Esperanza Rising: Is this book historically accurate?

Esperanza Rising takes place during the years 1930 and 1931.  Pamela Muñoz Ryan sets the scene in Mexico, clearly describing the richness of the land, the crops harvested and the delicious foods, but also the turmoil between the rich and poor.  In the beginning of the book, Esperanza’s father is killed by bandits who do not believe that there should be such a large divide between the rich and poor. This gap is also clearly portrayed when Esperanza and her mother leave Aguascalientes, fleeing from her uncles.  On the train out of Mexico, Esperanza shuns a poor women and child, which once again shows the divide she is used to between the rich and the poor.

            Another aspect of this book that Ryan sets up is the culture of the United States at this point in history when Esperanza and her mother arrive in California.  Upon their arrival, they discover that people in general are poor, do not have much money, have small houses to live in and work very hard for little money.  The work conditions of the people in the book are poor, often working in cold, heat, or extreme weather.  However, in the camp, people enjoyed occasional parties as a special occasion and saved their money, dreaming of getting jobs that would someday make them rich.  Amongst this dreaming was the danger of working through the strikes that happened in the work-sheds when people became unhappy about wages and the conditions in which they had to work.  Through all of these details and events, Ryan sets the stage for a very clear context of the events in the book, which led me to wonder how much of these events and details are historically accurate?

            While many of the small details about life as a migrant worker do check out to be true, I discovered with a little bit of research that the place where Esperanza and her mother go to live in a worker’s camp, Arvin, California, was not in fact opened as a camp for workers until 1937, six years after the close of the book.  However, the town’s Wikipedia page states that a large portion of the town’s diversity does come from Mexican immigrants, as well as “Okies” who came to work during the late 1900s.  Overall, the historical accuracy of the events, including the strikes, the fiestas and the conditions of the workers match up to the descriptions in the book, the book only places these events a few years earlier than reality.

To learn more about life as a migrant worker, as well as the town history of Arvin, check out these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvin,_California

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tsme.html