Mother Road

Inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Mother Road is set in the present day and introduces us to William Joad.

Hardworking and hard living, Joad hung on to the family farm, but now has no blood kin to pass it down to. No one, that is, until a private detective uncovers an unexpected relation: Martín Jodes – a young Mexican American man descended from Steinbeck’s protagonist Tom Joad.

The two men meet up at the site of the former government work camp that was once home to Steinbeck’s Joads and is now home to migrant workers like Martín’s mother, who lived and died laboring in the fields. Together these unlikely cousins travel from California back to Oklahoma, reversing the Joads’ mythic journey in an epic story about land, family and survival.