Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie - Softcover

Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1859841627 ISBN 13: 9781859841624

Publisher: Verso, 1998

Synopsis

An exquisite memoir of growing up dirt poor in Oklahoma. “Love of the land is not located so much in the mind, or in the heart, as in the skin: how the skin feels when you go back.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt. When the peasants are deprived of fields to work, so goes the chorus of an old Irish ballad, “All that’s left is a love of the land.” In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, writer and journalist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz bears witness to a family and community that still clings to the dream of America as a republic of landowners. Drawing deeply on the stories, often biblical parables, she heard in her early years, Dunbar-Ortiz brings to life one of the least understood groups in US history: poor rural whites. They are the backbone of the national campaigns against abortion and for prayer in school. They are also the soldiers of the militia movement and the members of a group who will come to trial this spring for the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Red Dirt takes us into the minds of these people, allowing us to feel both their grievous sense of loss and their battered but still-clung-to faith.

About this title

Review

Now a professor of ethnic studies in California, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz turns her eye back to her own roots as a "Dust Bowl Baby" in rural Oklahoma. In telling the story of her family and their hardships in the Depression, Dunbar-Ortiz introduces the reader to some fascinating characters who are certainly not the "white trash" caricatures of popular belief. Interspersed well with her own story are historical facts that give depth to the narrative and correct popular misconceptions about "Okies" (some of which were popularized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath).

From the Back Cover

In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz bears witness to a family and community which still clings to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1859841627
• ISBN 13: 9781859841624
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 232