Earl Shelton is every bit an Oklahoman. From the distinctive drawl that marked him out for abuse when he landed in the "promised land" during one of the largest migrations in US history to the horseshoe belt buckle and ever-present cowboy hat, Shelton never escaped his roots.
Yet in seven decades he never returned to them either. Instead, he spent almost all his adult years within striking distance of what was once a canvas and wood refuge, that he still describes as his real home, in the heart of California.
Shelton was still a boy when he arrived at the Weedpatch camp in 1941, established a few years earlier to accommodate some of the flood of migrants streaming out of the midwestern dust bowl and northern cities to escape drought and the great depression.
Shelton's widower father — unemployed, homeless and largely destitute after losing his land in Oklahoma — led his sons in the footsteps of the fictional Joad family at the heart of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, along Route 66 and into the California valleys in search of work picking fruit and vegetables.
Steinbeck based his story of the Joads' experiences on the real accounts of those living at the Weedpatch camp, built by the federal government as a place of shelter and protection for the desperate migrants who were often unwelcome in California and frequently exploited and abused.
"There wasn't much here," said Shelton, standing inside one of the camp's few remaining original wooden huts. "We lived in a tent for the first seven years. People had no money to speak of. I was seven years old when I arrived and I had to work in the fields. I picked cotton before school, I picked cotton after school. But this place was the best place I ever lived. I had so many mothers because the women knew that mine had died. I had more friends than anybody I ever knew of. It's actually still home."
Shelton may have left the camp half a century ago, albeit to live just a few miles up the road, but Weedpatch lives on today as a temporary shelter for Mexicans and Hispanic Americans who arrive each April for the six-month grape picking season in the vast plantations of the California valleys a couple of hours' drive north of Los Angeles.
The housing has improved and working conditions and pay are better, if still only acceptable to the desperate. But the modern day economic migrants drawn to California, many of them working illegally, are often met with the same hostility and suspicion that greeted Earl Shelton and the other "Okies" just looking for a means to survive. The same accusations – that the new arrivals bring crime, steal jobs and are somehow less civilised – are still swirling around.
The hostility has been given an added edge in recent months by the worst economic crisis in California since the great depression, which has left the state on the edge of bankruptcy.
Shelton's father farmed 40 acres of land but lost that in 1934. Two years later, the boy's mother died and his father was left with four children to bring up and no job. "We lived in a shack in our grandmother's yard and my dad made a living by cutting wood and hunting. There were 16 of us altogether at her place because no one else in the family had work. The was no electric, no running water," said Shelton.
Eventually, his father was lured by the promise of well-paid farm work that drew so many to California. Shelton's two eldest brothers went ahead.
"Dad sold his wagon and team and made a down payment on a '29 A Model [Ford]," said Shelton. "We started out, no driver's licence, nothing, doing 30 miles an hour and made it to Arizona, dad with a seven year-old and a 10-year-old. Dad had a dollar and 20 cents in his pocket out in that desert. I don't remember going hungry but I'm sure dad spent that money on my brother and I.
"After three days all he had left was a nickel and he decided to spend it on a cup of coffee."
It proved to be a good investment. As Shelton's father sipped his coffee a farmer asked him if he was looking for work. What was then the largest cattle ranch in the world needed men to dig in search of water 35 miles up into the hills.
Shelton's father earned $2.50 a day with free food and board, in a tent. Two weeks later the Sheltons were on their way again with enough money to make it to California.
"I don't remember much hostility to us along the way," said Shelton. "They were used to seeing people like us in our condition. There was thousands of people on Route 66. But when we got here people didn't want their kids going to school with us."
School wasn't a priority in any case.
"They put us to work picking cotton on arrival," said Shelton. "When I wasn't at school I was working in the fields. My dad didn't care if I went to school or not. My dad taught us boys how to work in the fields doing piece work; the harder you worked the more you got paid. The worst job was cutting grapes underneath them vines. It was hot."
Life in the camp was a haven from a hostile world. The migrants had been greeted with abuse and violence by Californians who feared they would take jobs or bring crime. Farmers forced the desperate Okies to work for near to slave wages and often used the police as a private force to deal with troublemakers who tried to demand better conditions and pay.
Fear of the migrants was such that at one point the Los Angeles police were dispatched to the California border to prevent any more entering the state. "No Niggers or Okies" read the signs in restaurants near the camp.
School consisted of a few huts until after the second world war, when old military transport planes could be had for a pittance. By the late 40s, Weedpatch children were taking lessons in the bellies of half a dozen surplus aircraft. Shelton and his classmates are lined up on the wing of a C-46 in one school photo.
The unusual set-up drew a visit from Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier, and saw the school become the only elementary in the US ever to teach aeronautics. "We used to take the engines apart in our lessons," said Shelton.
Shelton stayed 13 years, until he was an adult. When he left it was to move a few miles up the road, except for a stint in the army. He worked most of his life in the oil industry.
What remains of the old camp is preserved behind a fence in a corner of Weedpatch. The other buildings have been replaced by three and four bedroom clapboard homes for today's migrant workers.
Jesus Garcia is one of them and his journey is not so very different from Shelton's, even if a few illegalities were involved along the way. He arrived from Mexico over the mountains and through the desert guided by a "coyote" — a people smuggler — in 1972.
Garcia, now 60, had little education, found work in a factory and went to evening classes to learn how to read and write. He obtained his residency papers about 20 years ago and has spent much of his life moving with the harvests even after he married and had children.
"We'll stay here until the grape picking season ends around September. Then we'll move on to another place, picking chillies, limes," he said.
Garcia speaks little English and, although he will qualify for American citizenship in a couple of years and his daughters are US citizens, he regards himself as Mexican. But he likes the camp and the life.
"There's security here. It's a good life. The bosses treat you well. They'll take you to the doctor and make sure you're OK," he said.
It's also a tough life. Work begins at 4am. Eight or ten hours later, the women can be seen in heavy boots tramping out of the fields with towels wrapped around their necks to protect them against the sun.
Life is harder still for the 21st century heirs to Earl Shelton and the Okies immortalised in The Grapes of Wrath. The modern day "illegals" smuggled in from Mexico not only live in constant fear of arrest and deportation, but face a resurgence of hostility in border states such as California from Americans who accuse them of taking jobs and fuelling a surge in drug violence.
Immigration controls are tighter than when Garcia arrived. Employers are obliged to verify a worker's right to be in the country and only those with residency papers are allowed in to Weedpatch. That leaves many of the "illegals" seeking jobs by the day, where few questions are asked, and forced to live in difficult conditions paying hundreds of dollars a month to sleep in a garage or shed.
Los Angeles is still a magnet for those who make it across the border safely. Many do not, having been robbed by their guides or even kidnapped and held for ransom demanded from relatives already in the US. The undocumented workers can be seen gathered on the street corners early in the morning waiting for a contractor to swing by in search of day labour, perhaps on a construction site, as a gardener or in the fields.
"They don't pay us enough but they don't treat us bad," said Marco Amate, in the northern part of Los Angeles country. "We hear stories that they used to get Mexicans to work all week and then call in the immigration because they didn't want to pay them. It's not like that any more. But it's difficult. People here don't like us. They blame us for everything."
Amate is 27 and has been in the US for eight years. He pays £300 a month for a room at the back of a house owned by a Mexican family naturalised as US citizens.
"The room is just an old bed with a wood chest of drawers and a chair. Everything else I had to buy myself. I don't like it but there's nowhere else to stay and there's no work in Mexico so there's no point going back there. They told me if I get picked up not to say where I live because they'll get into trouble," he said.
Amate finds work as a labourer two or three days a week, pulling in £40 or more a day. "Sometimes we get lucky and there's a job for a month or two," he said. "I send my money back to my mother once a month. I keep enough for the rent and food and beer.
"Most of it goes to Mexico to pay for my brothers and sisters. I have seven. I wire the money through the post office."
There are an estimated 2.7 million undocumented workers, mostly Mexican, in California. One in 10 of the pupils in the state's schools are the children of people working illegally in the US. Yet without them, California's stumbling economy would have collapsed.
"I don't know why they don't like us here," said Amate. "We're doing the jobs they don't want. They want us as pickers and gardeners and maids but then they complain we are here. Perhaps it's because there's too many of us. They say Mexicans sell all the drugs and do all the murders. It's not true but they say it."
Earl Shelton is sympathetic to their plight but he can't resist a comparison with his days in the cotton fields.
"They're just trying to make a living like we were. But now there's nothing like the work that there used to be because there's so much machinery. They pick all the potatoes with a machine. The grapes still take a lot of work. Americans don't want to do that kind of labour any more."