California Documentary Project
The New Okies
Visual Communications
Los Angeles
Project Director: Julie Shigekuni,
Creative Writing Program, University of New Mexico
Santa Barbara County Arts Commission
Santa Barbara
Project Director: Melinda Burns, Santa Barbara New-Press
Photographs of farmworkers in Santa Barbara County: past and present
This project consisted of two exhibits of photographs of California farmworkers: one depicting the lives of migrant workers during the Depression and the other showing farmworkers today.
The contemporary exhibit, titled “The New Oakies,” featured Mixtec Indians of Santa Barbara County, who are among the newest migrants to California’s fields.
According to Project Director Melinda Burns, a reporter with the Santa Barbara News Press, several thousand Mixtecs, many underage teenagers, work in northern Santa Barbara County as strawberry pickers, strawberry sharecroppers, or tenant farmers with small plots of land
“Our project depicted the lives of the people who form the base of the lucrative agricultural industry in California, and we hope it helped educate the public about who they are. We included the archival photos from the Depression so that people could compare the past and present lives of these workers.”