It is a below-the-fold headline in today’s newspaper of record: A Migrant Mother’s Struggle to Win Back Her Young Son. It is a story about immigration, family trauma, good intentions, and bureaucratic hurdles. The spoiler alert is that the end of the piece has mother and five-year-old son walking off hand in hand; we can only hope that what they are walking toward is a safe future together.
But reading the words “migrant mother” the face I instantly picture—and I’m guessing I’m not alone—is not Olga from Honduras but the unnamed woman in the iconic Dorothea Lange photograph.
We know her name now—Florence Owens Thompson. But the wall label says, “Migrant Agricultural Worker’s Family, Nipomo, California, so she was anonymous two times over. “Mrs. Hisname,” as my rabbi would say, although mister is also without a name here. But the mission Lange was given by the New Deal Farm Security Administration was not to highlight individuals but to document a societal reality. The photograph known as “Migrant Mother” became a symbol of the Depression. Soon after its publication the federal government sent 20,000 pounds of food to the pea-pickers camp in Nipomo. Lange’s photograph, and the term “migrant mother” have become so instantly recognizable that adaptations have been used to draw attention to a world of othered mothers.
The migrant mother in the newspaper story has not migrated from one part of the United States to another. Her English, not fluent, is spoken with the accent of Someplace Else. In the photograph that runs with the story, we see only her back.