Children of the harvest: schooling, class and race

I’ve just come across a fascinating article about the schooling of migrant children during the Great Depression era in the US West Coast states. The authors, Paul Theobald and Rubén Donato, tell a fascinating tale of the manipulation of schooling as an efficient way to perpetuate class relationships. By comparing two groups of rural migrants the article also offers an illuminating analysis of the intersections of class and ethnicity. The two groups are external migrants from Mexico and internal migrants from the dust bowl of the Great Plains states. The latter group came to be collectively known by the disparaging term ‘Okies,’ and is epitomized by the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.