Deportee (aka. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos")
Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Martin Hoffman
The crops are all in
and the peaches are rott'ning,
The oranges piled in their creosote
dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all
their money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan,
goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't
have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call
you will be "deportees"
My father's own
father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in
his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit
trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
Some of us are
illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we
have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They
chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
We died in your
hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died
on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your
bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
The sky plane caught
fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all
our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry
leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Is this the best way
we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our
good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be
called by no name except "deportees"?
On January 28, 1948, a DC-3 caught fire and crashed in rough terrain in Southern California, killing all 32 aboard. The flight was taking Mexican farm workers to the border town of El Centro for deportation – some of the workers were being returned to Mexico at the termination of their bracero (work permit) contracts which allowed Mexican guest workers to legally work in the U.S. to fill agricultural labor shortages, while others were illegal immigrants being deported.
More than a hundred witnesses watched as the airship spiraled out of control and crashed on the edge of the Diablo Valley. Nine people fell from the stricken aircraft into Los Gatos Canyon that day.
The crash was horrific, but so too was the attitude of those concerned with the planning and operation of the flight. The staff writers of Flight Safety Australia explain flight operations of the ill-fated airplane …
“The DC-3 was chartered by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from Airline Transport Carriers in Burbank to fly the Mexican citizens to the INS Deportation Center in El Centro, California. The owners had previously operated the unfortunately named Fireball Air Lines.
“For reasons which are unclear, the pilots took the wrong aircraft on that fateful day. They were supposed to be flying a DC-3 certified for 32 passengers. Instead, they took one configured for only 26 passengers and which was overdue by seven flight hours for a mandatory safety inspection.
“The pilots, both of whom had flown in World War II, ferried the aircraft to Oakland, where the 28 passengers and their INS guard boarded. The aircraft also had one flight attendant – the wife of the captain. Because there weren’t enough seats, three of the passengers had to sit on luggage, and the aircraft exceeded its maximum take-off weight by about 30 kilos.
“While the overloading and lack of seats probably had no direct bearing on the tragedy which followed, it was, as one account puts it, ‘a clue into the state of mind of the pilot and flight crew.'
“About 90 minutes after leaving Oakland, workers at a road camp observed the DC-3 at an estimated altitude of 5,000 ft above ground with a white trail coming from the left engine.”
(Staff Writers.“The Los Gatos Canyon crash: a tragedy of errors immortalised in song.” Flight Safety Australia. January 29, 2018.)
Witnesses on the ground claim to have seen several people jump from the doomed airliner when, seconds later, the left wing broke free from the fuselage, and the airplane fell to earth, crashing in a spectacular fireball in Los Gatos Canyon, killing all aboard.
After the Crash
The aftermath was disturbing. On the day of the crash, the local Fresno and Bakersfield California newspapers reported just the names of the four white Americans – pilots, stewardess, and immigration officer – and none of the Mexican nationals. But by the second day, as reported by the Bakersfield Californian, both American and Mexican officials were working to identify the names of the Mexicans.
By the third day after the tragedy, media reports of the Los Gatos crash and practically all other new items were buried by an event of international importance: Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated.
The families of the Mexican victims were not notified, and the remains of the deportees were placed in a mass grave, marked only as Mexican Nationals, in the city of Fresno, about 100 km from the crash site.
“As was true of the thousands of migrants being moved across the border during this era, these 28 migrants were caught between a domestic and international set of policies that could do little to appease the nation’s competing economic needs and its xenophobic impulses. A more humane way of securing labor from Mexico may have prevented this accident—as would have a less racist immigration policy.”
– Rubén Casas, Assistant Professor of English at Fresno State University
What Caused the Crash?
The immediate cause of the tragedy was an intense fire in the aircraft’s left wing. The then Civil Aeronautics Authority later determined that the fire was sparked after fuel had leaked from faulty separating gasket in the left engine fuel pump. The fire burnt through the wing, which separated in flight.
The investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Authority discovered that a fuel leak in the port engine's fuel pump had ignited and the slipstream fanned the flames to a white hot intensity. The ensuing fire, acting like an oxy-acetylene torch, burned through the wingspar and caused the crash.
Flight Safety Australia reports that the U.S. Government denied liability , but the charter company was insured for more than the $100,000 then required by law and was able to continue operations before declaring bankruptcy in 1953.
(David Kulczyk. Death in California – The Bizarre, Freakish, and Just Curious Ways People Die in the Golden State. 2009.)
The Song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”
Motivated by what he considered a callous attitude towards the mostly Mexican victims who were often referred to in the media as “just deportees,” songwriter Woody Guthrie wrote a poem shortly after the crash.
The Bracero Program was a series of laws and diplomatic agreements created by the U.S. Congress in 1942, that permitted Mexican farm laborers (or Braceros) to work in the United States due to the severe labor shortages caused by World War II.
Under the terms of the program, the labor contractors were expected to provide transportation to and from the Mexican border, with the U.S. Immigration Service being required to repatriate the Mexican citizens if the contractor defaulted. It could be argued that Guthrie's song is less about the program itself and more a comment on the attitude of American society and the media towards the Mexican farm laborers.
In the song, Guthrie assigned symbolic names to the dead: "Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita; adiós, mis amigos, Jesús y María ..."A decade later, Guthrie's poem was set to music and given a haunting melody by a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman. It was titled “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” though it’s also known as “Deportee.”
The song was popularized by Pete Seeger, and was subsequently performed by Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Julie Felix, Cisco Houston, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Kelly, Martyn Joseph, The Byrds, Richard Shindell and Ani DiFranco among others.
Guthrie’s lyrics not only pay respect to the departed workers, but question the system that seduces workers to leave their families and risk their lives to find unsecured work under questionable conditions.
After restoring humanity to the anonymous deportees and chronicling the plights of their families and countrymen, Guthrie delivers some damning questions in the final verse.
Is this the best way
we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our
good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be
called by no name except “deportees”?
(Robin Wilkey. “‘Deportees,’ 28 Anonymous Mexican Farmworkers Killed In 1948 Plane Crash, Finally Named At Memorial.” Huffington Post. September 05, 2013.)
Monument
In 2009, writer Tim Z. Hernandez – the son and grandson of Mexican farmworkers – worked with Carlos Rascon, the diocese’s cemeteries director, to track down the names of all the farm workers in the Los Gatos crash. Hernandez was shocked to find that no one had yet to answer the central question in the song: “Who are all these friends all scattered like dry leaves?/The radio said they are just deportees.”
They began to seek out the gravesite and those names of the victims. The Los Angeles Times reported that the $14,000 for the monument was raised mainly from small donations.
Hernandez tracked down a list of names from their death certificates. But the spellings of their names had been horribly botched, which made it difficult to further trace the men back to their descendants in Mexico. So Hernandez put a notice in a bilingual Fresno paper that he was looking for relatives of the braceros, writing: "If someone is related, please get in touch." "Si alguien está relacionado, por favor, pónganse en contacto."
The grandson of one of the deceased got in contact and led him to a local Spanish-language newspaper that published the correct names, hometowns and relatives of the workers a few days after the accident. In the coming years, Hernandez tracked down families of seven of the individuals on the flight that day.
Hernandez's search is not over. He explains it's become his lifelong mission to track down the remaining relatives of the crash who still don't know the fates of their loved ones. As he puts it to the BBC, "I'm still looking."
(Jason Daily. “One Man’s Search to Find the Families of the 'Deportees' in the Famous Woody Guthrie Song.” Smithsonian Magazine. February 28, 2018.)
On September 2, 2013 (Labor Day), some 65 years after the crash, a granite memorial was unveiled at the mass grave site at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Fresno. The families of deceased passengers were the guests of honor.
The event was much-anticipated and 65 years overdue. At long last, a memorial gravestone would list the names of the 28 previously anonymous Mexican farm workers killed in a plane crash on January 28, 1948.
“Today we are here to right a wrong,” said Bishop Armando X. Ochoa. A large crowd was gathered before him – some from California, others from Mexico, and many wearing brightly-colored costumes and holding old family photos, according to The Los Angeles Times.
The memorial includes all twenty-eight names of the migrant workers, which included three women, and one man born in Spain, not Mexico as widely reported.
(“A Memorial to Woody Guthrie’s 'Deportees' 65 Years Later.” allgov.com. September 10, 2013.)
Note: In his book, All They Will Call You, Hernandez describes the time period of the crash as “schizophrenic,” a society operating through an economic system dependent on the simultaneous importation and deportation Mexican labor using trains, boats, and C-47 cargo planes newly rebranded as Douglas DC-3s (post-war). He quotes a government official from the San Joaquin Valley who described the need for dispensable labor (and the twin desire to keep Mexican workers only for so long) as saying: “We are asking for labor only at certain parts of the year, at the peak of our harvest, and the class of labor we want is the kind we can send home when we are through with them.”
There seemed to be, according to researchers of this time and to Hernandez’s own interpretation of the evidence, as much need for imported Mexican labor as there was a desire to rid the nation of Mexican migrants.
Had everything worked out as it was supposed to, it is very possible that some if not all of the 28 deportees aboard the plane that day would have, in a matter of days or weeks, been brought back to the U.S. for another stint of work. It was collusion between industry players and federal and state government (on both sides of the border) at its most efficient. When demand waned, the authorities would step in and do the work of sending workers back. Many would return to Mexico as “enganchados,” that is “on the hook” with a particular farmer or patron, biding their time until it was time to repeat the cycle all over again.
(Ruben Casas. “All They Will Call You: A Look at the Lost History of Deportation and a Tragic 1948 Flight.” Tropics of Meta. January 23, 2017.)
On January 29, 2018, the California State Senate convened to formally recognize the seventieth anniversary of the plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon and Hernandez’s work. The event was an effort led by Senator William Monning and Senator Ben Hueso, with support of the California Latino Legislative Caucus. In the seven decades since the tragedy, never has the incident been officially acknowledged or recognized by any governmental agency, until now.
(Tim Z. Hernandez. “Deportees Killed in 1948 Plane Crash Recognized After 70 Years.” The University of Arizona Press. January 29, 2018.)
“That I’m aware of, there wasn’t an outcry about the deportation that occurred on Jan. 28, 1948. And nothing, on record at least, showed that anyone really knew about the omission of their names and the anonymity of their gravesite.
“What was most surprising to me, more than even the media’s omission of including the names of the passengers, was that Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno had access to the names since the accident, over six decades (ago), and never was there an effort to at least put their names on a headstone. Alice Walker once said: 'Some years are for asking questions, other years are for answering.'”
– Tim Z. Hernandez, 2017
Postscript
Sadly, the Los Gatos plane crash and the lives it took were far from anomalous. By 1945 authorities were using boats, trains, and planes to get the very people they had, six months prior, brought to the U.S., out of the country. The hastiness and seemingly uncaring way in which these removals happened routinely resulted in death.
In July 1955, for example, deportees transported by train to the Mexicali desert were left to fend for themselves in 112-degree heat. 88 migrants died of heatstroke. Later, a congressional investigation was ordered to look into the inhumane treatment of those removed from the U.S. via boat. The investigation found that 25 percent of those deported where transported in something akin to an “eighteenth century slave ship” and a “penal hell ship.”
(Ruben Casas. “All They Will Call You: A Look at the Lost History of Deportation and a Tragic 1948 Flight.” Tropics of Meta. January 23, 2017.)
Mass death matters differently depending on whom it happens to, and in the context in which it happens. It is clear there is a need to correct the dispassionate and impersonal ways the lives of marginalized people are rendered invisible and unremarkable in both life and death.
Gustavo Arellano, featured contributor for The Los Angeles Times and the former publisher and editor of Orange County's alternative weekly OC Weekly, wrote about migrants who are essential to California, but who are also seen as expendable – those that died are forgotten cogs of the Golden State machine. Arellano said …
“These migrant dead haunt California, like an Edgar Allan Poe horror story. They wander the border and farms, linger on the side of roads and in overcrowded spaces. Forgotten cogs of the Golden State machine, a land where Latino labor has always been simultaneously essential and expendable.
“Each bears a different message: Clarity. Peace. Justice without borders. No Más. A remembrance of those who passed away. A reminder that they weren’t the first migrants killed this way. And that they will not be the last.
“There will be
funerals and memorials to honor them. There will be hearings, and
maybe even new laws, to address what happened and hope it doesn’t
happen again.
“Just like before.
“Either way, the bodies will get buried, here or thousands of miles away, and prayers will be offered and we’ll collectively move on.”
(Gustavo Arellano. “Column: The ghosts of migrant dead haunt California. Let’s honor them.” The Los Angeles Times. March 07, 2021.)
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