Category:Migrant Mother sequence by Dorothea Lange

Description of the scenery from the en:Wikipedia article on Florence Owens Thompson, mentioning location and conditions that lead to the series of shots:

In March 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Florence [Owens Thompson] and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." On the road, the car's timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp on Nipomo Mesa. They were shocked to find so many people camping there—as many as 2,500 to 3,500. A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay. Years later Florence told an interviewer that when she cooked food for her children that day little children appeared from the pea pickers' camp asking, "Can I have a bite?" While Jim Hill, her husband, and two of Florence's sons went into town to get the car's damaged radiator repaired, Florence and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As Florence waited, photographer Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. She took six images in the course of ten minutes.

There are multiple opinions where the true location of the shot sequence had been. Examples:

• A California professor named Paul Martin Lester made attempts to find out the deeper details of the story and dicovered that there were some 11 camps, where at least one was flooded and muddy whilst a second one was dry so that Mrs. Thompson had to move leaving a note. So the location of car break down and the historical shots are believed separate. Image comparisons of the available photos of the camp hinted him that the car broke probably down at South Thompson Road whilst the photo sequence is somewhat backed by local interviews so that it located by him at North Oakglen. see Article on Paul Martin Lester's research
• Local researcher George R. Stewart proposes, based upon current landscape and image comparison, a location at the very west corner of the sports field of Nipomo High School, very close to highway 101, whilst he sets only the bea pickers camp some mile away to the farm lands in the Nipomo Mesa area. see Blog of George R. Stewart