Okies disappearing from Dust Bowl Festival, replaced by Latino migrants tending California's fields
WEEDPATCH, Calif. - The girl was afraid to speak in class because of her accent.
The clothes sewn by her farmworker mother made her self-conscious. She lived in a field laborers' camp outside the dusty town of Lamont, and many Californians despised people like her. Go back to where you came from, they said.
"I felt inadequate. I felt like they was all smarter than me, prettier than me," Pat Rush said. "I was completely, totally intimidated."
In the 1940s, her family was part of the wave of migrants who fled their farms in the drought-ravaged South and Midwest after the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, traveling west on Route 66 in search of work, and hope.
They were hated newcomers lumped together - people from places such as Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Kansas - under a single pejorative: Okies.
Rush is 84 now. It's a hot autumn day at the Dust Bowl Festival, the last one after 30 years because its organizers have grown too old, too tired.
Rush leans on her daughter for support as she walks through the former Weedpatch Camp, the clutch of tents and one-room tin cabins immortalized by John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
She worries that stories like hers will fade, that young people just won't find them all that interesting.
"I think it's kind of sad,
