Contents
Chapter 21
Overview
An intercalary chapter traces how displaced families become migrants and how endless movement, hunger, and hostility reshape them. Townspeople and great owners respond with fear, repression, and wage-cutting schemes that crush small farmers. As exploitation intensifies and locals arm themselves, the migrants’ need hardens into anger, foreshadowing conflict.
Summary
The narrative widens to the whole stream of displaced families driven off their small farms by machines and ownership changes. On the highways and in roadside camps, constant movement, hunger, and the need to protect children alter these people, welding them together under the pressure of shared hardship and hostility.
In the West, townspeople and men of property fear the migrants’ hunger and numbers. To justify repression, they brand the newcomers as dirty, criminal, and dangerous, organizing squads with clubs and guns. Even clerks and small shopkeepers, threatened by cheaper labor and debt, join the defensive posture.
With too many workers for too little work, competition drives wages downward. Great owners exploit this by flooding areas with handbills and by vertically integrating: buying canneries, underpaying for fruit as growers, and maintaining canned-goods prices to capture profit. Small farmers, unable to survive below-cost markets, lose their land and join the migrant stream.
Money that might go to wages instead funds surveillance and armed control. Fields and granaries remain full while children sicken from malnutrition. The thin boundary between hunger and anger begins to dissolve among the migrants, and that anger ferments under systemic pressure, hinting at coming upheaval.
Who Appears
- Migrant familiesDisplaced small farmers, reshaped by hunger and movement, competing for scarce work and uniting under shared hostility.
- Men of property and townspeopleFear the migrants, justify repression, and organize armed squads to protect perceived interests.
- Great owners and companiesManipulate labor supply and prices; use canneries to undercut growers and keep profits high.
- Small farmersLack canneries, are underpaid for crops, lose land, and are forced onto the roads.
- Clerks and small storekeepersDebt-burdened locals who fear wage undercutting and support armed defenses.