tself is scarcely a part of the California of the imagination. Monterey, fifteen miles west along State Highway 68 and a world away, has turned Cannery Row--a name made famous by Steinbeck--into rows of trendy shops, designed for tourists who know nothing of what Steinbeck wrote about it but the name, but find there the California they expect to find. Salinas does not even look like the California of the imagination. The tourists who venture there along Highway 58 might think they had left the state entirely, were it not for the license plates on the cars.
As with Salinas, so with the Okies, the thousands of historical Joads who came west on Route 66 in the 1930s. Folklore holds that in farm towns around the Salinas Valley, one can still hear third-generation Californians speaking with Oklahoma accents. Whether or not this is true in fact hardly matters; what is relevant here is the connotation: the Okies' descendants may have remained in California, but they are not of California. California does not particularly wish to claim them. In the library of a California university, a aisle of stacks is devoted to California history and mythology, but the Okies (like Salinas) are scarcely to be found there.
The silence is noteworthy. A striking contrast may be made to the Spanish and Mexican influence and mythology. Present-day California may offer a cold welcome to the largely Mexican migrant farm workers who now occupy the same marginal place in the economic life of California's agricultural valleys that the Okies did sixty years ago. Yet the missions and the ranchos are as accepted a part of the California myth as the Gold Rush or Chinatown. Like most societies, California does not care to dwell on the darker side of its history, but even among the injustices of the state's history, the Okie experience--in spite of being the subject matter of so famous a book as The Grapes of Wrath--is nearly invisible. It is as tho...