The inimitable Gustavo Arellano writes in today's Los Angeles Times under the headline, "‘Okie’ was a California slur for white people. Why it still packs such an ugly punch." Here's an excerpt from his column:
They flooded into California fleeing poverty in their homeland. The public denigrated them as dirty and crime-prone — a threat to the good life.
Authorities harassed the newcomers out of city limits, forcing thousands of families to crowd in enclaves and take low-paying jobs. And when even that couldn’t drive them away, law enforcement set up blockades on the California border.
There are then, of course, the obligatory references to John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee." Regarding the book, Arellano explains it was a favorite of his growing up:
But what speaks to me more than anything about “The Grapes of Wrath” is how the saga of the Joads so closely mirrors that of my family.
The resilience of Ma Joad, the idealism of Tom, the tragedy of Pa, the personal growth of Rose of Sharon — they were my Mexican-born parents, my aunts and uncles, my native-born cousins, my siblings. The book has colored my idea of California ever since. Though it was fictional, Steinbeck based it on the real-life exodus of Dust Bowl refugees, especially those from Oklahoma. California can be cruel to desperate people — yet only in California could the persecuted transform their hard times into dreams they would’ve never found back home.
I especially connect to a slur that the Joads and their real-life contemporaries had to endure: “Okies.”
Californians turned the term — long used as shorthand for an Oklahoma native — into an insult. My family members and other immigrants from south of the border had similar insults thrown at them, including “Mexican” and “paisa,” or hillbilly.
But both groups took the invectives back from the haters and transformed them into markers of cultural pride.
Arellano continues with this revealing missive about the connotations of Okie, which suggest something akin to or synonymous with white trash:
It was in [a] spirit of respect that I used “Okie” in an Aug. 5 obituary for Salvador Avila, the co-founder of the Avila’s El Ranchito Mexican restaurant chain. He opened his first spot in Huntington Park in the 1960s, at a time when the city was “still an Okie” center instead of one of the most Latino cities in the United States, I wrote.
I thought nothing of that line, because it was true. Southeast L.A. County is where many Dust Bowlers settled and where they and their descendants held political power for decades. To merely say “white people” would have downplayed the history, because the Okie experience in Los Angeles was distinct from other white Americans in the region like, say, Midwesterners or Southerners.
Almost as soon as I published my piece, the critiques came in.
Teri O’Rourke of Palm Desert, whose grandparents left Oklahoma in the 1930s, said my use of “Okie” brought back memories of “the people in the ‘50s and ‘60s who thought Okies were stupid and lazy.”
Karen Hamstrom claimed “Okie” was “extremely offensive language” that was beneath me.
“While the Depression-era generation that endured those taunts may be mostly gone, those words are still used with scorn and derision to imply filth, stupidity, and a shallow gene pool,” she wrote. “Given how quickly you take offense to words and actions you deem discriminatory to your culture, I expect better from you.”
Danny Esparza viewed “Okie” as a “bitter descriptive” and claimed Huntington Park in its white heyday “was a beautiful [thriving] city with a financially thriving downtown area. People came from all around to shop there. To use your racist vehemence, it is now a Mex trash pit.”
Nothing like self-hating Latinos to brighten your day.
Of course, you don't want to miss the rest of this Arellano column.
A prior blog post about Okies and the Dust Bowl era is here, and others touching on these topics are here, here, and here.
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