nomadland surviving america in the 21st century

“It’s 5’3” inside and I am 5’2”… Perfect fit,” she says. Inside dimension is ten feet from end to end and room enough for Linda to stand up straight. Towed behind the jeep is her home, a trailer she calls the “Squeeze Inn.” It’s a “fiberglass relic” built in 1974. She drives a salvaged Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo. Linda is a sixty-four-year-old grandmother. What she has revealed in her book is eye-opening. In the book, Bruder stayed close with them for a year, Linda May, Swankie, Bob Wells, LaVonne and many others, all in their 60’s and 70’s but still active as itinerant workers. Many of them are fallout of the 2008 financial meltdown when they lost their homes, jobs and investments. These are van and RV dwellers in California, Nevada, Arizona and several other Western States. Journalist Jessica Bruder has followed some modern-day nomads and chronicled their lives in her 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. Or in more recent years, Jeannette Walls’ family when she was a child in The Glass Castle (2005). Or, maybe the famous image of the migrant mother with her children captured by photographer Dorothea Lange (1936). When you hear the word nomad, what do you think of? The Bedouin in the Arabian desert? Now, what about American nomad? Maybe John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) comes to mind, dust bowl families on a wagon heading to California to escape poverty.

Nomadland surviving america in the 21st century