Top of page

Exhibition Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library

Not an Ostrich: & Other Images from America's Library

DOROTHEA LANGE. Farm child. New Mexico, 1935

Dorothea Lange. Farm child. Family now settled on the Bosque Farms project (an agricultural resettlement project for Dust Bowl refugees), New Mexico December 1935. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
Enlarge

DOROTHEA LANGE. Farm child. New Mexico, 1935

During the Great Depression, farmers from drought plagued and depleted areas were resettled in central New Mexico. In the federal resettlement village of Bosque Farms, forty-two families won the right by lottery to buy land at $140 an acre with a 40-year mortgage. Initially, temporary shelters were constructed as well as a barn for as many as fourteen families at once while small two- and three-bedroom adobe houses were built. As a result of continued farming failures, residents turned to dairy farming ventures; eventually the village became primarily residential and a suburb of Albuquerque.