American Photography 30 Winners

From the series "Lost Hills"

Sofie Gamino in her grandparents’ kitchen in Lost Hills, CA. November 2, 2013. Lost Hills is a town of 3,500 farm and oilfield workers located at the southern edge of California's Central Valley; the same agricultural region that the "Okies" headed in search of work as they fled the dust bowls of the 1930s. Today a new group of migrants, this time Mexican-Americans and Mexicans, again wrings a wage from the Valley's parched soil. These individuals embody the bootstrapping grit and the cooperative frontier spirit of The West -- and are living a new iteration of the "Okie" experience so prominent in our national psyche. But because some of Lost Hills’ residents are undocumented immigrants, all are assumed to be, and so may be cut out of their own American dream, and denied their place in the historical record.

From the series "Lost Hills"

Three generations of Malanche men work together in Lost Hills, CA. March 23, 2013. Lost Hills is a town of 3,500 farm and oilfield workers located at the southern edge of California's Central Valley; the same agricultural region that the "Okies" headed in search of work as they fled the dust bowls of the 1930s. Today a new group of migrants, this time Mexican-Americans and Mexicans, again wrings a wage from the Valley's parched soil. These individuals embody the bootstrapping grit and the cooperative frontier spirit of The West -- and are living a new iteration of the "Okie" experience so prominent in our national psyche. But because some of Lost Hills’ residents are undocumented immigrants, all are assumed to be, and so may be cut out of their own American dream, and denied their place in the historical record.