Nipomo, California was where Dorothea Lange took a picture that seemed to sear us with all the anguish of the Great Depression.
That woman whose picture Dorothea Lange took, she stood as a bulwark against all those forces working against her. If your first glance detected a look of defeat, your second glance took in her determination, inner forces not yet spent, stirring and swelling up to return to the struggle.
You knew this woman had been through cruelties that tear out hearts and rip apart families.
There was food and shelter and likely some stability she wanted to provide for her children. There was work she was ready to take on. But they weren’t hiring migrants. That day her picture was taken, nobody was hired to pick peas in the fields of Nipomo, California because frost had killed the crop.
She was every American woman warped and scarred by oppressive economic hardship.
No statistics have ever been able to explain much of this. You had a vague idea of what she had been through. You imagined she might be strong enough to endure one or two more setbacks. But after that, her future would be even more perilous.
This is what you felt when you saw her. How the dustbowl had etched her face with despair.
Dorothea Lange was working for the U.S. Farm Security Administration when she took that photograph in Nipomo, just south of Pismo Beach, California, back in 1936.
It’s titled The Migrant Mother and it’s in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Later on we would find out this woman had a name, Florence Owens Thompson.
We would hear conflicting versions of the story behind the picture.
But we would never hear anyone explain how it was for Americans during the Great Depression in a way that came close to how Florence Owens Thompson looked that day in Nipomo, California.
