“Each’ll help each”: Imagining Mutual Aid in The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) opens in Oklahoma with deadly dust storms and closes in California with a devastating flood. The novel documents the physical, emotional, social, political, and economic impact of an environmental disaster on refugees and migrant farmworkers, vulnerable populations who survive in part through informal practices of mutual aid. In Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902), Peter Kropotkin argues that mutual aid refers to the practices of cooperation and care that enable human and nonhuman species to reproduce and flourish. In this paper I argue that informal practices of mutual aid - the sharing of food, resources, knowledge, skills, and care - enable refugees and migrant farmworkers to survive the slow, grinding, traumatic violence of life on the road, in homeless encampments, and in the fields. The Grapes of Wrath is a story of the 1930s and the Dust Bowl, but it is also a story unfolding around the planet in the first decades of the twenty-first century.