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The Farm Security Administration was an agency created during the Roosevelt’s New Deal to help farmers during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Formerly under jurisdiction of the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration adopted the task of creating and managing Farm Workers’ Communities that relocated destitute migratory farmworkers on to productive land in the form of communal camps with spaces for farmers to harvest crops, come together for community events, and receive healthcare. These Farm Workers’ Communities further absorbed migrant families from Mexican and African-American backgrounds as populations around the country struggled to succeed during the economic decline of the Great Depression.

Scholarly literature surrounding Farm Workers’ Communities during the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration program suggests a model carefully intertwined with the many societal and political factors of the time. The following analysis of main scholars’ research on perceptions of power and control, race and class, and the American conception of an ‘ideal’ childhood within the government-funded farms of dust bowl refugees, Mexican migrants, and beyond displays the program’s general successes and failures for migrant farming families and their children. Research on primary sources of the time, such as photos, figures, and personal accounts of those involved further exemplify these themes. My research centers around two questions: How did federal programs embedded in Farm Workers’ Communities benefit the children that resided in the camps, and how may these programs have created disadvantages? Further, how thoroughly were American political and cultural ideals of the time embedded into the structure of these communities? Note that within scholarly journals, as well as my own analysis, Farm Workers’ Communities are also referred to as Migratory Labor Camps and FSA camps. I will be primarily utilizing Farm Workers’ Communities to define these spaces, although the term ‘camps’ will show up often in my work.