California 22nd District At the southern end of California’s
Central Valley is Bakersfield. It has been the focus of great
migrations four times—in the gold rush of 1885, in the boomlet
that followed the discovery of oil in 1899, in the 1930s flight
of Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas and in a
flood of newcomers in the 1980s and 1990s, when Bakersfield and
Kern County grew more rapidly than California’s biggest metro
areas. The migration that made the deepest imprint was in the
1930s. The Okies drove over a thousand miles of brown landscape,
then through the Tehachapi Pass, and found this vast green
valley, with its irrigated fields and its eucalyptus-shaded
towns—the richest farming country in the world. The story is
told vividly in novelist John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
and in Dan Morgan’s Rising in the West, which explains how the
migrants prospered in California. 2008 Presidential Vote |Cook
Partisan Voting Index| The area around Bakersfield is one
Southern-accented part of Califo