(Photo by Farah Javed)
By Farah Javed
“Picturing Home: Dust Bowl Migrants in Chandler,” an exhibit at the Chandler Museum, provides a glimpse into the challenges Chandler, southeast of Phoenix and Arizona’s fourth-largest city, faced during the Great Depression.
As visitors walk into the exhibit, they see “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, news articles from the Chandler Arizonian discussing housing projects and a wall dedicated to the Dust Bowl. Sprinkled among these signs and photos are thought bubbles asking questions like, “WHAT WOULD FORCE YOU TO LEAVE HOME?”
“Those are meant for guests to reflect on the relevancy of today,” said Tiffany Egnor, education coordinator at the Chandler Museum. “All of these issues are things that still happen today.”
While the exhibit focuses on how the Dust Bowl impacted the lives of migrants and residents in Chandler, the present-day city and Arizona itself still wrestle with many of the same challenges its residents faced about 90 years ago.
Following the Dust Bowl, thousands of migrant workers in the Plains area headed to California where fertile farm land was still plentiful.
On their way to the Golden State, workers stopped in Chandler and found work in cotton fields. Some migrants chose to continue west, while others started a cycle of leaving Arizona and returning for cotton harvest season.
(Photo by Jahlil Rush)
In Chandler alone, there has been huge population growth. In 1990, the city saw an increase of approximately 90,000 people, many of them retirees between the ages of 55 to 64, but that number more than doubled in 2020, with about 276,000 new, younger residents aged 25 to 34, according to data released by the city. Today migrant workers are drawn, not to agriculture, but to the tech boom in Arizona, where companies like Intel have established major manufacturing operations.
Along with this growth, however, came a surge in real estate costs and in homelessness. In Maricopa County, currently the county with the largest population nationwide, homelessness increased by 35 percent from 2018 to 2020. Located within that county, Chandler is also experiencing a housing crisis. The price of buying and renting homes continues to rise as demand for housing increases against a stagnating supply.
This housing shortage was also characteristic of the Dust Bowl in Arizona. Homes took the form of cabins, abandoned barracks or cars.
One museum photo shows a grandmother, a baby and three kids sitting in their small home while the parents were at work. With the housing shortage in Arizona today, families also squeeze into small houses with multiple people, even strangers.
“If you look around, you see an unusually high number of folks looking to rent a single room in a home as an independent adult or, alternatively, saying I have a spare bedroom I can rent it out,” said Liza Kurtz, a research analyst at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. “You end up with multiple not-related adult households doubling in one space home or apartment just to reduce costs.”
Those who can’t afford that living arrangement either live in their cars, and some even reside in Arizona’s forests.
In addition to these demographic and historical similarities, Arizona’s dust storms also continue to be a part of everyday life.
The Arizona Emergency Information Network warns of haboobs, intense dust storms that commonly arise after thunderstorms. They resemble walls reaching thousands of feet high and miles long.
Still, while experts believe that Arizona’s storms don’t compare to those in the 1930s, they remain wary of the potential impact the dust could have.
(Photo by Farah Javed)
Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, points to the agricultural practice of leaving fields unplanted for a season as a way to improve the quality of the soil. She said particulates from such dry, dusty fields could reach populated areas.
“I don’t think we’re looking at a dust bowl,” she said. “No-till practices have been pretty much adopted since the Dust Bowl, but there isn’t a plan for that land.”
As visitors near the end of the exhibit, they encounter walls with portraits of farmers.
But by this point, having understood the similarities between the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the conditions in Chandler and Arizona today, these farmers are more familiar than a suburban dweller might have thought.