hurt. They’ve been hurt by the city’s actions, and hurt by the presence of migrants. They’re electing to be silent for a moment, but at any time it could go the other way. All it would take is an incident.”

Phelps and his church have been the targets of attacks by members of the Woodlawn community and even by members of his own congregation. They protest outside his church and call him an “Uncle Julio” for his efforts to help migrants. He said one of the regular attendees told him, “You know, Pastor, you did us exactly the same way the City of Chicago did the Black community. You just brought it into our church.” Phelps told me, “I said to this person, ‘So when have you asked me for help and I wasn’t there?’ She couldn’t say that I wasn’t.”

The pastor’s sermons don’t address the politics of the migrant situation directly. It would be a “misuse of the pulpit,” he said, if churchgoers felt like he were trying to indoctrinate them. Instead, he tries to deliver sermons for his African American congregants that acknowledge their hurt, and sermons for Latin American migrants that fill them with a sense of hope. He said he had recently delivered a sermon that spoke to both groups. He titled it “The Benefits of Waiting” and quoted Isaiah 40:31: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Explaining his meaning, he told me, “I think that all of us—regardless of our color, economic, or educational status—are waiting for something to come through.” ♦

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By Jessica Winter

By Danielle Mackey

David Campany

‘migrant mother, 1936’, dorothea lange: politics of seeing, barbican art gallery / prestel, 2018.

An essay on Dorothea Lange’s well-known image, written for The Politics of Seeing , the  book of the Barbican Art Gallery London / Jeu de Paume, Paris exhibition. Published by Prestel, 2018

Other essays by Drew Heath Johnson, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Alona Pardo.

French edition: ‘La Mere Migrante’, in Politiques du Visible , Prestel, 2018

Republished as ‘An Essay on Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother , 1936′ in Carlos Lobo, Paulo Catrica eds., ‘Post-photographic Truths: Poetics vs. Politics’,  Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts , 14 (2), 2022, pp. 96-103.

‘Migrant Mother’, 1936

‘Iconic’ photographs have a kind of fame that is self-perpetuating. Like celebrities, the more they are seen, the more they are seen; and the more they circulate, the more they circulate – but the less they are understood. As their status grows, their meaning becomes vague, little more than the accumulation of clichés and received wisdom.

More often than not, photographs become iconic when they become default substitutes for the complexities of the history, people or circumstances they could never fully articulate but to which they remain connected, however tentatively. As with monuments to almost forgotten battles, they are symbolic placeholders, public markers for a missing comprehension. If any photograph deserves the mixed blessing of being described as ‘iconic’ it is Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ (1936). It has become one of the most recognised and reproduced, with all the power and problems this entails.

In February 1936 Lange was travelling and shooting in central California on assignment from the US government’s Resettlement Administration (RA, later known as the Farm Security Administration, or FSA). After a month away, she was driving back to her home in Berkeley when, near the town of Nipomo, she noticed a sign to a pea-picker’s camp. Lange later recalled, perhaps with a little narrative drama, that she drove on for twenty miles until, ‘following instinct, not reason’, she turned around. [1]

The recent pea crop had frozen and around 2,500 pickers were out of work, nearly out of food, and camping, in desperation. Although Government help was on its way, the situation in Nipomo was dire. Lange saw a woman seated before a makeshift tent with children around her. She took out her large-format (4 × 5 inch) camera, mounted it on its tripod and made seven exposures. [2] It took less than ten minutes to take the photographs. Lange usually spent longer, talking with people and making notes. On this occasion she didn’t even get the woman’s name. Much of Lange’s account of that day comes from an interview she gave 24 years later, to Popular Photography magazine:

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. I made five exposures [sic], working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. 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 . [3]

For ethical reasons, Lange preferred not to photograph people unawares. Most often there was at first some kind rapport to be established. The resulting images could be described as collaborative, although the precise nature of such collaboration can be too nuanced to define. Suffice it to say, the avoidance of the problems of candid photography in favour of a more participatory approach has its own challenges for the photographer, subjects and eventual audience. However closely we study the photographs, we shall never know exactly what went on between Lange and the woman and her children.

Back in Berkeley, Lange processed her film and made prints. She then contacted the San Francisco News , and on 10 March the paper ran a story titled ‘Food Rushed to Starving Farm Colony’. The government had shipped 20,000 pounds of supplies to the camp. The feature was illustrated with two of Lange’s photographs. What became her most well-known image was not used in that first publication. It did appear the next day however, in the newspaper’s follow-up piece, ‘What Does the “New Deal” Mean to This Mother and Her Child?’ There it was presented alone, setting the pattern for its countless subsequent presentations as an isolated symbol rather than as part of a larger piece of journalism. In general Lange made photographs to be used in conjunction with each other and accompanied by careful writing; coverage of a subject was more important than the making of emblematic images. In many ways this particular photograph, and its subsequent life, was an anomaly in her working practice.

Why are certain photographs chosen for publication over others? Why are some used as components of stories or photo-essays while others are singled out? With the expansion of the popular press in Europe and North America in the 1920s and ’30s, conventions were soon formulated for photo-essays. Images were selected by an editor or art director from what the photographer or photo agency had supplied. Meaning would be constructed in the movement from one image to another, held together by captions and further text. But against this idea stood the singular image, which could be made to function in a more summary and immediate way within the quickening visual culture of the mass media. The documentary details of these isolated pictures could be made to serve wider ideas, extending meaning from the particular to the general.

Such pictures tend to be compositionally tighter, with a pictorial rhetoric or iconography connecting them to a longer history of representation. Indeed, most photographs that are labelled ‘iconic’ tap into well-established visual tropes and conventions that pre-date the medium. By accident or design, or something in between, Lange’s image fits within a familiar pattern of mainstream depictions of suffering women and children. With its classical form and clarity of gesture, traditionalists might claim there is thus something timeless and eternal being communicated by Lange’s photograph, as if it encapsulated core and incontrovertible truths about motherhood, childhood and human nature. Praise for it often reaches for comparisons with Madonna and Child images from art history, invoking the supposedly sublime dignity of maternal pain in the face of adversity. The appeal is less to the sociopolitical circumstances of that particular woman and those  particular children there in Nipomo in 1936, but to values that are presumed to transcend them.

Even the words ‘Migrant Mother’ pull the image away from concrete reality into a more generalised realm. But photographs do not naturally possess titles or captions. They are thought up by the photographers themselves or people at the institutions that make use of photographs: newspapers, archives, picture agencies, publishers, museums. In photography’s applied fields, such as journalism, images are given captions that often aspire to neutrality, or at least a non-specific authorship. Through the caption the institution ‘speaks’ the image. As the cultural critic Walter Benjamin noted in the same year Lange took the photograph, captions ‘have an altogether different character than the title of a painting’. They are to be found in illustrated magazines and they give ‘directives’. [4] Eight-by-ten-inch press prints of Lange’s image were widely distributed for reproduction with the caption ‘Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California’, or ‘Destitute pea pickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.’ But these were often discarded so that the photograph could be used for wider purposes. For example, on 30 August 1936, more than five months after Lange took the photograph, it was used by the New York Times  as part of a less specific story about federal relief for California’s fruit pickers. The newspaper’s art department even removed the children from the image to isolate the figure of the woman, and she was captioned  ‘A worker in the “peach bowl.”’

It is only in the field of art, or Photography, capital ‘P’, that titles are bestowed upon photographs. Titles help to shift the emphasis away from documentary specifics to aesthetic considerations and the achievement of the photographer. The subject matter is still present but is rendered less pressing as more symbolic or metaphorical readings are encouraged. It is not clear exactly when Lange’s photograph was titled ‘Migrant Mother’, but it was not circulated under that name by the RA or FSA, or the publications to which it was initially supplied. Even when it was given a full page in US Camera 1936 , the high-profile and self-proclaimed annual of serious photography, it was given no title at all, just Lange’s name and the image’s technical specifications (‘Camera – 4″×5″ Graflex; Lens – Zeiss Tessar 7½″; Aperture – F.8; Exposure – 1/15 sec.; Film – S.S. Pan’). [5]

In the latter 1930s the photograph was widely reproduced. In 1939 Lange and her husband, the sociologist Paul S. Taylor, published the book An American Exodus : A Record of Human Erosion . [6] Lange’s photographs were paired with quotations from the subjects and statistics gathered by Taylor. The already famous image was notable by its absence. It could be that it did not quite fit the aim of the book, which was to attempt to make a specific socioeconomic record of the movement of tenant farmers westward from land made unworkable by drought. It is also entirely plausible that Lange was aware that this image was different, both visually and through what it had already become in the hands of the media. It was too much of a showstopper, and difficult to integrate into a book in which all the images and words were intended to work together. Such an emotive image would distract from the kind of civic consciousness that Lange and Taylor were hoping their book might help to activate.

With the arrival of the Second World War, media attention shifted to America’s place in world affairs. But by the beginning of the 1960s there was a revival of interest in the American experience of the 1930s and in the visual culture it had left behind. Exhibitions, books, magazines and television programmes began to reuse the FSA photographs, cementing them in the popular imagination. Several of those images became synonymous with that decade, Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ prime among them. At the same time, photography was starting to gain a firmer footing both in art museums and university programmes. Having outlived their original purposes, documentary photographs were beginning to be collected and exhibited as signs of an era, or as great works by individual photographers.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a sophisticated language was emerging for the critical discussion of photography and its social functions. Higher-education media programmes were developing theoretical tools to think through the conventions by which documentary photography works. [7] Central to this project was the simple but revelatory notion that despite being records of aspects of what was there in front of the camera, the meaning of a photograph is neither inherent nor fixed, nor is it determined by the photographer’s intentions. It is largely a consequence of how and where the image is used. While ‘Migrant Mother’ was being championed in the mass media as a landmark photograph with obvious and eternal values, it was simultaneously being put under a critical spotlight as an exemplary instance of semantic instability. The meaning of ‘Migrant Mother’ migrates, and to grasp just how it does so requires an understanding of institutional and ideological power.

Images used within a framework of liberal reform or charity tend to depoliticise, sentimentalise, aestheticise and even victimise their subjects in the flattering appeal to the good nature of the more fortunate. But what would an image made in the name of revolutionary emancipation look like, and how would it be used? What would be the place of photography in collective politics? How different would this be from ‘Migrant Mother’ and its uses? Or could such an image as ‘Migrant Mother’ be used in other ways? As the American writer, teacher and documentary artist Allan Sekula put it in 1978: ‘The subjective aspect of liberal aesthetics is compassion rather than collective struggle. Pity, mediated by an appreciation of great art, supplants political understanding.’ [8] A few years later, Sekula’s contemporary the artist Martha Rosler noted: ‘Documentary photography has been much more comfortable in the company of moralism than wedded to a rhetoric or program of revolutionary politics.’ [9] The objections here were not so much against Lange herself – along with Walker Evans she was among the more politically astute photographers of the 1930s, well aware of how images are susceptible to the values of those who might put them to work. Rather, it was those values that were coming under urgent scrutiny.

Thus, when students of photography encounter Lange’s photograph it now tends to be within a framework of circumspect questioning. What is this image? What can we know from looking at it? What else do we need to know? In what different ways has it been used? How do text and context shape response? Why are women so often portrayed as timeless victims rather than as political agents? What happens when one photograph becomes so dominant in popular consciousness? What are the relations between aesthetics, ethics and politics? To what extent did the image result from collaboration between Lange and the woman and children? Moreover, the image has become something of a touchstone in discussions of image retouching. The thumb of the woman’s left hand was visible in the bottom-right corner of the frame. She was gripping the upright post of her lean-to, possibly in order to help support the head of the young child in her lap. Some prints exist with the thumb clearly present, while in most it has been removed, although not entirely: a ghostly thumb remains visible. But it is still not quite clear why the thumb was such a problematic presence. What documentary code did it violate? Why was it improved by its removal? All these questions are now part of what Lange’s image has become in popular discussion.

Today’s magazines, newspapers and television programmes regularly run features about famous photographs. Tracking down and interviewing the subjects of familiar images makes for compelling stories, and the mass media is always happy to report on its own significance in the construction of collective memory. One of the first images to be revisited in this way was Lange’s. In 1978 Emmet Corrigan, a reporter for the local California newspaper the Modesto Bee , located the ‘migrant mother’. Her name was Florence Owens Thompson, a working-class woman now 75 years old. She was part Cherokee, a fact almost never mentioned when the image was published. Thompson was bitter about the experience and spoke of wishing Lange hadn’t photographed her, of Lange promising not to publish the pictures, of not having been asked her name and of not making a penny from the success of the image. Thompson and her story went on to appear in further newspapers and TV programmes, and these in turn have become part of the way in which the career of Lange’s image is today understood.

Dorothea Lange had died in 1965. Since she had been a government employee when she made ‘Migrant Mother’, its copyright had been in the public domain from the start. Reproduction free of charge is one of the reasons for its promiscuous circulation. While it is undeniable that Lange benefited professionally from the reputation of the photograph, she made little direct profit from it. It would be another generation before the cultivation of a market in vintage prints and of record sales at auction. In 1998 Sotheby’s in New York sold a print of ‘Migrant Mother’ bearing Lange’s handwritten notes for $244,500. Its reproduction still costs nothing.

[1] Dorothea Lange, ‘The Assignment I’ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother’,  Popular Photography , February 1960.

[2] Lange submitted only five of these images to the FSA, whose holdings are now in the public domain at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The sixth image surfaced when Lange’s husband Paul S. Taylor used it in an article for American West magazine in May 1970. The seventh exists only as a contact sheet in the Dorothea Lange Archive, Oakland Museum of California.

[3] Dorothea Lange, ‘The Assignment I’ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother’,  Popular Photography , February 1960.

[4] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 226.

[5] See T. J. Maloney, ed., US Camera 1936 (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1936), np., Lange’s image was also exhibited at the US Camera exhibition held at the Rockefeller Center, New York, 28 September–11 October 1936.

[6] Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor, An American Exodus : A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939).

[7] Notable here was the work of the team headed by Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK; the writings of Victor Burgin and John Tagg within the Film, Video and Photographic Arts programme at the Polytechnic of Central London, UK; and the writings of artist-teachers in the USA, particularly Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler.

[8] Allan Sekula, ‘Dismantling Modernism – Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)’, Massachusetts Review , 19/4: Photography (Winter 1978), pp. 859–883.

[9] Martha Rosler, ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography)’, in 3 Works (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981).

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Why Adams’s Campaign Strategy Involves Burger King and Baptisms at Rikers

Mayor Eric Adams keeps finding eye-catching ways to seize the spotlight on the issue of public safety, even when the narrative turns against him.

By Jeffery C. Mays

It was the day after a New York City police officer had been fatally shot in the line of duty and a man killed after being shoved onto the subway tracks , and Mayor Eric Adams had reached the end of a somber hourlong news conference.

He had spoken emotionally about the loss of the officer; blamed the two deaths on a system that he said left the city vulnerable to the effects of recidivism and mental illness; and sought to counter the narrative that New York had descended into chaos.

And now it was time for Burger King.

“Give me those two pictures from Burger King,” the mayor commanded, launching into an explanation for a recent unannounced visit to an outpost of the fast-food chain in Lower Manhattan that has attracted complaints for drug dealing. After some research and face-to-face conversations there, Mr. Adams concluded the complaints were unwarranted.

“I did something revolutionary,” he said. “I went to talk to them and said, ‘Who are you?’”

Earlier that morning, Mr. Adams had visited Rikers Island for another closed-press drop-in, and watched the baptisms of several detainees. Three days later, he returned to Rikers for his own rebaptism, with the Rev. Al Sharpton doing the honors that included a thorough washing of the mayor’s feet.

The visits were part of the mayor’s unorthodox messaging strategy as he prepares to run for re-election next year, and faces what seems likely to be a contested Democratic primary.

Many of Mr. Adams’s events seem to be rooted in political theater or old-time religion, and sometimes a combination of both: the baptism at Rikers; the drop-in at Burger King; accompanying the police on an early-morning raid targeting a major robbery ring. On Wednesday, he announced a “Five-Borough Multifaith Tour,” a series of conversations with clergy and faith leaders.

For the mayor, getting rebaptized at Rikers was a “fortifying ritual that makes sense to a lot of his base,” said Christina Greer, a political science professor who is currently a fellow at the City University of New York. She likened the rebaptism to his trip to Ghana , where he received a spiritual cleansing , shortly after he was elected in 2021.

“But I don’t know if that’s enough,” Ms. Greer added. “A lot of his base wants to know where the city is going.”

In the view of many New Yorkers, the city is pointed in the wrong direction . Mr. Adams has the lowest approval rating of any New York mayor since Quinnipiac University began conducting city polls in 1996.

His standing among Black registered voters, typically among his most steadfast supporters, has also dipped. In Quinnipiac’s December poll, 38 percent of Black voters disapproved of the way Mr. Adams was handling his job, up from 29 percent last February.

Recent front-page headlines in the city’s tabloids have contributed to the impression that the city is spinning out of control , as has the mayor’s own rhetoric.

But since December, he has repeated variations of a new city slogan — jobs are up, crimes are down — and said that New York was in fine shape.

“I know a city out of control,” he said last week. “I visit some of them in this country. This is not one of them.”

Yet the mayor has been selective about who hears that message. He has limited his interactions with the City Hall press corps to a single weekly news conference, typically held on Tuesdays. He prefers to conduct one-on-one interviews, often on radio and frequently on programs with significant Black and Latino audiences.

Late last week, the mayor faced off against one of his most ardent critics, Olayemi Olurin, a lawyer and a political commentator who hosts a YouTube show . The two appeared together on “The Breakfast Club,” a popular morning show on Power 105.1 FM co-hosted by the author and media host Charlamagne Tha God.

The result was a volatile, nearly hourlong debate over his public safety policies, which Ms. Olurin said were most damaging to the Black and Latino, poor and working-class people who helped elect Mr. Adams.

Frank Carone, the mayor’s former chief of staff, said he wasn’t surprised to see Mr. Adams in the studio across from a vocal opponent or being rebaptized at Rikers Island. The mayor is comfortable with dissonance, Mr. Carone said, especially around his signature issue of crime and public safety.

“He believes that he’s the one who runs into the fire and doesn’t run away from it,” Mr. Carone said. “In this case, the fire is the conversation on criminal justice and public safety. He’s trying to articulate that real leadership addresses both.”

Clips of Mr. Adams sparring with Ms. Olurin have garnered hundreds of thousands of views. She criticized the rise in stop-and-frisk encounters during his administration and the return of plainclothes police squads focused on recovering guns. She asserted that as the mayor highlighted the killing of the police officer in the line of duty , he had ignored civilians who have been killed by the police.

“We’ve had a tradition of overpolicing for generations,” Mr. Adams said, deflecting blame away from his administration.

“And it’s gotten worse now that you’re here,” Ms. Olurin shot back.

The criticism struck directly at the mayor’s core political identity: a Black New Yorker with working-class roots; a teenager who said he was beaten by the police, and who used the confrontation to propel him toward a police career that saw him rise to captain; a politician who understood firsthand how government needed to work for people.

But the policies of Mr. Adams’s administration, as Ms. Olurin noted, have not always reflected that.

During his time in office, the city has ramped up the use of policing tactics such as stop and frisk, and has conducted too many unlawful stops, according to a federal monitor. Complaints to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates police misconduct, are on the rise. The arrest and detention rates of young people have increased.

The long-troubled Rikers Island is in danger of being taken over by federal authorities and the mayor has questioned whether the jail can be closed by the legally mandated August 2027 deadline.

And Mr. Adams canceled $17 million in funding for programs on Rikers Island designed to prepare those same men he was baptized alongside to re-enter society. All but $3 million of the funding was restored, but new contracts must now go to bid, causing a delay in providing those services.

Sandy Nurse, a city councilwoman who represents Bushwick and Brownsville and leads the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, praised Mr. Adams for visiting Rikers. “As a Black man, as the second Black mayor of New York City, that’s important,” she said. “But it can’t just be visits with photographs. It has to come with material support.”

Ms. Olurin said in an interview that she was glad that she was able to challenge some of the mayor’s rhetoric on a Black platform like 105.1 FM radio, where Mr. Adams has appeared a handful of times.

“People got to see how he answers things and evades things,” she said. “A lot of the things his administration is doing are not defensible.”

Charlamagne said in an interview that he also believed that the city’s tendency toward overpolicing did not necessarily make people feel safer. “With stuff like stop and frisk, it increases the amount of encounters between Black and brown people and police officers, and a lot of times those don’t end well.”

He added that he did not tell Mr. Adams in advance that Ms. Olurin would be questioning him.

In his Tuesday news conference, Mr. Adams seemed to evade a question about whether he was prepared for the adversarial interview, or, as a reporter worded the question, “Did they kind of punk you?”

“Well, one thing for sure,” the mayor replied. “I’m not a punk.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.

Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall. More about Jeffery C. Mays

Explore Our Coverage of the Adams Administration

Burger King and Baptisms: Mayor Eric Adams keeps finding eye-catching ways to seize the spotlight on the issue of public safety  through appearances at Rikers Island, even when the narrative turns against him.

Gun-Detecting Technology: Adams announced that New York City planned to test technology  to detect guns in its subway system as officials seek to make transit riders feel safe after a deadly shoving attack.

Grappling With Acts of Violence: Adams was recently confronted with two tragic events that crystallized some people’s persistent fears  about the city: the shooting death of Police Officer Jonathan Diller  and a man being fatally pushed into the path of a subway train  in an unprovoked attack.

Sexual Misconduct Accusations: A woman has accused Adams  in a lawsuit of asking her for oral sex in exchange for career help in 1993 and sexually assaulting her when she refused. Adams said the accusation was completely false . A few days after the revelations, a top adviser to Adams was accused of sexually harassing  a police sergeant and punishing her when she refused his advances.