The Path of People in Flight
by Lauren Pronger
This was my first time reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and I can instantly see why it’s a classic: the themes of migration and class struggle are just as relevant today, and it reveals a cyclical history.
The Joads come from Sallisaw, OK, what would have been Indian Territory just 30 years prior, where the Cherokee Nation (along with four others) were forcefully displaced from the Southeastern US to make way for rapid settler and agricultural expansion, including for cotton. An intercalary chapter makes clear the Oklahoma cotton farmers “took up the land” in what was probably the land rush, yet another mass migration, by killing and driving away the Indigenous peoples who had been forced to relocate there a hundred years earlier. By 1939, the disastrous combination of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the industrialization of cotton farming forced the current tenants off their land to seek better prospects in California.
Steinbeck calls Route 66 “the main migrant road…the path of a people in flight.” We see it clearly in the novel - families loading up cars with every possession they can fit - and today, people from around the world travel the length of the highway, some tourists and some refugees from climate disasters and collapsing economies. This history of migration has also been weaponized in the past year as multiple Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids took place as part of a statewide anti-immigration effort along the route in Oklahoma. There is a sort of tragic irony that comes with reading the “great American migration novel” at a time when today’s migrants are being indiscriminately targeted along the same romanticized route.
Similarly, The Grapes of Wrath is often touted as the great novel of the working class, a text that lays bare the plight of the poor and all the indecencies forced upon them. We see these migrating laborers referred to with derision and faced with violence, even by those who will soon experience a similar fate, called dirty, lazy, and crazy, for packing up their lives and heading elsewhere to find work and stability. As the novel clearly illustrates, the migrants and working people are none of these things and may only find themselves in such temporary conditions due to unavoidable circumstances. We see communities form to ensure care and safety for one another as their survival is threatened by the greed of land barons, the upper class, and fellow workers convinced by the barons that their success is only possible at the expense of their neighbors’. As the Joads work full days without being able to afford basic necessities, they realize the only way to survive is to organize against their employers, even as the police protect upper class wealth over working people’s livelihoods by shooting and threatening to burn the workers’ houses down and while ripping the workers’ meager food out of the ground.
How much of this isn’t true today? The 2022 census lists over 6 million working poor in the US, 40-60% of homeless Americans are gainfully employed, and 1 in 8 Americans receive SNAP benefits. My shop on Amarillo’s Route 66 has a regular rotation of working folks who come by looking for odd jobs to make ends meet or to pay for shelter that night. A full-time job at the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr officially fell below the federal poverty line in 2025. The unhoused and poor are still regarded with derision: called dirty, lazy, and crazy, and few will hire them, with many running them off or even calling the cops to displace them. Modern day encampments like the Joads’ are similarly criminalized and bulldozed by the police, public and unused lands largely cannot be used to grow food for those who are starving, and modern housing and employment discrimination keep many workers in forced poverty.
It seems the almost 90 year old novel still tells the story of the average family today - we’re still seeking fair employment to provide food and a roof over our heads, some migrating across state and country lines to do so - some might find it, some might die trying to find it, and some will fight to make it easier for all of us.
This is Lauren Pronger from Amarillo, TX for the HPPR Radio Readers.
