Posted by Bruce Berman

Girl in northern New Mexico, 1937

by Mary Lamonica

Drive through New Mexico today and you’ll find a state awash with vibrant cultures. Hispanics, Native Americans, Anglos, African Americans, and Asian Americans all call New Mexico home. Back in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Russell Lee and his boss, Roy Stryker, the head of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) which employed Russell Lee and the other FSA shooters (including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon), knew many Americans were unfamiliar with Hispanics and Hispanic life. Racial laws supposedly providing “separate, but equal” facilities were anything but. Stryker and Lee were determined to do their part to change the situation by sending Lee on a lengthy documentary trip through the Southwest to showcase Hispanic life. New Mexico’s more than 221,000 Hispanics were the key draw.

Lee appeared to have first photographed Mexican Americans in 1937 during a swing through Minnesota. Lee encountered Hispanic sugar beet workers bringing in the year’s harvest. He and his wife Jean so loved Mexican culture that the two took their honeymoon in Mexico. Detailing Hispanic life became a priority for the photographer. The Lees made a preliminary trip to New Mexico in 1939 for the FSA, photographing Hispanic and Native American life around Taos.

Posted by Bruce Berman

Filling station in New Mexico. Boys pulling water from a well,
photograph by Russell Lee

Essay by Mary Lamonica

Cars. By 1929, more than 26.5 million automobiles cris-crossed American roads. Between one-third and one-half of all families owned a vehicle when the stock market collapsed in October 1929.

Although many Americans lost homes and jobs during the Great Depression, those who could hung onto their automobiles and their radios. Both brought dreams of a better life, but cars might actually be able to get people there.

Cars, therefore, were more than mere vehicles of transportation during the depression years. Cars were hope. Cars were freedom. Cars often were homes, too, as abundant FSA photographs attest. It’s not surprising that so many people developed a bond with their cars during the 1930s.

The Great Depression forced other Americans to move backward, away from the burgeoning car culture. The FSA photographers frequently captured images of horses or mules hitched to wagons, headed down rural roads and main streets. Not everyone could afford (or maintain) Henry Ford’s $300 Model T (or a Dodge or an Oldsmobile) when jobs became scarce.

America’s car culture had far-reaching effects by the time of the Great Depression. Cars meant mobility, certainly. But cars also meant jobs, and not just for assembly-line workers in Michigan. As automobile ownership shifted from the province of the wealthy in the early 1900s and into the realm of the middle- and working classes by the 1920s, whole industries sprung up. Oil workers, service station mechanics, and attendants were needed. Roads had to be improved. Hotels and restaurants sprang up, seemingly overnight in some places, to meet travelers’ demands. Russell Lee photographed many such places as he traveled the nation’s new byways.