The Federal Writers’ project was a way for white Americans to document the experiences of others during the Great Depression. This created more jobs and historical documentation of the Great Depression through the lens on many Americans. The texts I chose for my text analysis project were based on Latino immigration. While reading a A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project by Jerrold Hirsch I came across a quote on immigration that says “Only after World War II was immigration apotheosized as quintessential part of the American experience. Historian Oscar Handlin argued ‘Once I thought to write about the history of immigrants in America. Then I discovered the immigrants were American History”1 This quote is a great example on how the Federal Writers’ Project spread through different states and gathered distinctions/similarities of Americans.
My historical question was composed from the quote by Hirsch “How did Immigrants experience life in America during the Great Depression? What do their experiences teach us about America during this time period?”. My assumptions about the life of immigrants during the Great Depression became one that included starvation and poverty. An example of immigration hardships and decline can be found is in the American Yawp “1930 to 1940 the Mexican-born population living in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas fell from 616,998 to 377,433. with jobs suddenly scarce, hostile attitudes intensified, and official policies less than welcoming, immigration plummeted and deportations rose. Over the course of the Depression, more people left the United States than entered it.” 2 While choosing text files, I noticed a pattern of immigrants who had a great come up and then transitioned into struggle during the Great Depression. Regions like Florida and New York had immigrants who worked in factories and were able to purchase multiple properties. However, when Depression hit America, many were faced with the reality that their only options were to try and make ends meet or go back to their countries.
Uploading the class Corpus to Voyant was easy but I refrained from having any specific assumptions on my findings since I knew my classmates historical questions varied from mine. However after it was uploaded, I was fascinated by being able to look at topics aside from my own. It is a great visualization of what others were discussing in this time frame. The set statistics demonstrate important commonly used words, a map of places discussed in the texts and a number of unique words. I used the map tool called Dreamscape, which shows the most commonly listed areas in the documents. This also included places I had used in my text files search. The cirrus tool contains an array of words that also correlate to words I had seen in my texts. Overall, this was a great way to analyze texts and generate more ideas by being able to play with different aspects of the text. This also made me conclude that immigrants journey is only slightly different than Americans during the Great Depression and that their experiences are more similar than different.
