This week, I began reading Jonathan Ebel's From Dust They Came, a secondary source that focuses on religion in the California migrant camps, as well as "The 'Okies' Search for a Lost Frontier," a 1939 New York Times article by Charles Todd. In From Dust They Came, I read the chapter "The Tent Platform," which focused on living conditions and ideas of 'home' in the migrant camps. I find Ebel's analyses to be a bit strong for the evidence he provides, but I am nevertheless gathering a lot of valuable information from this book, and I will read a few more chapters of it in the coming weeks. Todd's (one of the creators of the Voices of the Dust Bowl LOC collection) article focused on how the migrant camps were able to return some dignity and humanity to the migrants.
The more I have explained my topic, the more I've realized I want to mainly focus on the use and quality of government interventions in the migrant camps, still through a public health/social determinants of health framework. This means moving slightly away from looking at individual cases and outcomes, and more of what did and didn't work on the grand scale. We will see, though! I have also realized that a hurtle in my research is going to be that many of the primary sources I am seeing being referenced exist only in physical archives in California. I have several primary sources already picked out, and an absolute plethora of photography primary sources to go through, but I was hoping to look at camp newspapers, which will present a challenge. I'm sure that I will be able to find at least some options after I put more time into researching them.