cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/54239937
During the Great Depression, when banks foreclosed on farms, neighbors often showed up at the auctions together.
They’d bid only a few cents, and return the land to the family that lost it. Sometimes a noose hung nearby as a warning to outsiders not to profit from someone else’s ruin.
It was rough, but it worked, communities protected each other when the system wouldn’t.
If a collapse like that happened today, do you think people would still stand together or has that kind of solidarity disappeared? Could it happen again?
Part of that was linked to a great drought on US farms caused by overfarming leading to the dust bowl. That was a major part of the US GDP then. And 100 years later people still don’t believe humans can alter the environment.
The US at the time deported Latino citizens due to the increases racism/bigotry. Most of them were farmhands who knew how to work the land, better than the white farmers. The US realized their mistake in the middle of the depression and attempted to woo the same people back under the Vaquero program. The promise of citizenship was never fulfilled by the US.