My own family was affluent white California. The roads around here are named after my great grandfather's cousins. My grandma was born in her family's San Francisco house, just after the Great Earthquake. I might have been wealthy myself had not my great grandfather been a dreamer. He knew the aerospace industries and the movie industry would be a very big deal but he died just before the market crashed in 1929, and he'd bet everything on the wrong players. My great grandma held onto three family homes, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Over the years she sold the San Francisco and San Diego homes. That was her income. The San Francisco house still stands, owned by some Chinese front company and subdivided into tiny apartments. The San Diego home is now a parking lot for a strip mall. I remember the San Diego house. It was gorgeous.
Anyways, many refugees arrived in California from the Dust Bowl and were deeply offended when white California landowner farmers, dairymen, and ranchers didn't immediately discard their Mexican and Mexican-American workers in favor of the white refugees who were utterly inexperienced in California agricultural practices. My own family was generally as racist as most white California, my grandfather even chose to boycott my wedding to, in his words, a "Mexican girl" but they had even less love for the Okies. I've had the pleasure twice of elderly Okies going off in my face about that, and sometimes they write bitter racist letters to the newspapers too, but I haven't seen any lately, as they are now mostly dead. (I can say this stuff, my brother is married to an Okie descendant with similarly bitter ancestors...)
Second, the Japanese internment. My other grandpa, he got beat up by the police for protesting the internment of his Japanese neighbors. He was a pacifist. During World War II he was drafted, refused, and was given a choice of prison or building Liberty and Victory Ships. He was a welder, he built ships.
A lot of Japanese families lost everything to grifters who promised to manage their property while they were interned and then stole it. My mom has a friend who was fortunate. A family in Utah took them in, paid them fairly as ranch hands, and managed their California properties well. After the war the family moved back, everything as it was when they left.
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